I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine—it always keeps the way beyond open—always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake—after a wrong guess.
The best way to predict your future is to create it.
At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.
When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.
If there were such a thing as terminal literalism, you'd have died in childhood.
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.
Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't want, to impress people that they don't like.
Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.
It's not what you say out of your mouth that determines your life, it's what you whisper to yourself that has the most power!
I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.
The story of life is quicker than the wink of an eye, the story of love is hello and goodbye...until we meet again
My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus. [The Science of Second-Guessing (New York Times Magazine Interview, December 12, 2004)]
When a man learns to love, he must bear the risk of hatred.
Sometimes I just think depression's one way of coping with the world. Like, some people get drunk, some people do drugs, some people get depressed. Because there's so much stuff out there that you have to do something to deal with it.
No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.
How quick come the reasons for approving what we like.
Perhaps - I want the old days back again and they'll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears.
I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.
You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude toward what happens to you, and in that, you will be mastering change rather than allowing it to master you.
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.