A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.
Our life is full of brokenness – broken relationships, broken promises, broken expectations. How can we live with that brokenness without becoming bitter and resentful except by returning again and again to God’s faithful presence in our lives.
When it’s time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived.
It’s the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us. The question is not what you look at but what you see.
Simplify, simplify, simplify.
As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.
There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
The rule is to carry as little as possible.
Love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is only your aversion to it that hurts, nothing else.
The art is long, life is short.
Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing.
Sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind but falling in love and not getting arrested.
Life will let you get away with something for a while, but sooner or later, you will pay the price. Everything you do in life causes the effects that you experience. When you get the bill, be prepared to pay.
Trials are intended to make us think, to wean us from the world, to send us to the Bible, to drive us to our knees.
Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.
Start from wherever you are and with whatever you’ve got.
One person caring about another represents life’s greatest value.