“You can make yourself happy or miserable – it’s the same amount of effort.”

You have to learn to take rejection not as an indication of personal failing but as a wrong address.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

You knew the sweetness of now, now, TONIGHT! who cares for tomorrow, tomorrow is nothing, yesterday is over and done, tonight live, tonight!

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.

If you learn only methods, you’ll be tied to your methods, but if you learn principles you can devise your own methods.

The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.

Don’t worry about things. Don’t push. Just do your work and you’ll survive. The important thing is to have a ball, to be joyful, to be loving and to be explosive. Out of that comes everything and you grow.

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled.

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

Teachers are to inspire; librarians are to fulfill.

Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.

I don’t think the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken over. And if we don’t take the toys out of their hands, we’re fools.

That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

If we could execute with a monumental effort just to reach an immediate goal that everyone could see, we could then continue to the next visually.

I’m telling you a lie in a vicious effort that you will repeat my lie over and over until it becomes true

Effort is the unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty.

To relinquish the futile effort to control change is one of the strengthening forces of true detachment & thus true love.

Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.

Nothing that is really good and admirable is granted by the gods to men without some effort and application.

The price of life is effort; the acme of effort is an accomplishment; the reward of accomplishment is joy.

Tools and instruments which can ease the effort of labor considerably are themselves not a product of labor but of work; they do not belong in the process of consumption but are part and parcel of the world of use objects.