“Life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.”

He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.

The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn’t know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren’t.

Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That’s right. Others come in to govern for them.

Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.

The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all.

There is for a man two things in life that are very important, head and shoulders above everything else. Find work you like, and find someone to live with you like. Very few people get both.

What joins men together is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.

It is supposed to true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don’t believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and love of blood.

There’s a difference between quittin and knowin when you’re beat.

People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didn’t even know they were there.

I think by the time you’re grown you’re as happy as you’re goin to be. You’ll have good times and bad times, but in the end you’ll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I’ve knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.

All the time you spend tryin to get back what’s been took from you there’s more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

Ever step you take is forever.

If there’s one thing on this planet you don’t look like it’s a bunch of good luck walkin around.

One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everybody is goin to get older with you.

The trouble with a liar is he can’t remember what he said.

I looked at Brief Encounter very closely, to be honest.

It is the briefest yet wisest maxim which tells us to meddle not.

You just need people with the desire to better themselves.

If I were called upon to define briefly the word Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the senses preceive in nature, seen through the veil of the soul.

Sorrow is brief but joy is endless.

Illusion is brief, but repentance is long.

If matter mute and inanimate, though changed by the forces of Nature into a multitude of forms, can never die, will the spirit of man suffer annihilation when it has paid a brief visit, like a royal guest, to this tenement of clay?

Certainly any president – Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative – should keep an open mind until they get the briefing.