“The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.”

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.

It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.

If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.

The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.

Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.

After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.

Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.

In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.

Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

I could weep for a river-valley, and I have. But for a country? Oh man, I don’t know.

Authentic men aren’t afraid to show affection, release their feelings, hug their children, cry when they’re sad, admit it when they’re wrong, and ask for help when they need it.

Darkness attracts me, it’s the only time, I can cry in peace.

As I pen these words, tears flow from my pained heart onto my trembling lips, and the soul seeks release from daily abuse.

We suffered. We worried. We lost. We wept. But loved, and laughed, and cared, and helped.

And still as an adult like I do as well, you know what I mean like I literally just cried in the first interview that I had today. Like, I’m just a very emotional human.

Illness and problems are the specialties of life. But the death of a child is a cause of mental agony which can be overcome if one concedes this world to be a stage or stadium wherein praiseworthy are those who are not proud of their achievement and those who do not cry at their defeat.

Be happy with those who are happy, and cry with those who are crying.