“If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I’d still swim. And I’d despise the one who gave up.”

What one can be, one must be!

The great lesson is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s backyard.

Appreciate again and again, freshly and naively the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy, however stable these experiences may have become to others.

Most people experience both tragedy and joy in varying proportions. Any philosophy which leaves out either cannot be considered to be comprehensive.

People are not evil; they are schlemiels.

False optimism sooner or later means disillusionment, anger and hopelessness.

The most stable, and therefore, the most healthy self-esteem is based on deserved respect from others rather than on external fame or celebrity and unwarranted adulation.

One of the goals of education should be to teach that life is precious.

Every person is, in part, his own project and makes himself.

Obviously the most beautiful fate, the most wonderful good fortune that can happen to any human being, is to be paid for doing that which he passionately loves to do.

It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.

One’s only rival is one’s own potentialities. One’s only failure is failing to live up to one’s own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.

The needs for safety, belonging, love relations and for respect can be satisfied only by other people, i.e. only from outside the person.

All of life is education and everybody is a teacher and everybody is forever a pupil.

We must understand love; we must be able to teach it, to create it, to predict it, or else the world is lost to hostility and to suspicion.

We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle that anybody created anything.

Fears inspire us to unfold our potential.

The most important ingredient of our life is our choices.

From a small seed a mighty trunk may grow.

It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real meaning of the sun.

Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.

Art requires so much patience, don’t let time-lapse trick you.

Life is too short to live to impress others. 

Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.