“the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners”

I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.

Maybe life doesn’t get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we’re willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.

The first steps toward stewardship are awareness, appreciation, and the selfish desire to have the things around for our kids to see. Presumably the unselfish motives will follow as we wise up.

You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they’re not self-sufficient.

Sugar, it’s no parade but you’ll get down the street one way or another, so you’d just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.

If you can’t dress expensive, dress memorable.

…prodigal summer, the season of extravagant procreation. It could wear out everything in its path with its passionate excesses, but nothing alive with wings or a heart or a seed curled into itself in the ground could resist welcoming it back when it came.

In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.

You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.

It’s a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.

Don’t wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.

Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you’re contagious.

It’s what you do that makes your soul.

The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.

It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.

Error can point the way to truth, while empty-headedness can only lead to more empty-headedness or to a career in politics.

People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.

Rather than engage in the sort of selective retention that so many investors tend to do and pretend mistakes never happened, I prefer to own them. This allows me to learn from them and, with any luck, avoid making the same errors again.

He’s marked his entrance with an error of some momentum

I’m interested in the truth, and unauthorized biographies are not. Yes, I would like to correct those errors someday.

There can be no greater error then in supposing that capital is increased by non-consumption.

Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.

The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful is the cause of half their errors.