“It turns out there’s only one thing that capuchins really, really love – and that’s sweet stuff. If you give them a big vat of say, marshmallow fluff, and you let them go at it.”

The true antidote to greed is contentment. If you have a strong sense of contentment, it doesn’t matter whether you obtain the object of your desire or not. Either way, you are still content.

Meditating means bringing the mind back to something again and again. Thus, we all meditate, but unless we direct it in some way, we meditate on ourselves and on our own problems, reinforcing our self-clinging.

A decision of the courts decided that the game of golf may be played on a Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.

Occasionally we sigh for an earlier day when we could just look at the stars without worrying whether they were theirs or ours.

By the time you’re eighty years old you’ve learned everything. You only have to remember it.

Experience is something I always think I have until I get more of it.

Journalism, like history, has no therapeutic value; it is better able to diagnose than to cure, and it provides society with a primitive means of psychoanalysis that allows the patient to judge the distance between fantasy and reality.

When myth meets myth, the collision is very real.

Discipline means protection from one’s own wanton interest.

The United States grants the favors of the second, third, or fifty-seventh chance, and its citizens remain free to invent for themselves whatever character draws a crowd or pays the rent.

Walk in awe, wonder, and humility. Walk at all times of day. In the early morning when the world is just waking up. Late at night under the stars. Along a busy city street at noontime.

Some idea of inflation comes from seeing a youngster get his first job at a salary you dreamed of as the culmination of your career.

The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions.

Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. Middle age is when you’re forced to.

As surely as you are a living man, so surely did that spectral anatomy visit my room again last night, grin in my face, and walk away with my trousers: nor was I able to spring from my bed, or break the chain which seemed to bind me to my pillow.

Most of us wait until we’re in trouble, and then we pray like the dickens. Wonder what would happen if, some morning, we’d wake up and say, “Anything I can do for You today, Lord?”

My hometown is 30,000 people. It’s remote, but it’s an oil town, so it’s developed. There’s definitely a mill mentality: not a lot of people leave. It’s a lot of long hours, shift work. Even my Dad, who’s a dentist worked hard, because that’s what people do up there.

Autumn can be glorious but menacing too – the long shadows, brisk winds, scurrying leaves, impending frost.

Fidel Castro just talked a long time, and he talked and he talked and he talked and he talked… and he talked during the meeting. I think it was about four hours. But I guess that’s part of the Castro spirit.

A great symphony is a man-made Mississippi down which we irresistibly flow from the instant of our leave-taking to a long forseen destination.

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.

It’s been so long and I’m lost without you, what am I gonna do? I been needin’ you, wantin’ you, wonderin’ if you’re the same and who’s been with you. Is your heart still mine? I wanna cry sometimes … I miss you.

Tell me not here, it needs not saying, What tune the enchantress plays In aftermaths of soft September Or under blanching mays, For she and I were long acquainted And I knew all her ways.

A moment’s thought would have shown him. But a moment is a long time, and thought is a painful process.