What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Whoever has the most fun, wins.

Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.

If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself.

I believe that the term ‘coming out’ is a bit antiquated and outdated in the sense that it gives the power to someone else to accept or deny you when, in actuality, what the process is, is that we’re letting people into our lives.

If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.

No te acostarás sin saber una cosa más.

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

Busy is a decision. We do the things we want to do, period. If we say we are too busy, it is just shorthand for the thing being ‘not important enough’ or ‘not a priority.’ Busy is not a badge. You don’t find the time to make things, you make the time to do things.

The real problem of humanity is that we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.

People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.

Spend your time on people you admire, work you can’t not do, and experiences you’ll never forget.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, programme a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

Specialisation is for insects.

Define yourself. When you let others do it, they just mess it up.

Growing up, we say, as though we were trees, as though altitude was all that there was to be gained, but so much of the process is growing whole as the fragments are gathered, the patterns found. Human infants are born with craniums made up of four plates that have not yet knit together into a solid dome so that their heads can compress to fit through the birth canal, so that the brain within can then expand. The seams of these plates are intricate, like fingers interlaced, like the meander of arctic rivers across tundra.

The skull quadruples in size in the first few years, and if the bones knit together too soon, they restrict the growth of the brain; and if they don’t knit at all the brain remains unprotected. Open enough to grow and closed enough to hold together is what a life must also be. We collage ourselves into being, finding the pieces of a worldview and people to love and reasons to live and then integrate them into a whole, a life consistent with its beliefs and desires, at least if we’re lucky.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

A ship is safe in harbour, but that’s not what ships are for.

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go and do that, because what the world needs is people that have come alive.

Money buys happiness in the same way drugs bring pleasure: incredible if done right, dangerous if used to mask a weakness, and disastrous when no amount is ever enough.

Victory over oneself is a bigger and a better victory than a victory over thousands of people in a score of battles. Those who have achieved victory over other people can be defeated in future battles, but those who have achieved victory over themselves become victors forever.

When learning is purposeful, creativity blossoms. When creativity blossoms, thinking emanates. When thinking emanates, knowledge is fully lit.

Life is a sum of all your choices.

History never repeats itself, but man always does.

If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.

The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.

A good marriage is one in which each spouse secretly thinks he or she got the better deal, and this is true also of our friendships.