Life and Existence

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.

Nobody ever died of laughter.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.

Marriage is a friendship recognized by the police.

Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure, nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.

Live your life and forget your age.

Live your life and forget your age.

The need to find meaning . . . is as real as the need for trust and for love, for relations with other human beings.

Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.

I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

When everything is astonishing, nothing is astonishing; this is how the world is to children.

Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.

It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

Marriage is like twirling a baton, turning handsprings or eating with chopsticks. It looks easy until you try it.

Marriage should, I think, always be a little hard and new and strange. It should be breaking your shell and going into another world, and a bigger one.

Marriage should, I think, always be a little hard and new and strange. It should be breaking your shell and going into another world, and a bigger one.

It isn’t tying himself to one woman that a man dreads when he thinks of marrying; it’s separating himself from all the others.

All that a husband or wife really wants is to be pitied a little, praised a little, appreciated a little.

This is the true measure of love: when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will ever love in the same way after us.