Life and Existence

To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence, no matter where the obstacles are encountered.

What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.

As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties, the inmost strength of the heart is developed.

No man is defeated without until he has first been defeated within.

Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open eyes into their misfortune?

The man who in wavering times is inclined to be wavering only increases the evil, and spreads it wider and wider; but the man of firm decision fashions the universe.

There is only one way to be prepared for death: to be sated. In the soul, in the heart, in the spirit, in the flesh. To the brim.

There is only one way to be prepared for death: to be sated. In the soul, in the heart, in the spirit, in the flesh. To the brim.

In any man who dies there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight. It goes with him. . . . Not people die but worlds die in them.

In any man who dies there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight. It goes with him. . . . Not people die but worlds die in them.

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.

If you bring curiosity to your work it will cease to be merely a job and become a door through which you enter the best that life has to give you.

Never lose a holy curiosity.

What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism.

Cowards die many times before their deaths The valiant never taste of death but once.

Conscience is a man’s compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one’s course by it, still one must try to follow its direction.

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it

We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.

I have bought this wonderful machine—a computer. Now I am rather an authority on gods, so I identified the machine— it seems to me to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy.

What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.