Reset, readjust, restart, refocus.As many times as you need to.
Just don't quit!
I never feared about my skills because I put in the work. Work ethic eliminates fear.
So if you put forth the work, what are you fearing? You know what you're capable of doing and what you're not.
-- Michael Jordan
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDEDFOR THE EXISTENCE OF GODWAS MUSIC
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward.
Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.
The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Anyway—because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next—and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis—at any time of night or day.
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;Man got to tell himself he understand.
The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: "Nothing.
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.
To be is to do - SocratesTo do is to be - SartreDo Be Do Be Do - Sinatra
The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.
There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.
Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones.
You'll forget it when you're dead, and so will I. When I'm dead, I'm going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.
Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her.
Nothing is generous. New knowledge is a valuable commodity. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we are.
Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go around looking for it, and I think it can be poisonous. I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, 'Please — a little less love, and a little more common decency'.
And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It's good for you.
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.
If somebody says 'I love you' to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? 'I love you, too'.
I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.
There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.
When we passed a Catholic church, I recalled, he said, "You think your dad's a good chemist? They're turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?
Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because the moment simply is.
Perhaps some people really are born unhappy. I surely hope not. Speaking for my sister and myself: We were born with the capacity and determination to be utterly happy all the time. Perhaps even in this we were freaks. Hi ho.
Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?
No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's . . ." "And?" "No damn cat, and no damn cradle.
If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference.
Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.
I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway.
The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It's misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm
everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been
Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana)I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.
I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind.
The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.
I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.
The champagne was dead. So it goes.
I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific.
Motivation is a byproduct of action, not the catalyst for it.
Control your thoughts or your thoughts will control you.
Today is a new day. Stop living in the past.
Focus on the step in front of you, not the whole staircase.
You attract what you are, not what you want. If you want great, then be great.
Your goals should scare you a little and excite you a lot.
