✿ The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.
✿ Put a daily limit on self-pity. Concentrate on all the good things still in your life.
✿ We’re so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks--we’re involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don’t get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?
✿ Everyone knows they’re going to die, but nobody believes it. Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live. You strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials. When you realize you are going to die, you see everything much differently.
✿ If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.
✿ By throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, "All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment."
✿ Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.
✿ If you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more.
✿ Part of me is every age.
✿ These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can’t substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship.
✿ Devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.
✿ Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.--Mahatma Gandhi
✿ Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone.
✿ Being fully present.
✿ Building your own little subculture. The big things—how we think, what we value--those you must choose yourself. You can’t let anyone--or any society determine those for you.
✿ The biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness. We don’t see what we could be. We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become.
✿ Invest in the human family. Invest in people. Build a little community of those you love and who love you.
✿ What’s wrong with being number two?
✿ Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others. For all the things we didn’t do. All the things we should have done.
✿ If we know, in the end, that we can ultimately have that peace with dying, then we can finally do the really hard thing--make peace with living.
✿ Death ends a life, not a relationship.
✿ Love is when you are as concerned about someone else’s situation as you are about your own.
✿ Be compassionate.
