1 “There is no easy way from the earth to the stars.”
2 “As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.”
3 “Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.”
4 “Associate with people who are likely to improve you.”
5 “If you live in harmony with nature you will never be poor; if you live according what others think, you will never be rich.”
6 “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”
7 “Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow, and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”
8 “Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.”
9 “While we wait for life, life passes.”
10 “It’s not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It’s because we dare not venture that they are difficult.”
11 “Life is like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.”
12 “He who is brave is free.”
13 “Luck is what happens when preparation.”
14 “If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.”
15 “It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. … The life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.”
16 “They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.”
17 “People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”
18 (Above quote, expanded here.) “Were all the geniuses of history to focus on this single theme, they could never fully express their bafflement at the darkness of the human mind. No person would give up even an inch of their estate, and the slightest dispute with a neighbor can mean hell to pay; yet we easily let others encroach on our lives—worse, we often pave the way for those who will take it over. No person hands out their money to passersby, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers.”
19 “As long as you live, keep learning how to live.”
20 “To wish to be well is a part of becoming well.”
21 “Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.”
With Ken Thompson 