The strange things about growing old is that the intimate identification with the here and now is slowly lost. One feels transposed into infinity, more or less alone.

Was and will make me ill, I take a gram and only am.

Grief doesn't kill, love doesn't kill; but time kills everything, kills desire, kills sorrow, kills in the end the mind that feels them; wrinkels and softens the body while it still lives, tots it like a medlar, kills it too at last.

Oh, this journey! It was two hours cut clean out of his life; two hours in which he might have done so much, so much—written the perfect poem, for example, or read the one illuminating book.

Query: how to combine the belief that the world is a to a great extent illusory with belief that it is none the less essential to improve the illusion? How to be simultaneously dispassionate and not indifferent, serene like an old man and active like a young one?

If people threw away their money as thoughtlessly as they throw away their time, we would think them insane. Yet time is infinitely more precious than money because money can't buy time.

How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.

Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.

The only way to survive eternity is to be able to appreciate each moment.

All of us have been dying, hour by hour, since the moment we were born. Realizing this, let all things be placed in their proper perspective. . . . Remember, it is always later than you think.

If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn't you make the most of it?

We have, each one of us, been entrusted with one life, made up of days and hours and minutes. We're spending them according to our values, whether or not we admit it.