If the wind will not serve, take to the oars. To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle.

What stays with you longest and deepest? Of curious panics, of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?

I do not snivel that snivel the world over, That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth, That life is a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare crape and tears.

Me wherever my life is lived, O to be self-balanced for contingencies, To confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.

Disappointments are like weeds in the garden. You can let them grow and take over your life, or you can rout them out and let the flowers sprout.

What can't be helped must be endured.

He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.

The living can't quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can't because they don't. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.

An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he's in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots.

Just because something is broken doesn't mean it's no good. Doesn't mean you throw it away. It just means it's broken, and broken is okay. I wanted to tell her that broken is still beautiful, still works, still wakes me in the morning, and at the end of every day past and those to come, I can love broken.

My life has been real different than I thought. Ain't turned out how I hoped . . . nor dreamt. But I'm not the only man in the world to get screwed by life. Lots are worse off than me. That's life. You take the bad with the good. Rise up through it. Live in the midst of it. It's the bad that lets you know how good the good really is. Don't let the bad leave you thinking like there ain't no good. There is, and lots of it, too.

You take the bad with the good. Rise up through it. Live in the midst of it. It's the bad that lets you know how good the good really is. Don't let the bad leave you thinking like there ain't no good. There is, and lots of it, too.