There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.

— Søren Kierkegaard

Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us. NOTHING is the worst thing that can happen to us.

— Richard Bach

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

— Umberto Eco

Sometimes I find myself agreeing with Umberto.

Other times I want to say, “Chill dude . . . Life is a Cabaret, old chum!”

I gave my life to become the person I am right now.

Was it worth it?

— Richard Bach

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; But if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.

– Don Marquis

I lived in Denver in the late ’80s. At one point I met an acquaintance who invited me to attend his monthly book club. I was in a heavy reading phase and was excited about the prospect of connecting with fellow book lovers. I was encouraged to bring a book and plan on sharing a favorite passage.

The book I happened to be reading at the time was The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and the passage I picked to read turned out to be pretty heavy. You see, the entire short story of Ivan Ilyich is about a man who discovers that he is dying. In his final days he has the painful revelation that he has lived his life as a facade, doing everything that his parents, his family, his church, and his community expected of him, at the expense of being true to that still small voice in his soul. Thought provoking to say the least.

I will never know with certainty why I was not invited back to this small group of literature buffs, but I never heard from them again. Telephone calls to my contacts at the group where never returned (this was long before the days of email and Facebook). No doubt, I came across too intense, for I was wrestling at the time with the very ideas that haunted Ivan Ilyich.

Since then I have learned to temper my intensity. I have also learned that pushing people too hard to make them think can have unintended consequences. It’s okay to make people think they are thinking. Just be careful when you really start to make them think.

If you are going through hell, keep going. — Winston Churchill

I want to beg you as much as I can . . . to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything.

Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your innermost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.

– Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet 

Life’s a tough proposition, and the first hundred years are the hardest.

– Wilson Mizner

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest gift is the gift of life . . .

and the greatest sin is to return it unopened.

– Mork