Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.Almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

No matter how dark things may get in a story, I feel it's the responsibility of the storyteller to leave the audience with at least a shred of hope.

Josh Radnor

The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possibly because He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did.

Kurt Vonnegut

There are no better cosmetics than a severe temperance and purity, modesty and humility, a gracious temper and calmness of spirit; and there is no true beauty without the signatures of these graces in the very countenance.

John Ray

While we spoke of many things Fools and kings This he said to me: The greatest thing you'll ever learn Is just to love and be loved in return.

Eden Ahbez

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.

Ernest Hemingway

I didn't get into this so I could talk about my work, my movies. You become an actor to act.

Kevin Bacon

The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.

John Buchan

A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.

Erica Jong

To do great things is difficult; but to command great things is more difficult.

Friedrich Nietzsche

We must never stop dreaming. Dreams provide nourishment for the soul, just as a meal does for the body. Many times in our lives we see our dreams shattered and our desires frustrated, but we have to continue dreaming. If we don't, our soul dies, and agape cannot reach it.

Paulo Coelho

If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you're dead and rotten, either do things worth the writing, or write things worth the reading!

Benjamin Franklin

The stage is life, music, beautiful girls, legs, breasts, not talk or intellectualism or dried-up academics.

Harold Clurman