Successful people maintain a positive focus in life no matter what is going on around them. They stay focused on their past successes rather than their past failures, and on the next action steps they need to take to get them closer to the fulfillment of their goals rather than all the other distractions that life presents to them.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.

Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

Dreams are necessary to life.

Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.

One hopes, of course, that a relationship grows and becomes a deep and wonderful marriage and friendship that lasts forever. But that's not always the case.

Our thoughts really do create our lives. They've done a lot of research showing if you're an optimistic, positive person you will be a healthier person than if you're a sad, depressed, negative person.

I used to think that divorce meant failure, but now I see it more as a step along the path of self-realization and growth.

Through a long and painful process, I've learned that happiness is an inside job - not based on anything or anyone in the outer material world. I've become a different and better person - not perfect, but still a work in progress.

No matter what kind of challenges or difficulties or painful situations you go through in your life, we all have something deep within us that we can reach down and find the inner strength to get through them.

Sometimes you just have to let go of the old and trust that something better is going to take its place, even if it's scary to face change and the unknown.

I have a strong belief that there is a god or a higher power. I think that if you have a strong belief in that, then you won't feel alone in life and you will feel you can get through anything.

I first got sick after I had my daughter, Kimberly, 21 years ago. I'd always been energetic and never had any serious medical problems. Then I got very sick with a high fever. They told me I had mononucleosis. I became pregnant right away with Sean, and after he was born, I never seemed to recover.

I resisted writing a book for a long time because I didn't want to invade anyone else's privacy or hurt anyone or anger anyone.

True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it is lost.

Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship - never.

Friendship, of itself a holy tie, is made more sacred by adversity.

We often pretend to fear what we really despise, and more often despise what we really fear.

He who studies books alone will know how things ought to be, and he who studies men will know how they are.

Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost.

Times of great calamity and confusion have been productive for the greatest minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace. The brightest thunder-bolt is elicited from the darkest storm.

No company is preferable to bad. We are more apt to catch the vices of others than virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.

Patience is the support of weakness; impatience the ruin of strength.

The present time has one advantage over every other - it is our own.

Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.

Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the dinner.

There is this difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man, really is so; but he that thinks himself the wisest, is generally the greatest fool.