You may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

People who reach certain levels of frailty, more important than getting their mammogram, more important than getting their blood pressure tweaked, they're at high risk of falling. If they fall and break their hip, they not only die sooner, they die miserably.

Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped. Wisdom is prudent strength.

Practice is funny that way. For days and days, you make out only the fragments of what to do. And then one day you've got the thing whole. Conscious learning becomes unconscious knowledge, and you cannot say precisely how.

The evidence is that people who enter hospice don't have shorter lives. In many cases they are longer.

Over time I learned that there are two very different satisfactions that you can have in your life. One is the satisfaction of becoming skilled at something. It almost doesn't matter what the terrain is. There is a deep, soul-feeding resonance in mastery itself, whether in teaching, writing a complicated software program, coaching a baseball team, or marshalling a group of people to start a new business.

Outsiders tend to be the first to recognize the inadequacies of our social institutions. But, precisely because they are outsiders, they are usually in a poor position to fix them.