When life puts you through a tumbler, it's your choice whether you come out polished or crushed.

People after death become complete again. The blind can see, the deaf can hear, cripples are no longer crippled after all their vital signs have ceased to exist.

My patients taught me not how to die, but how to live.

Learning lessons is a little like reaching maturity. You're not suddenly more happy, wealthy, or powerful, but you understand the world around you better, and you're at peace with yourself. Learning life's lessons is not about making your life perfect, but about seeing life as it was meant to be.

Begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it were the only one we had.

I've told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation.

I didn't fully realize it at the time, but the goal of my life was profoundly molded by this experience - to help produce, in the next generation, more Mother Teresas and less Hitlers.