“A man can spend his whole existence never learning the simple lesson that he has only one life and that if he fails to do what he wants with it, nobody else really cares.--Louis Auchincloss”

“When a baby comes into the world, its hands are clenched, right? Like this?" He made a fist. "Why? Because a baby not knowing any better, wants to grab everything, to say the whole world is mine. But when an old person dies, how does he do so? With his hands open. Why? Because he has learned his lesson." "What lesson?" I asked. He stretched open his empty fingers. "We can take nothing with us.”

“But what will he do when he sees only too clearly why his patient is ill; when he sees that it arises from his having no love, but only sexuality; no faith, because he is afraid to grope in the dark; no hope, because he is disillusioned by the world and by life; and no understanding, because he has failed to read the meaning of his own existence?”

“What does it all mean?' I said.'A good question,' he rejoined: 'nobody knows what anything is; a man can learn only what a thing means. Whether he do, depends on the use he is making of it.”

“‎But he still thought it self-evident that one had to do what was right; he had never learned how people could want to do otherwise; he had learned only that they did.”

“He who lacks imagination lives but half a life. He has his experiences, he has his facts, he has his learning. But do any of these really live unless touched by the magic of the imagination?”