"A handful of patience is worth a bushel of brains"

“Real courage is not to give up hope, even in the most terrible darkness, and to carry on. That if courage and love is deep as despair, deeper, then light may come again”

“Capitalization implies a hierarchy, that some letters are more special than others.”

“Most of us lead far more meaningful lives than we know. Often finding meaning is not about doing things differently; it is about seeing familiar things in new ways. When we find new eyes, the unsuspected blessing in work we have done for many years may take us completely by surprise. We can see life in many ways: with the eye, with the mind, with the intuition. But perhaps it is only those who speak the language of meaning, who have remembered how to see with the heart, that life is ever deeply known or served.”

“It is a pledge that senility has not the last say in everything.”

“Consumerism is so weird. Its a sort of conspiracy we collude in. Youd think shoppers spending their hard-earned cash would be highly critical. You know that the manufacturers are trying to have you on.”

“At my age, I don't think anyone is untouched by cancer.”

“... when death has been brought upon a saint, we ought not to think that an evil has happened to him but a thing indifferent; which is an evil to a wicked man, while to the good it is rest and freedom from evils. 'For death is rest to a man whose way is hidden' (Job 3:23 LXX). And so a good man does not suffer any loss from it.”

“I tried to grow up. Honest. Didn’t quite happen. I guess I’m someone for whom youth still seems more real than the present, or the half century in between. And why not? I'm deeply underwhelmed by most contemporary art, literature, music, films, TV, the heinous little phones, money talk, real estate talk, all that stuff. The Internet, which at first seemed so fascinating, appears to be evolving into something even worse than TV, but we'll see.”

Source : Donald Fagen (2013). “Eminent Hipsters”, p.5, Penguin