Og Mandino Quotes

Wealth stays with us a little moment if at all: only our characters are steadfast, not our gold.

Life is both sad and solemn. We are led into a wonderful world, we meet one another here, greet each other---and wander together for a brief moment. Then we lose each other and disappear as suddenly and unreasonably as we arrived.

Once, once for all, if you would save your heart from breaking, learn this lesson once for all you must cease, in this world, to believe in the eternity of any creed or form at all. Whatever grows in time is a child of time, and is born and lives, and dies at its appointed day like ourselves.

It isn’t a perfect place. There are no perfect places. But nobody cares about perfection when there are sand castles to build and kites to chase, children that are being born, old hearts that are giving in.

[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand.

That's the thing about life; everything feels so permanent, but you can disappear in an instant.

Modern capitalism is just as subversive as Marxism. The materialistic view of life on which both systems are based is identical. As long as we only talk about economic classes, profit, salaries, and production, and as long as we believe that real human progress is determined by a particular system of distribution of wealth and goods, then we are not even close to what is essential.

Life is once. Forever.

Life, Lady Stutfield, is simply a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments.

We brought nothing into this world and it's certain we can carry nothing out.

To think that so much comes to so little, to think that life is really short.

We say that life is sweet, its satisfactions deep. All this we say, as we sleepwalk our time through years of days and nights. We let time cascade over us like a waterfall, believing it to be never-ending. Yet each day that touches us, and every man in the world, is unique; irredeemable; over. And just another Monday.

Here you can be a billionaire, like Mark Zuckerberg rich, but you are going to die and you are here for a while and ultimately all of your stuff is kind of like a rental.

You can't get too attached to any one shampoo. And conditioner, also.

As ephemeral as our footprints were in the sand along the river, so also were those moments of childhood caught in the photographs. And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures, telling our brief story.

We're all nothing but unified arrangements of atoms and particles, drifting around, enjoying consciousness every now and then for a second or so before splitting up to become bits and pieces of trees and stars and french fries.

Objects exist and if one pays more attention to them than to people, it is precisely because they exist more than the people. Dead objects are still alive. Living people are often already dead.

The eighteen years he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity. Already he hears death calling. With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another.

For the sort of potential that a human being carries, it is a very brief life.

Wondering why we bother with love, if it never lasts.

Riches, power and fame last only for a few years! Why do people cling so desperately to these transitory things? Why can't people who have more than they need for themselves give that surplus to their fellow citizens? Why should some people have such a hard time during their few years on this earth?

As an actor, you realize that your whole life is about arrivals and departures. You're always meeting people, you get really close, and then you all have to leave.

Our children that die young are like those spring bulbs which have their flowers prepared beforehand, and leave nothing to do but to break ground, and blossom, and pass away. Thank God for spring flowers among men, as well as among the grasses of the field.

...and there you have it, another body on the floor surrounded by things that don't mean much to anyone except to the one who can't take any of them along.