Nourishing Life

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid.
-Marcus Aurelius

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because some day in life you will have been all of these.
-George Washington Carver

Nothing else matters much - not wealth, nor learning, nor even health - without this gift: the spiritual capacity to keep zest in living. This is the creed of creeds, the final deposit and distillation of all important faiths: that you should be able to believe in life.
-Harry Emerson Fosdick

A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

Wherever a man may happen to turn, whatever a man may undertake, he will always end up by returning to the path which nature has marked out for him.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Family life is full of major and minor crises - the ups and downs of health, success and failure in career, marriage, and divorce - and all kinds of characters. It is tied to places and events and histories. With all of these felt details, life etches itself into memory and personality. It's difficult to imagine anything more nourishing to the soul.
-Thomas Moore