Mortality

Your mentors may leave you prepared, but they can't leave you ready.

And did you get what you wanted out of life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved. To feel beloved on the earth.

You'll never see a U-Haul behind a hearse. I don't care how much money you make, you can't take it with you. It's not how much you have — it's what you do with what you have.

I speak because I think our time on earth is short and each moment that we are not our truest selves, each moment we pretend to be what we are not, each moment we say what we do not mean because we imagine that is what somebody wants us to say, then we are wasting our time on earth.

The effect you have on others is the most valuable currency there is. Everything you gain in life will rot and fall apart, and all that will be left of you is what was in your heart.

What is it you're doing with this one wild and precious life of yours?

I know that when I am on my deathbed someday, I will not be thinking about any particular legislation I passed; I will not be thinking about a policy I promoted; I will not be thinking about the Nobel Prize I received. I will be thinking about that walk I took with my daughters.

Don't just be yourself. Be all of yourselves. Don't just live. Be that other thing connected to death. Be life. Live all of your life. Understand it, see it, appreciate it. And have fun.

Life has a very simple plot: first you're here and then you're not.

There are 30,000 days in your life. I realized there are no warmups, no practice rounds, no reset buttons. Every day we're writing a few more words of a story. Instead of trying to make my life perfect, I tried to make it interesting.

It is an incredibly exciting thing, this one meaningless life of yours.

Raise the rest of your life to meet you. Don't search for defining moments because they will never come. The moments that define you have already happened. And they will already happen again. And it passes so quickly.