“look at its shape, with vibrant yellows and oranges, a sunflower can brighten your day...it's as if it is smiling like a happy face painted on the sun...so if you do only one thing all day, let it be to smile, so you can brighten the day of others around you, just like the sunflower”

“Exceptional people, I have found, either start out being optimistic or learn to be optimistic because they realize that they can’t get what they want in life without being optimistic.”

“Fear is the worst kind of grave, because it buries one alive.”

“I don’t entirely understand how anyone gets a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend. It just seems like the most impossible odds. You have to have a crush on the exact right person at the exact right moment. And they have to like you back. A perfect alignment of feelings and circumstances. It’s almost unfathomable that it happens as often as it does.”

“I just want to make you happy. But I'll be there when you're not happy, too. If you're sad, I'll sit inside it with you. I know I'm going to mess up sometimes, too, but I promise to say sorry a lot, because that's what people do when they want something to work.”

“Doing what you love isn't a priviledge; it's an obligation.”

“You can think of death bitterly or with resignation, as a tragic interruption of your life, and take every possible measure to postpone it. Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.”

“The right way to discover your potential is to experiment in life as much as possible. When you experiment, you will either succeed or fail. Either way you learn something about yourself and the world and become wiser. Every experiment proves something. If it does not prove what you intended originally, it proves something else.”