Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere - the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.
There is no such thing as luck. There is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe.
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
I don't know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion.
You better live your best and act your best and think your best today, for today is the sure preparation for tomorrow and all the other tomorrows that follow.
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation...Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.
Why not seize the pleasure at once, how often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparations.
The preparation of good food is merely another expression of art, one of the joys of civilized living…
For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.