I used to occasionally buy anthologies of quotations, imagining quotes as shortcuts to wisdom. Why bother to read all half-million words of War and Peace when you can sum it all up with, “Everything I know, I know because of love”? Joyce’s Ulysses can be a slog, so just go straight to the last page: “…yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” For that matter, “Jesus wept” pretty much tells you all you need know about the Bible.

The trouble with collections of quotations was that I invariably found so much dross among the odd pearl of wisdom that I ended up irritated at the editor’s inept choices and/or annoyed at my own lack of wisdom in buying the damn books. So I determined to make my own anthology.

Thirty years on, I’m now into my sixth one, titled “Open Anywhere, Spring 2015,” containing about 800 quotations that have resonated with me. Every few years, I dump all my quotes into a pdf file, create a pretty cover, and have lulu.com make me a single copy, a slim perfect-bound book: portable, personalized wisdom for about 12 bucks.

I categorize my selections in sections: happiness; consciousness, self, mind and brain; zen meditation; science; UG Krishnamurti; food and health; humor; wisdom; and misc. Less is more (gasp!). I’d like to share just a dozen, chosen pretty much at random. I’ll skip attribution here—write me if you want details.

• How can life be so beautiful, providing such sublime rewards for mediocrity?
• Utram bibis, aquam an undam? (Which do you drink, the water or the wave?)
• If you want to be a schmuck all your life, no one’s going to stop you.
• There’s nothing so dead as yesterday’s enlightenment.
• If you are not happy here and now, you never will be.
• The certitude that there is no salvation is a form of salvation. In fact, it is salvation.
• Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
• When inventing a god, the most important thing is to claim it is invisible, inaudible and imperceptible in every way. Otherwise, people will become skeptical when it appears to no one, is silent and does nothing.
• Nothing happens until you leave home.
• All meditation can do is take us to new and more interesting ways of being unhappy.
• She taught us the joy of shame, and the shame of joy.
• Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.