We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important.

Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you're living?

Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them - that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

I just hope Americans come to understand that food isn't something to be manipulated by our teeth and shoved down our gullet, that it's our spiritual and physical nourishment and important to our well-being as a nation.

English food writer Elizabeth David, cook and author Richard Olney and the owner of Domaine Tempier Lulu Peyraud have all really inspired the way I think about food.

I want every child in America to eat a nutritious, delicious, sustainably sourced school lunch for free.

Buy foods from nearby farms and have that food served in the cafeteria.

Create a garden; bring children to farms for field trips. I think it's important that parents and teachers get together to do one or two things they can accomplish well - a teaching garden, connecting with farms nearby, weave food into the curriculum.

In Berkeley, we built the garden and a kitchen classroom. We've been working on it for 12 years. We've learned a lot from it. If kids grow it and cook it, they eat it.

The fact that most kids aren't eating at home with their families any more really means they are eating elsewhere. They are eating out there in fast food nation.

If we don't preserve the natural resources, you aren't going to have a sustainable society. This is not something for Chez Panisse and the elite of San Francisco. It's for everyone.

The act of eating is very political. You buy from the right people, you support the right network of farmers and suppliers who care about the land and what they put in the food.

A lot of equipment can get in the way of the connection with food, with touching and feeling.

I was a very picky eater.

This is the power of gathering: it inspires us, delightfully, to be more hopeful, more joyful, more thoughtful: in a word, more alive.

I once had an Early Girl tomato at my friend Jay's house, and I thought that was the best thing I'd ever had. But then I visited friends in Senegal, and I ate sea urchin pulled fresh out of the sea. It tasted like the ocean.

We have to understand that we want to pay the farmers the real price for the food that they produce. It won't ever be cheap to buy real food. But it can be affordable. It's really something that we need to understand. It's the kind of work that it takes to grow food. We don't understand that piece of it.