Today is the day for fools, foolishness and merry pranks played on friends, colleagues and neighbours. Because of the abundance of April Fools’ hoaxes in the media, many people distrust news reports and advertisements launched on this day. No such luck here at Serene Ambition…although, as in some countries like Britain, we do believe that jokes pulled after noon turn the prankster into the ‘fool’. Instead, we’d like to share a few famous insights into learning how to live wisely.

Life has taught me that it knows better plans than we can imagine, so that I try to submerge my own desires, apt to be too insistent, into a calm willingness to accept what comes, and to make the most of it, then wait again. I have discovered that there is a Pattern, larger and more beautiful than our short vision can weave…
—Julia Seton

Those docs, they always ask you how you live so long. I tell ‘em: “If I’d known I was gonna live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”
—Eubie Blaker

You have to be at peace with yourself. I love to laugh. I think laughter can cure. You can see it in a person’s face. Around age forty, when your face has lost the glow of youth, what you are inside starts to form on the outside. Either the lines go up or they go down. If they go up, that’s a good sign.
—Elizabeth Taylor

I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we are all put together. We are so proud of our autonomy that we seldom, if ever, realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others. One of the booby traps of freedom—which is bordered on all sides by isolation—is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life’s banquet.
—Saul Bellow

Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age, and to imagine right up to the brink of death that life is only beginning. I think that is the only way to keep adding to one’s talent, to one’s affections, and to one’s inner happiness.
—George Sand