The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man

A true education, Epictetus taught, consists of learning “to distinguish that among things, some are in our power but others are not; in our power, are will and all acts that depend on the will. Things not in our power are the body, the parts of the body, possessions, parents, brothers, children, country, and generally all with whom we live in soci

After a pause, he counseled his youngest to let it go. You’ll kill yourself getting worked up, he told her. “I don’t have time for people like that,” he said. The wisdom of centuries was packed into that laconic advice.

as the APA frames the matter: resilient people choose to “avoid seeing crises as insurmountable problems.” Instead they view trauma as a painful chance to grow stronger.

Live, learn, and move on.

I never heard Charlie talk much about God. The nearest he came with me was to say lightheartedly that he went to church in old age because he was “cramming for the final.”

We “cannot be happy and strong,” he concludes, until we live “in the present, above time.”

Charlie made an art of living. He understood, as great artists do, that every life is a mixture of comedy and tragedy, joy and sorrow, daring and fear. We choose the tenor of our lives from those clashing notes.

What we face may be complicated, but what we do about it is simple. “Do the right thing,” Laura White told her son. “Do unto others,” a teacher told his disciples, “as you would have them do unto you.”

Some men regret the last rays of the setting sun, while others look toward the east for the first light of dawn.”