Quotes about life
page 14

“You are not separate from the whole. You are one with the sun, the earth, the air. You don’t have a life. You are life.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Sun

“Amor Fati – “Love Your Fate”, which is in fact your life.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Love, Fate

“Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then — our friends are not able to finish their stories.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves (1931), Ch. II

“You'll never know why you exist, but you'll always allow yourselves to be easily persuaded to take life seriously.”

Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist

“And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it.”

William Shakespeare As You Like It

Source: As You Like It

Books, Tree, Change

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 3, pp. 43-44
Context: Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

“People make mistakes in life through believing too much, but they have a damned dull time if they believe too little.”

James Hilton book Lost Horizon

Source: Lost Horizon

People, Time

“Wisdom is knowing I am nothing,
Love is knowing I am everything,
and between the two my life moves.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Love, Wisdom

“It’s impossible to go through life unscathed. Nor should you want to. By the hurts we accumulate, we measure both our follies and our accomplishments.”

Christopher Paolini book Inheritance

Variant: It's impossible to go through life unscathed. Nor should you want to. By the hurts we accumulate, we measure both our follies and our accomplishments.
Source: Inheritance (2011)

Feeling, Hurt

“Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there's humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

“When we talk of "exploring the mystical," we are not trying to dig into creation, because if you dig into creation, it will only get more complex. It will not bring clarity; it will only bring more complexity. That is why the yogis looked in a different direction. We looked inward. If you look inward, a different dimension opens up. Now instead of things getting more complex, you get to clarity. It is because of this that we say that those who look inward have a third eye. They see things that others cannot see. They have brought a new clarity to life.”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Source: Of Mystics & Mistakes

“Life's battles don't always go to the stronger or faster man. But sooner or later the man who wins, is the man who thinks he can.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Thinking

“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”

Joseph Chilton Pearce (1926–2016) American writer

Variant: To live a creative life we must first lose the fear of being wrong.

Fear, Motivational, Success

“That quotation about not having time to stand and stare has never applied to me. I seem to have spent a good part of my life - probably too much - in just standing and staring and I was at it again this morning.”

James Herriot (1916–1995) veterinary surgeon and writer

Source: It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet

Time, Parting

“I dreamt my lady came and found me dead
…………
And breathed such life with kisses in my lips
That I revived and was an emperor.”

William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet

Source: Romeo and Juliet

Kiss, Dead

“You have the power to heal your life, and you need to know that. We think so often that we are helpless, but we're not. We always have the power of our minds…Claim and consciously use your power.”

Louise L. Hay (1926–2017) American writer

Thinking

“Life will find a way.”

Michael Crichton book Jurassic Park

Source: Jurassic Park

Way

“Give every day the chance to become the most beautiful day of your life.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Beauty, Chance, Beauty, Good Morning

“the greatest learning of the ages lies in accepting life exactly as it comes to us.”

Anthony de Mello (1931–1987) Indian writer

Source: The Prayer Of The Frog, Vol. 1

Age, Learning

“The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

“Life may contain the "essence" (what else could?); recollection, the repetition in imagination, may decipher the essence and deliver to you the "elixir"; and eventually you may even be privileged to "make" something out of it, "to compound the story." But life itself is neither essence nor elixir, and if you treat as such it will only play its tricks on you.”

Hannah Arendt book Men in Dark Times

Source: Men in Dark Times

Imagination

“Life goes on within you and without you”

George Harrison (1943–2001) British musician, former member of the Beatles

“You've got to have something to eat, and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave.”

Billie Holiday (1915–1959) American jazz singer and songwriter

Love

“The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.”

W.B. Yeats book The Winding Stair and Other Poems

The Choice http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1602/, st. 1 The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)

Rage, Perfection

“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.”

Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo

Chapter 117 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo/Chapter_117 Source: The Count of Monte Cristo (1845–1846) Context: Tell the angel who will watch over your future destiny, Morrel, to pray sometimes for a man who, like Satan, thought himself, for an instant, equal to God; but who now acknowledges, with Christian humility, that God alone possesses supreme power and infinite wisdom... There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.

Happiness, World, Wise, Hope

“No one could say how long that life would last. Whatever has form can disappear in an instant.”

Haruki Murakami book South of the Border, West of the Sun

Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun

“Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Source: Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

Women, Girl, Thinking, Reality

“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

Maya Angelou book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Misattributed
Source: This is actually from Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks On the Road, though it is widely attributed to Ms. Angelou's book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Inspirational, Business

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Variant: Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
Source: Walden and Other Writings

Wise, Life

“He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandonds himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.”

Marguerite Yourcenar book Memoirs of Hadrian

Source: Memoirs of Hadrian

Law

“If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother and hope your guardian genius.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

The earliest appearance of this proverb yet located is in Eliza Cook's Journal Vol. 11, (1854), p. 128, and the earliest attribution to Addison yet found is in Public Ledger Almanac (1887), p. 20.
Disputed
Source: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_New_Era/XD8DAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=addison%20%22hope%20your%20guardian%20genius%22&pg=PA1&printsec=frontcover&bsq=addison%20%22hope%20your%20guardian%20genius%22 Many Thoughts of Many Minds

Hope, Success, Perseverance

“When man does not have firm, calm lines on the horizon of his life- mountain and forest lines, as it were- then a man's innermost will becomes agitated, preoccupied, and wistful.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Mountain

“The life of every human being on earth can depend on the experience, judgment, and vigilance of the person in the Oval Office.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Dependency, Personality

“Ducking for apples -- change one letter and it's the story of my life.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Change

“And good neighbors make a huge difference in the quality of life. I agree.”

Robert Fulghum book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Source: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

“Time goes by so fast. Nothin' can outrun it. Death commences too early--almost before you're half-acquainted with life--you meet the other.”

Tennessee Williams Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Source: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Death, Time

“Life is a book and there are a thousand pages I have not yet read.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Books, Reading

“I'm not straight, and I'm not gay. I'm not bisexual. I want out of the labels. I don't want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that's not on the map. A real adventure.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Invisible Monsters

Variant: I want out of the labels. I don't want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that's not on the map. A real adventure.'
A spinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined.
Source: Invisible Monsters

“You either have faith or fear, not both. Things, they think, generate fear. The more things you have, the more you have to fear. Eventually you are living your life for things.”

Marlo Morgan book Mutant Message Down Under

Source: Mutant Message Down Under

Fear, Faith, Thinking

“She believed, of course… because without something to believe in, life would be intolerable.”

Rosamunde Pilcher book The Shell Seekers

Source: The Shell Seekers

“After all Death is a Symbol that there was Life.”

Mario Benedetti (1920–2009) Uruguayan journalist, novelist, and poet

Death

“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

William Shakespeare book Shakespeare's Sonnets

Source: Sonnets (1609), XVIII
Source: Shakespeare's Sonnets

Men

“Every moment there are a million miracles happening around you: a flower blossoming, a bird tweeting, a bee humming, a raindrop falling, a snowflake wafting along the clear evening air. There is magic everywhere. If you learn how to live it, life is nothing short of a daily miracle.”

Sadhguru book Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Source: Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Flowers, Bird, Learning, Bee

“I almost wish I hadn't gone down that rabbit-hole—and yet—and yet—it's rather curious, you know, this sort of life!”

Lewis Carroll book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

“That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone changed my life.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Books, Change, Reading

“You can have everything in life that you want if you just give enough other people what they want.”

Zig Ziglar (1926–2012) American motivational speaker

Secrets of Closing the Sale (1984)
Variant: You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.

People

“There is little point in teaching anything backwards. The whole object of life, Headmistress, is to go forwards.”

Roald Dahl book Matilda

Source: Matilda

“If you die and i live there's no life for me back in District 12. You're my whole life. I would never be happy again.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Happiness

“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.”

Eugene O'Neill Long Day's Journey into Night

Page 63 (Act 2, Scene 1)
Long Day's Journey into Night (1955)
Source: Long Day's Journey Into Night
Context: But I suppose life has made him like that, and he can't help it. None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever.

Help

“I've always had this deep-down conviction that I'm not like everybody else, and there's an amazingly exciting new life waiting for me just around the corner.”

Sophie Kinsella book Can You Keep a Secret?

Source: Can You Keep a Secret?

Waiting

“Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.”

Terry Pratchett book Jingo

Variant: Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Source: Jingo

“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

"Earth, Fire and Water" from The Celtic Twilight (1893)
Source: The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

Water

“There's a sorrow and pain in everyone's life, but every now and then there's a ray of light that melts the loneliness in your heart and brings comfort like hot soup and a soft bed.”

Hubert Selby Jr. Requiem for a Dream

Source: Requiem for a Dream

Pain, Light, Heart, Loneliness

“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Happiness, Sadness, Sad, Happy

“You’re my best friend, Shmuel,’ he said. ‘My best friend for life.”

John Boyne (1971) Irish novelist, author of children's and youth fiction

Source: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

“Seeing the world with all the unspoiled simplicity of a young child, you are free from concepts of beauty and ugliness, good and evil, and no longer fall prey to conflicting tendencies driven by desire or repulsion. Why trouble yourself about all the ups and downs of daily life, like a child who delights in building a sand castle but cries when it collapses? To get what they want and be rid of what they dislike, look how people throw themselves into torments, like moths plunging into the flame of a lamp! Would it not be better to put down your heavy burden of dreamlike obsessions once and for all?”

Dilgo Khyentse (1910–1991) Bhutanese Buddhist Lama

Source: The Hundred Verses of Advice: Tibetan Buddhist Teachings on What Matters Most

People, World, Beauty, Evil

“I've had a very sheltered life. What can happen to you if you stay home writing all day?”

R.L. Stine (1943) American writer and producer

Home

“You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life”

John Irving book The World According to Garp

Source: The World According to Garp

Parent

“You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Marriage, Forgetting

“It’s just life. You can’t beat life.”

Alice Munro (1931) Canadian novelist

Source: Away from Her

“I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 36e

Nature, Horse

“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Art, Way, Support, Time

“Life is difficult.”

M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) American psychiatrist

Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth

“Life is not an easy matter… You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

Trotzky's Diary in Exile — 1935 (1958)
Source: Diary in Exile, 1935

Idea, Personality

“There is no doubt that the princess did become a queen---not only on the screen. One of the most loved, one of the most skillful, one of the most intelligent, one of the most sensitive, charming actresses---and friends, in my life---but also in the later stages of her life, the UNICEF ambassador to the children of the world. The generosity, sensitivity, the nobility of her service to the children of the world and the mothers of the world will never be forgotten.”

Gregory Peck (1916–2003) American actor

Love, Children, World, Intelligence

“Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Variant: The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.

“So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 153

People

“People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

People, Courage, Wise

“Some of it's magic and some of it's tragic but I had a good life all the way.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

Variant: Some of its magic, some its tragic, but I've had a good life along the
way.

Way

“Suddenly Ka realized he was in love with İpek. And realizing that this love would determine the rest of his life, he was filled with dread.”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

Love

“… memory can restore to life everything except smells, although nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Mary

Source: Mary

Memory, Past

“My ancestors were Brahmins. They spent their lives in search of god. I am spending my life in search of man.”

Muhammad Iqbál (1877–1938) Urdu poet and leader of the Pakistan Movement

Educational Thinkers http://books.google.com/books?id=O6Fp2zaQVVMC&pg=PA151&dq=Muhammad+Iqbal+Brahmin&hl=en&ei=hJQaTKPPKMewcfnqzIEK&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=Muhammad%20Iqbal%20Brahmin&f=false

God, Search

“It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!”

Oscar Wilde book The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Pt. II, st. 9
The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)

Love, Dance

“There can be no life without change, and to be afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid of life.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Change

“Life's too short to pretend and play games like that. I want to spend my time hanging out with people who make me feel good about myself. People who make me happy.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: Alice in Zombieland

Happiness, People, Feeling, Game

“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people”

Terry Pratchett book Guards! Guards!

Source: Guards! Guards!

People, Problem, Thinking

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”

Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow

Variant: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.
Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Chapter 38, "Thinking about life", page 402 (ISBN 9780141033570).

Thinking

“Adolescence is such a fun time in your life, because you think you know it all, and you haven’t gotten to the point where you realize that you know almost nothing.”

Anthony Kiedis book Scar Tissue

Source: Scar Tissue

Thinking, Time

“How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or seen anybody die?”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Love, Baby

“One thing we do know: Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Variant: Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.
Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

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