Quotes about life

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“So long as you are ready to die for Humanity, the life of your country is immortal.”

“I don't know about you, but I only have one life, and I don't want to spend it in a sewer of injustice.”

“They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.”

“She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
Of her life, and weaves them gratefully
Into a single cloth –
It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
And clears it for a different celebration.”

“The struggle of life is one of our greatest blessings. It makes us patient, sensitive, and Godlike. It teaches us that although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”

“The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.”

“I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of daily life.”

“Man cannot stand a meaningless life.”

“When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life.”

“To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.”

“if we possess a why of life we can put up with almost any how.”

“Everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn’t agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life.”

“You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.”

“Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.”

“My life has a superb cast, but I cannot figure out the plot.”

“The significant relationships of early adulthood are thus construed as the means to an end of individual achievement, and these "transitional figures" must be cast off or reconstructed following the realization of success. If in the process, however, they become, like Dido, an impediment to the fulfillment of the Dream, then the relationship must be renounced, "to allow the developmental process" to continue. This process is defined by Levinson explicitly as one of individuation: "throughout the life cycle, but especially in the key transition periods… the developmental process of individuation is going on." The process refers "to the changes in a person's relationships to himself and to the external world," the relationships that constitute his "Life Structure" (p. 195).

If in the course of "Becoming One's Own Man," this structure is discovered to be flawed and threatens the great expectations of the Dream, then in order to avert "serious Failure or Decline," the man must "break out" to salvage his Dream. This act of breaking out is consummated by a "marker event" of separation, such as "leaving his wife, quitting his job, or moving to another region" (p. 206). Thus the road to mid-life salvation runs through either achievement or separation.”

“Art is my life and my life is art.”

“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”

“There’s a really stupid saying: When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade. Well, I have a better saying: When life hands you a lemon, shove that lemon up its stupid butt.”

“You are the butter to my bread, and the breath to my life”

“Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it.”

“And because I love this life
I know I shall love death as well.
The child cries out when
From the right breast the mother
Takes it away, in the very next moment
To Find in the left one
Its consolation.”

“In life, as in football, the principle to follow is to hit the line hard.”

“The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first and love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.”

“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.”

“To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”

“You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. In the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.”

“You spend your life getting walked on, you learn to recognize the tread.”

“Life is a series of experiences, each of which makes us bigger, even though it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and griefs which we endure help us in our marching onward.”

“I learned to create a little more space between my thoughts and actions—actually between my feelings and reactions. This is extremely important; without it, life can be a real roller coaster ride.”

“Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.”

“Is not life a hundred times too short for us— to bore ourselves?”

“Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.”

“The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.”

“If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.”

“Life is to be lived, not controlled.”

“Why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from
Birth must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.”

“The only number that would ever be enough is 0. Zero pounds, zero life, size zero, double-zero, zero point. Zero in tennis is love. I finally get it.”

“The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.”

“God gives us life, but the world's landlord is the devil….”

“Life will undertake to separate us, and we must each set off in search of our own path, our own destiny or our own way of facing death.”

“Trust allows you to give. Giving is abundant. As you give so it shall be given to you. If you give with judgment, limitation and stinginess, that is what you will create in your life - judgment, limitation, and stinginess.”

“For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.”

“The finest actor is he who play the comedy of life perfectly, as i aspire to do. To walk well, talk well, weep well, laugh well and die well, it is all pure acting, because in every man there is the dumb dreadful immortal spirit who is real- who cannot act, who-is and who steadily maintains an infinite though speechless protest against the body's lies”

“If something comes to life in others because of you, then you have made an approach to immortality.”

“Waves are the voices of tides. Tides are life," murmured Niko. "They bring new food for shore creatures, and take ships out to sea. They are the ocean's pulse, and our own heartbeat.”

“If you're bored with life, if you don't get up every morning with a burning desire to do things, you don't have enough goals.”

“To be mature you have to realize what you value most… Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one's own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.”

“The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That's the day we truly grow up.”

“What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.”

“Love is the greatest refreshment in life.”

“There was nothing like a Saturday - unless it was the Saturday leading up to the last week of school and into summer vacation. That of course was all the Saturdays of your life rolled into one big shiny ball.”

“If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible. If he has to make a choice, may he make it now. Then I will either wait for him or forget him.”

“Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.”

“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.”

“She put her hand in his, and he clasped it firmly, knowing he had been waiting for her all his life.”

“A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.”

“Mistakes are a fact of life: It is the response to the error that counts.”

“The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.”

“Life is glorious, but it can be counted on to be cruel.”

“We are all carrying so many things in our life and inside ourselves. Often it feels there is no place to put them down. Where do you place the questions you carry”

“Look. We both know life is short, Macy. Too short to waste a single second with anyone who doesn't appreciate and value you.”

“A story about family, first loves, second chances, and the moments in life that leads you back home”

“It is not your aptitude but your ATTITUDE that decides your altitude in life.”

“Either one does not dream, or one does so interestingly. One should learn to spend one's waking life in the same way: not at all, or interestingly.”

“Life is a wheel, and it always comes back around to where it started.”

“The purpose of life is not to do what we want but what needs to be done.”

“If you want someone to be ignored, then build a life-size bronze statue of them and stick it in the middle of town…”

“Accept what life offers you and try to drink from every cup. All wines should be tasted; some should only be sipped, but with others, drink the whole bottle.”

“A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.”

“The goal of life is not to possess power but to radiate it.”

“Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet… Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.”

“I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.”

“For life be, after all, only a waitin' for somethin' else than what we're doin'; and death be all that we can rightly depend on.”

“When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream forever.”

“A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.”

“Any fool can fight a winning battle, but it needs character to fight a losing one, and that should inspire us; which reminds me that I dreamed the other night that I was being hanged, but was the life and soul of the party.”

“The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a pattern of systems.”

“The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.”

“But let me tell you this: sometimes at night, when I look up at the stars, an see the whole sky jus laid out there, don't you think I ain't rememberin it all. I still got dreams like anybody else, an ever so often, I am thinkin about how things might of been. An then, all of a sudden, I'm forty, fifty, sixty years ole, you know?
Well, so what? I may be a idiot, but most of the time, anyway, I tried to do the right thing-- an dreams is jus dreams, ain't they? So whatever else has happened, I am figgerin this: I can always look back an say, at least I ain't led no hum-drum life.
You know what I mean?”

“She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life — one scratched on the wall.”

“The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything is…42!”

“Any book which inspires us to lead a better life is a good book.”

“Life's too short to care about what other people think. Besides, they should accept us for who we are”

“And to me also, who appreciate life, the butterflies, and soap-bubbles, and whatever is like them amongst us, seem most to enjoy happiness.”

“Five minutes are enough to dream a whole life, that is how relative time is.”

“Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like 'What is my purpose in life?' very quickly lacked both.”

“Once we truly know that life is difficult — once we truly understand and accept it — then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”

“He had risked his life and now it was walking away from him, hand-in-hand with a Ruffian prince.”

“Everything in life in nonsense. It's just a question of persepctive”

“We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.”

“Life is a great big canvas. Throw all the paint you can at it.”

“Life is too short to be lived badly.”

“Nobody, as long as he moves among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.”

“You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this:
“Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.”
I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.”

“Life sometimes separates people so that they can realize how much they mean to each other.”

“Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.”

“some we know to be dead even though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through all the forms of life; other are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six”

“Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.”