Quotes about life

page 43

“Time is the most precious gift in our possession, for it is the most irrevocable. This is what makes it so disturbing to look back upon the time which we have lost. Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering. Time lost is time not filled, time left empty.”

“The 2019 novel coronavirus is a punishment by nature to humans' unsanitary lifestyle. I promise with my life that the virus has nothing to do with the (Wuhan Institute of Virology) lab.”

“Every animal possesses something which distinguishes it from all other animals; and this is what I understand by personal identity, or rather the identical self. This in every animal is perfectly distinct and indivisible, since the only knowledge we have of it is when it is entire; and divisibility of this is what we cannot conceive: but if indivisible, it must also be indestructible, and must always have existed. Itis not possessed of any kind of consciousness: but no consciousness can, it appears, exist without it; as life itself seems to be composed of personal identity, and other essentials of the mind or body, and that it is the combination which produces consciousness.”

“If we fail to instruct our children in justice, religion and liberty, we will be condemning them to a world without virtue, a life in the twilight of a civilization, where the great truths have been forgotten.”

“Yea, everything is vain, except only God alone,
and every pleasant thing must one day vanish away!
And all the race of men—there shall surely come among them
a Fearful Woe, whereby their fingers shall grow pale:
And every mother's son, though his life be lengthened out
to the utmost bound, comes home at last to the Grave:
And every man shall know one day his labour's worth,
when his loss or gain is cast up on the Judgment Day.”

“We all wanna feel great. We all wanna look great, have more energy. The most important thing is about having the right fuel in your body. I can't remember feeling this great in my whole 32 years of my life.”

“Forget about winning and losing; forget about pride and pain. Let your opponent graze your skin and you smash into his flesh; let him smash into your flesh and you fracture his bones; let him fracture your bones and you take his life. Do not be concerned with escaping safely — lay your life before him.”

“A single thought of her reminds me what it's like to feel alive and once again to have deep meaning in my life; A simple vision of her smile makes me feel special.”

“One afternoon, which is ever present in my recollection, I was enjoying a walk with my friend in the city park and reciting poetry. At that age I knew entire books by heart, word for word. One of these was Goethe's Faust. The sun was just setting and reminded me of a glorious passage:
Sie rückt und weicht, der Tag ist überlebt,
Dort eilt sie hin und fördert neues Leben.
O! daß kein Flügel mich vom Boden hebt,
Ihr nach und immer nach zu streben!
Ein schöner Traum, indessen sie entweicht.
Ach! zu des Geistes Flügeln wird so leicht
Kein körperlicher Flügel sich gesellen![The glow retreats, done is the day of toil;
It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring;
Ah, that no wing can lift me from the soil
Upon its track to follow, follow soaring!
A glorious dream! though now the glories fade.
Alas! the wings that lift the mind no aid
Of wings to lift the body can bequeath me.
(tr. Bayard Taylor)
As I uttered these inspiring words the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagram shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and my companion understood them perfectly. The images I saw were wonderfully sharp and clear and had the solidity of metal and stone, so much so that I told him, "See my motor here; watch me reverse it."”

“O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.”

“Collective human consciousness and life on our planet are intrinsically connected. “A new heaven” is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness, and “a new earth” is its reflection in the physical realm.”

“We must start from the joy of life, from respect, from humanity, because the most important thing in life is having respect for other people. Especially for those who might think very differently from you.”

“S funny. Piotr, toward the end of his life, looked at our district and only saw how much better it was. All the backbreaking, heartbreaking work he did cleaning up the messes after the war is taken for granted now, or mostly just forgotten. Instead, we look around and only see how much better it could be. And neither of us is wrong, exactly.”

“If Goethe claimed towards the end of his life that every reasonable person is a moderate Liberal, then in our time one must say: Every reasonable person is a moderate Socialist.”

“Compared to what human life has mainly been like here on earth, our current societies are WEIRD.”

“I was busy settling my own life, so it was a welcome break for my family and me. Before that, I had been saying more no's than yes's to the people who approached me. A lot of people told me that I wasn’t doing the right thing, but I think that as I matured, I have become choosier about what I want.”

“Life is miraculous. Even when it's disastrous, it's still incredible.”

“Neither force nor manipulate others into following you. Rather dedicate your life to the highest truth and let the magnetism of truth itself pull people to you.”

“God gives life to human beings who in turn give birth to artificial intelligence.”

“If what the eye sees does not rankle in the heart
Sweet is the flow of life in travel spent.”

“My real opinion is, that as a return for what has been done by me, I deserve a maintenance in the Prytaneum for the rest of my life.”

“If we spend our lives resisting what happened, which is what we are doing when we cannot accept the reality of what has happened, we are living our life pushing against what was instead of putting our energy towards what we want to create instead.”

“Life is 5% what happens and 95% how you react!”

“Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,
Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.”

“Cruelty is as old as life itself.”

“Purpose necessitates one has a vision into their future. Without purpose and vision, your life will resemble a windmill without wind. Devoid of wind, the windmill cannot do its job and has ceased to function.”

“When a friend is going through a difficult stormy time in their life, try to be the rainbow that makes them smile.”

“He who wears the emotional and physical scars of life should do so with honor and integrity.”

“Life is a test, make sure you study for it.”

“No one has gone through life without acquiring scars and bruises. Some wounds are hidden inside us and only we can feel. They are badges of our day-to-day struggle to learn and survive.”

“On one’s path through life, it shall be nearly impossible to find and acquire complete virtue. Aristotle listed his twelve virtues and other philosophers have noted even more personality traits to describe the virtuous. But one, morality jumps off the page which within itself is defined distinctively different between various religious, social value systems and nationalities. Morality is defined by our conscience, not the dictionary.”

“Though our lives are finite, life is infinite. We can start thinking about our legacy, the impact we'll have on the lives of others, today.”

“Every crime that was ever committed happened due to the person perceiving themselves as being both separate and disconnected from the person they committed that crime against. And so it can be said, that the perception of separateness is not only the greatest pain we experience in this life, it's also the single most dangerous thing on the planet.”

“Uncertainty is the equivalent of a predator waiting in the shadows and pounces upon us when least expected. Frequently, we are aware of pending uncertainty, such as, waiting for the results; of a test, a pending loan application, a promotion or potential employment, and the fact uncertainty will be present for our entire life.”

“If something or someone makes you happy and brings joy to your life, it does not have to make sense to anyone else.”

“One can never force another to reveal passion they do not possess or feel with in the heart. We are erected from life experiences and the broken pieces that could be salvaged.”

“The most significant adversary of relationships and love is life which is wrought with conflicts.”

“The most precious possessions in life cannot be touched by human hands; foremost, is the fulfillment of inner peace.”

“Longing for someone to touch, caress and meld into, is a strong human emotion of never-ending desire and want. When the desires do not exist in real life, we tend to live them through dreams and fantasies. We even resort to the extent of choosing a person we know and have feelings for to place a face on the illusion.”

“If an egg is broken by outside force, life ends. If broken by inside force, life begins. Great things always begin from inside.”

“Nothing in life worth having comes easy.
That is unless you are rich.”

“Each man lived his own life, and paid his own price for living it.”

“You think that your attention is in the present moment when it's actually taken up completely by time. You cannot be both unhappy and fully present in the Now. What you refer to as your "life" should more accurately be called your "life situation."”

“Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath. Or when a dark mood comes upon you and you start getting into a negative mind-pattern and thinking how dreadful your life is, your thinking has become aligned with the pain-body, and you have become unconscious and vulnerable to the pain-body's attack. "Unconscious," the way that I use the word here, means to be identified with some mental or emotional pattern. It implies a complete absence of the watcher.”

“The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life....The pain that you create now is always some form of non acceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity.”

“Instead of "watching the thinker," you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation. In your everyday life, you can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself.”

“I have little use for the past and rarely think about it; however, I would briefly like to tell you how I came to be a spiritual teacher and how this book came into existence. Until my thirtieth year, I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression. It feels now as if I am talking about some past lifetime or somebody else's life.”

“Never judge yourself through the eyes of another person. Your conscience will make your own judgments. Everyone at some point in our life, attempted to impress another person. We try to evaluate, what actions or mannerisms we can display that will impress them. And our evaluations are usually incorrect. Don’t pretend to be someone you’re not.”

“When beset with doubt in troubled times, and those about you will understand if you come unglued, stay the ground, and face the challenge. For when you stand alone to confront life's highest mountains, the next shall be easier to climb.”

“In a world where social media is part of everyone’s life and your phone is glued to your hip like a dog chasing its own tail, we need to start celebrating our own bodies and the bodies of those around us more.”

“Always be mindful, one has complete authority over psyche, words, and actions. Deliberative judgment of these three things, determine your station in life.”

“On one’s life’s journey to obtain destiny they will encounter hundreds of closed doors; some are locked and there is no key. There are only two choices.”

“Fate does not control who walks into your life, but it does have an impact on who you meet. Then, both determine the extent you will become a part of each other’s life.”

“Keep those close that bring joy and purpose and maintain distance from people who induce chaos and turmoil in your life.”

“Hundreds of life lessons are communicated and absorbed with every broken heart. So, let it break.”

“No teaching foresaw the future with such precision as Buddhism. Parallel with reverence to the Buddha, Buddhism develops the veneration of Bodhisattvas—future Buddhas. According to the tradition, Gotama, before reaching the state of Buddha, had been a Bodhisattva for many centuries. The word, Bodhisattva, comprises two concepts: Bodhi—enlightenment or awakening, and Sattva—the essence. Who are these Boddhisattvas? The disciples of Buddhas, who voluntarily have renounced their personal liberation and, following the example of their Teacher, have entered upon a long, weary thorny path of help to humanity. Such Bodhisattvas appear on earth in the midst of the most varying conditions of life. Physically indistinguishable in any way from the rest of humanity, they differ completely in their psychology, constantly being the heralds of the principle of the common welfare.”

“The day I shaved my head was the most empowering moment of my whole life. The last strand of hair cut off was the moment my whole face was on show and I couldn't hide behind my hair like I used to. As I looked in the mirror I realised I had one job to do. Inspire ... Shaving your head is so empowering. You don't need hair to be beautiful. You are beautiful with or without. I learnt that too.”

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

“Where speculation ends — in real life — there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement — the real depiction — of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the present.”

“The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they appear in their own or other people's imagination, but as they really are; i.e. as they are effective, produce materially, and are active under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of the politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics of a people. Men are the producers of their conception, ideas, etc.”

“Nine hundred feet below my cave rhododendrons blossomed. I climbed barren mountain-tops. Long tramps led me to desolate valleys studded with translucent lakes... Solitude, solitude! ...Mind and senses develop their sensibility in this contemplative life made up of continual observations and reflections. Does one become a visionary or, rather, is it not that one has been blind until then?”

“Your entire heart has been scarred through the years; seek the healer who heightens the senses and helps you feel alive. There, you will find the medicine to mend the wounds and restore life.”

“We can change our future, but we cannot escape our destiny. That is why life is a journey, not a destination. All roads lead to Rome, but our actions and inaction determine the meaning of our life regardless of the outcome.”

“Strength comes to those who treat life as a grand Symphony.”

“Imagine there's no countries,
It isn't hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
And no religion, too,
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…”

“Time is Life.”

“God, give us grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other. Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.
Amen.”

“In life the error teaches us to face our destiny.”

“My life is a combination of combinations of music and emotions.”

“Nothing records the effects of a sad life so graphically as the human body.”

“Never wish life were easier, wish that you were better.”

“If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.”

“As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.”

“A simple strategy that will save you so many headaches: don’t care about winning trivial arguments. Did someone say something you don’t agree with? Smile, nod, and move on to more important things. Life is short. Learning to not care about having the last word will save you so much time.”

“[T]here are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. 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.”

“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”

“Maybe if you weren’t busy throwing rocks at each other, you could spend a little time on the other niceties of life, such as cooperation and mutual advancement.”

“Give to all the children, from their birth, the same means of maintenance, education, and instruction; give then to all the men thus raised the same social milieu, the same means of earning their living by their own labor, and you will see then that many of these differences, that we believe to be natural differences, will disappear because they are nothing but the effect of an unequal division of the conditions of intellectual and physical development — of the conditions of life.”

“We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.”

“The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.”

“If you correct your mind, the rest of your life will fall into place.”

“To enjoy life, we must touch much of it lightly.”

“The exercise of an extraordinary gift is the supremest pleasure in life.”

“In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don't try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.”

“God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.”

“He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings, and all beings in his own Self, and looks on everything with an impartial eye.”

“Life's most important questions are, for the most part, nothing but probability problems.”

“Your money saved us for three days. It's not often that money saves a person's life.”

“Cheerfulness is often a cloak that hides a life of sacrifice and a continual union with God.”

“It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. This is in fact true. It's called living.”

“There Is Nothing More Beautiful Than Someone Who Goes Out Of Their Way To Make Life Beautiful For Others”

“What is the essence of life? To serve others and to do good.”

“Man's death by sins is more than his death by fate and his life by charity is more than his life by age.”

“If there's a hell, I think it's an encyclopedia, and you can just look up what everyone in your life thought about you. And if there is a heaven, it's a wikipedia, and you can just change that.”

“Use original detail in your writing. Life is so rich, if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else.”

“The opportunity of your life, it's you.”

“Today’s world might be lacking a new generation of educators whose mission would be to nourish love for life.”

“Love for life — love for people, above all respect for their values and traditions, and for everything that can give deep meaning to it.”

“Life always needs ideas capable of becoming the light that dispels the darkness.”