Quotes about life

page 88

“It is your own bad strategies, not the unfair opponent, that are to blame for your failures. You are responsible for the good and bad in your life.”

“God, he thought, her eyes are so bright, flashing, deep, full of promise, all those things eyes are in books but never are in life, and she was his.”

“They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever… and the other one scared me out of my mind.”

“Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,
And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?
---"On death”

“I’d never seen anything like it. First a trial, then a few murders, then dancing. Life goes on. Or, in this case, death continues.”

“As life goes on it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself everyday.”

“She comprehended the perversity of life, that in the struggle lies the joy.”

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”

“one must not allow the clock and the calender to blind him to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle --and mystery”

“Don't you know that four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still?”

“Four things to learn in life: To think clearly without hurry or confusion; To love everybody sincerely; To act in everything with the highest motives; To trust God unhesitatingly.”

“I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.”

“Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.”

“My prayer is simple my dear one, my dear one. May you never need understand. My prayer is for peacetime, my child, my child. Live it well and this life can be grand.”

“All literary men are Red Sox fans—to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.”

“Life was more difficult in Inkheart, yet it seemed to Meggie that with every new day Fenoglio's story was spinning a magic spell around her heart, sticky as a spider's web and enchantingly beautiful..”

“You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.”

“I'm not sure anyone's life turns out exactly the way they imagine. All we can do is to try to make the best of it. Even when it seems impossible.”

“Live your best life!”

“To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender.”

“I'd sell my soul to have you. In my whole life, you'll always be what I wanted most."

~ Hardy Cates”

“All your life, other people will try to take your accomplishments away from you. Don't you take it away from yourself.”

“Why live an ordinary life, when you can live an extraordinary one.”

“Success is loving life and daring to live it.”

“Everything in life has a place, and when one thing moves, it must go somewhere else.”

“I am your brother. I was supposed to be your brother before either of us was born. Karmic debt. It appears I was Vlad the Impaler or Genghis Khan in a past life.”

“In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.”

“Enjoy your life. No curse hangs over you, nor did it ever. No devil chases after your soul. Sing and dance and be merry.”

“I thought climbing the Devil's Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.”

“Wander a whole summer if you can… time will not be taken from the sum of your life. Instead of shortening, it will definitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal.”

“Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

“Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.”

“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality" says Iris Murdoch.
But given the state of the world, is it wise?”

“Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?”

“[Knowing how to suffer without complaining is the only practical thing, it's the great science, the lesson to learn, the solution to the problem of life. ]”

“There is one thing, and only one thing, in which it is granted to you to be free in life, all else being beyond your power: that is to recognize and profess the truth.”

“We all owe death a life.”

“and I think that everything in life is kind of unreal, isn't it?”

“All love is expansion, all selfishness is contraction. Love is therefore the only law of life. He who loves lives, he who is selfish is dying. Therefore love for love's sake, because it is the only law of life, just as you breathe to live.”

“If you find one true friend in life, you're richer than most. If that one true friend is your husband, you're blessed.”

“The trick is not how much pain you feel--but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.”

“Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.”

“The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life.”

“It goes on, terrifyingly repetitive. One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.”

“When someone dies, you don't get over it by forgetting; you get over it by remembering, and you are aware that no person is ever truly lost or gone once they have been in our life and loved us, as we have loved them.”

“The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom.”

“A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing.”

“human relationships simply aren't
durable.
I think back to the women in
my life.
they seem non-existent.”

“They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.”

“Send me out into another life
lord because this one is growing faint
I do not think it goes all the way”

“Flip-flop, hippety-hop, offa your rocker and over the top, life's a fiction and the world's a lie, so put on some Creedence and let's get high.”

“And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.”

“When life gives you lemons, chunk it right back.”

“Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.”

“Sometimes your whole life could hinge on a fraction of an inch. Or the beat of a nanosecond. Or the knock on a door.”

“An empty shell. Those were the first words that sprang to mind….. Something incredibly important -.. - had disappeared from Miu for good. Leaving behind not life, but its absence”

“There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.”

“Calvin: Mom and Dad say I should make my life an example of the principles I believe in…But every time I do, they tell me to stop it.
p.140”

“… when a wife wouldn't testify, little punishment was meted out. Alex came to understand that only those who pressed charges ever became truly free, because the life they were leading was a prison, even if most of them wouldn't admit it.”

“When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive.”

“There is no good reason. Don't waste your life waiting for good reasons… You'll wait and wait.”

“I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.”

“The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.”

“In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.”

“In the course of my life I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.”

“I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.”

“I’m not running away from my responsibilities. I’m running to them. There’s nothing negative about running away to save my life.”

“Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit”

“As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.”

“Not forever does the bulbul sing
In balmy shades of bowers,
Not forever lasts the spring
Nor ever blossom the flowers.
Not forever reigneth joy,
Sets the sun on days of bliss,
Friendships not forever last,
They know not life, who know not this.”

“What you should really be sorry for," he continued, "is that for the rest of my life, I'll have to avoid wine cellars to keep from thinking about you."
"Why? Was kissing me that bad?"
A devil-solf whisper. "No sweetheart. It was that good.”

“Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.”

“I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?”

“There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don't let the man who doesn't love you be one of them.”

“If we are alone, we become more alone. Life is strange”

“Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I…”

“I was born inside the movie of my life. The visuals were before me, the audio surrounded me, the plot unfolded inevitably but not necessarily. I don't remember how I got into the movie, but it continues to entertain me.”

“I do care about real life. It's just not as interesting as what's in my books.”

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come”

“The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires.”

“Living well is an art that can be developed: a love of life and ability to take great pleasure from small offerings and assurance that the world owes you nothing and that every gift is exactly that, a gift.”

“One of the most dynamic and significant changes you can make in your life is to make the commitment to drop all negative references to your past, to begin living now.”

“Did you ever think about life as a metaphor for television?”

“Life is nothing to be very serious about. Life is a ball in your hands to play with. Don’t hold on to the ball.”

“Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed - else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.”

“Love is a form of prejudice. I have too many other prejudices.”

“I want you to be everything that's you, deep at the center of your being.”
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated”

“Even if it’s not your ideal life, you can always choose it. No matter what your life is, choosing it changes everything.”

“He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life.”

“Learning to stop sweating the small stuff involves deciding what things to engage in and what things to ignore. From a certain perspective, life can be described as a series of mistakes, one right after another with a little space in between.”

“Children need close friends to help them grow up, to discover things about themselves and about life. They also need close friends to keep them sane”

“That's the thing about life; everything feels so permanent, but you can disappear in an instant.”

“He felt full of a dense and sour substance that was blocking his chest, and it wasn't grief. After all those years, life now seemed like no more than a trap, a maze, not even a maze, just a room that was all walls, no door.”

“Most of life is unbearable. It’s unbearable but we bear it”

“The worst thing to do is to die while reading LIFE magazine.”

“Sometimes, dear brother, I know so well what I want. I am quite able to do without God, both in my life and in my painting, but what I cannot do without, unwell as I am, is something greater than myself, which is my life, the power to create.”

“Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I simply should recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.”

“Security is the denial of life”

“The greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.”