
“From what we get, we can make a living. What we give; however, makes a life.”
"Is Life Worth Living?"
1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)
“From what we get, we can make a living. What we give; however, makes a life.”
New Year's Address to the Nation (1990)
Context: The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships.
“We have as many lives as we have points of view.”
Source: Invitation to Sociology (1963), p. 71
“We like to have a point of view in our stories, not an obvious moral, but a worthwhile theme.”
As quoted in The Gospel According to Disney : Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust (2004) by Mark I. Pinsky, p. 2
Context: We like to have a point of view in our stories, not an obvious moral, but a worthwhile theme. … All we are trying to do is give the public good entertainment. That is all they want.
“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
“The point is not what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us.”
“It is not pleasure that makes life worth living. It is life that makes pleasure worth having.”
“Count it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor, and for the sake of living to lose what makes life worth living.”
Summum crede nefas animam praeferre pudori
et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.
VIII, line 83.
Satires, Satire VIII