“Passionate — that means to live for the sake of living.”
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Context: Passionate — that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for the sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment. C'est ça. You don't realize what revolting egoism it is, and that one day it will make you the enemies of the human race.
“Don't get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.”
“The purpose of life is living. Men and women should get the most they can out of their lives.”
As quoted in Infidels and Heretics : An Agnostic's Anthology (1929) edited by Clarence Darrow and Wallace Rice, pp. 206 - 207
Context: The purpose of life is living. Men and women should get the most they can out of their lives. The smallest, tiniest intellect may be quite as valuable to society as the largest. It may be still more valuable to itself: it may have all the capacity for enjoyment that the wisest has. The purpose of man is like the purpose of the pollywog — to wriggle along as far as he can without dying; or to hang on until death takes him.
Antithesis
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part IV - Memory and Design
Sir Edmund Hillary : King Of The World
Context: The explorers of the past were great men and we should honour them. But let us not forget that their spirit lives on. It is still not hard to find a man who will adventure for the sake of a dream or one who will search, for the pleasure of searching, not for what he may find.
“I forgive the many for the sake of the few, the living for the dead.”
On calling an end to the sacking of Athens, after a plea on its behalf by two Athenians loyal to Rome, as quoted in The Story of Rome : From the Earliest Times to the Death of Augustus (1900) by Mary Macgregor; also said to be in a translation of Plutarch's works.
“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
“Good, to forgive;
Best, to forget!
Living, we fret;
Dying, we live.”
Dedication to La Saisiaz.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
