“To live is to experience things, not sit around pondering the meaning of life.”

—  Paulo Coelho , book Aleph

Source: Aleph (2011)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "To live is to experience things, not sit around pondering the meaning of life." by Paulo Coelho?
Paulo Coelho photo
Paulo Coelho 844
Brazilian lyricist and novelist 1947

Related quotes

Kurt Cobain photo

“There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life.”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist
Fritz Leiber photo

“What was life worth, anyway, if you had to sit around remembering not to mention this, that, and the other thing because someone else might be upset?”

Fritz Leiber book Conjure Wife

Source: Conjure Wife (1953), Chapter 11 (p. 116).

Katharine Hepburn photo

“life is to be lived. if you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around.”

Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) film, stage, and television actress
Poul Anderson photo

“I don’t pretend to understand what the physicists mean by time, but for people, it isn’t so-and-so many measured units; it’s events, experiences. A man who crowds his life and dies young has lived longer than one who got old sitting in tame sameness.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 19 “Thule”, Section 14 (p. 441)

Brian Greene photo

“The real question is whether all your pondering and analyses will convince you that life is worth living. That's what it all comes down to.”

Brian Greene book The Fabric of the Cosmos

The Fabric of the Cosmos : Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (2004), p. 3

“I spent the rest of the night pondering over what was in store for me at that point in life. I was no longer a teenager, and I’ll never be able to experience having sex as a teenager.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

My Twisted World (2014), 19-22, UC Santa Barbara, Inceldom

Desmond Tutu photo

“Out of the cacophony of random suffering and chaos that can mark human life, the life artist sees or creates a symphony of meaning and order. A life of wholeness does not depend on what we experience. Wholeness depends on how we experience our lives.”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner
Albert Schweitzer photo

“Affirmation of the world, which means affirmation of the will-to-live that manifests itself around me, is only possible if I devote myself to other life.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics
Context: Affirmation of the world, which means affirmation of the will-to-live that manifests itself around me, is only possible if I devote myself to other life. From an inner necessity, I exert myself in producing values and practising ethics in the world and on the world even though I do not understand the meaning of the world. For in world- and life-affirmation and in ethics I carry out the will of the universal will-to-live which reveals itself in me. I live my life in God, in the mysterious divine personality which I do not know as such in the world, but only experience as mysterious Will within myself.
Rational thinking which is free from assumptions ends therefore in mysticism. To relate oneself in the spirit of reverence for life to the multiform manifestations of the will-to-live which together constitute the world is ethical mysticism. All profound world-view is mysticism, the essence of which is just this: that out of my unsophisticated and naïve existence in the world there comes, as a result of thought about self and the world, spiritual self-devotion to the mysterious infinite Will which is continuously manifested in the universe.

Ben Stiller photo

“I don’t sit around thinking, I’ve been a bumbling suitor all my life.”

Ben Stiller (1965) actor, Comedian, director, writer

As quoted in "Born Funny" by Margot Dougherty Reader's Digest (September 2007) http://www.rd.com/your-america-inspiring-people-and-stories/ben-stiller-born-funny/article44068.html
Context: People like to define you through what they’ve seen you do … There are aspects of my personality, I guess, that come through on-screen, but I don’t sit around thinking, I’ve been a bumbling suitor all my life.

Related topics