“Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.”

— Anaïs Nin

As quoted in A Woman's Journal : A Blank Book with Quotes by Women (2002) by Running Press Staff, p. 1932

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Anaïs Nin 278

writer of novels, short stories, and erotica 1903–1977

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

Losses (1948)
Context: We read our mail and counted up our missions —
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school —
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, "Our casualties were low."
They said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities.

"Losses," lines 21-28

“If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.”

A.A. Milne (1882–1956) British author

“Living on silence,
Living by the book.
You get it to a science
Of living on one good look.
So put out all the fires
And blow away the smoke.
I'm getting pretty tired
Of living on hope.”

Aimee Mann (1960) American indie rock singer-songwriter (born 1960)

"What About Love"
Song lyrics, Welcome Home (1986)

“How many lives we live in one,
And how much less than one, in all.”

Alice Cary (1820–1871) American writer

Life's Mysteries; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 442.

“The life that is worth living, and the only life that is worth living, is the life of effort, the life of effort to attain what is worth striving for.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904)
Context: Of course, the worst of all lives is the vicious life; the life of a man who becomes a positive addition to the forces of evil in a community. Next to that and when I am speaking to people who, by birth and training and standing, ought to amount to a great deal, I have a right to say only second to it in criminality comes the life of mere vapid ease, the ignoble life of a man who desires nothing from his years but that they shall be led with the least effort, the least trouble, the greatest amount of physical enjoyment or intellectual enjoyment of a mere dilettante type. The life that is worth living, and the only life that is worth living, is the life of effort, the life of effort to attain what is worth striving for.