“Live for yourself and you will live in vain;
Live for others, and you will live again.”
Bob Marley (1945–1981) Jamaican singer, songwriter, musician
Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
“Live for yourself and you will live in vain;
Live for others, and you will live again.”
Bob Marley (1945–1981) Jamaican singer, songwriter, musician
“This is the world you have made yourself, now you have to live in it.”
Nina Simone (1933–2003) American singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger, and civil rights activist
Source: I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone
Hyman George Rickover (1900–1986) United States admiral
Variations of this quote have been attributed to a number of people, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Samuel Levenson, and Lao Tzu; there is no solid support for any such attribution.
Misattributed
George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist
"Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Polemic (March 1947)
Context: Shakespeare starts by assuming that to make yourself powerless is to invite an attack. This does not mean that everyone will turn against you (Kent and the Fool stand by Lear from first to last), but in all probability someone will. If you throw away your weapons, some less scrupulous person will pick them up. If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen. The second blow is, so to speak, part of the act of turning the other cheek. First of all, therefore, there is the vulgar, common-sense moral drawn by the Fool: "Don't relinquish power, don't give away your lands." But there is also another moral. Shakespeare never utters it in so many words, and it does not very much matter whether he was fully aware of it. It is contained in the story, which, after all, he made up, or altered to suit his purposes. It is: "Give away your lands if you want to, but don't expect to gain happiness by doing so. Probably you won't gain happiness. If you live for others, you must live for others, and not as a roundabout way of getting an advantage for yourself."
Michael Nava (1954) American writer
Source: Non-fiction, Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994), p.142
Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer
Esoteric Mind Power
“If you take little account of yourself, you will have peace, wherever you live.”
Poemen (340–450) Egyptian monk and desert father
Saying 81
Jessamyn Stanley (1987) American yoga teacher and author
Source: Jessamyn Stanley is fighting for radical visibility and yoga for every body, Samantha Grasso, Aug 28, 2018, 2018 https://www.dailydot.com/irl/jessamyn-stanley/,
“Live to please the others, and everyone will love you, except yourself.”
Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist