Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist
Not by Twain, but from Edward Abbey's A Voice Crying In The Wilderness (1989).
Misattributed
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist
Not by Twain, but from Edward Abbey's A Voice Crying In The Wilderness (1989).
Misattributed
Alan Brennert (1954) American writer
Source: Moloka'i
“Love is the great miracle cure. Loving ourselves works miracles in our lives.”
Louise L. Hay (1926–2017) American writer
“Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.”
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet
“If you know the why, you can live any how.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
“I would die for you. But I won't live for you.”
Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower
“There is nothing worth living for, unless it is worth dying for.”
Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary
“I am life which wants to live admidst of lives that want to live.”
Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher
Ich bin Leben, das leben will, inmitten von Leben, das leben will. <br class="br">Reverence for Life (1969) <br class="br">Source: Die Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben http://books.google.pl/books?id=q7MCqUIN7hkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false, C.H.Beck, 2008, p. 111
“Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.”
Thornton Wilder book The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Source: The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman
Linda
Death of a Salesman (1949)
Context: I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi
Source: Letters and Papers from Prison
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer
Source: Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary
Source: Let Me be a Woman
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher
John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter
Variant: We live in a world where we have to hide to make love, while violence is practiced in broad daylight.
“There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.”
Yukio Mishima book The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
Source: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
“You live and learn. Or you don't live long.”
Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love
Source: Time Enough for Love (1973)
“I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.”
Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
Orhan Pamuk (1952) Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literature recipient
Source: My Name is Red
“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.”
Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …
Variant: If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster. Časopis LIFE, január 1984
“The worst of all fears is the fear of living”
Theodore Roosevelt book Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
Source: Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
“Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness.”
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet
Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet
Letter Ten (26 December 1908)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
“The whole point of life is learning to live with the consequences of the bad decision we've made.”
Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist
Source: Infamous
“Strive for excellence, not perfection, because we don't live in a perfect world.”
Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker
Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910–1997) French naval officer, explorer, conservationist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and …
Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Variant: I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and then make the choice to share it with other people.
Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist
Source: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
“When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies”
John Fowles book The Collector
Source: The Collector
Anthony Bourdain book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
Kitchen Confidential (2000)
Source: Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
Context: Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It's healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I've worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. Oh, I'll accommodate them, I'll rummage around for something to feed them, for a 'vegetarian plate', if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine. (p. 70).
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
"Fear, the Foundation of Religion"
1920s, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)
Source: Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
Context: Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing – fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by the help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hears can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.
“You women listen more to your heart and less to all the nonsense. That's why you live longer.”
Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind
Source: The Shadow of the Wind
“Death is more universal than life. Everyone dies, but not everyone lives.”
Andrew Sachs (1930–2016) British actor
Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born
“You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”
Douglas Adams book Mostly Harmless
Source: Mostly Harmless
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher
“To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.”
Victor Hugo book Les Misérables
Variant: It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.
Source: Les Misérables
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States
Foreword (January 1960)
You Learn by Living (1960)
Context: One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In stopping to think through the meaning of what I have learned, there is much that I believe intensely, much I am unsure of. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.
“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet
Variant: Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
Principles of Social Reconstruction [Originally titled Why Men Fight : A Method Of Abolishing The International Duel], Ch. VIII : What We Can Do, p. 257
1910s
Context: It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly. The State and Property are the great embodiments of possessiveness; it is for this reason that they are against life, and that they issue in war. Possession means taking or keeping some good thing which another is prevented from enjoying; creation means putting into the world a good thing which otherwise no one would be able to enjoy. Since the material goods of the world must be divided among the population, and since some men are by nature brigands, there must be defensive possession, which will be regulated, in a good community, by some principle of impersonal justice. But all this is only the preface to a good life or good political institutions, in which creation will altogether outweigh possession, and distributive justice will exist as an uninteresting matter of course.
The supreme principle, both in politics and in private life, should be to promote all that is creative, and so to diminish the impulses and desires that center round possession.
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer
Source: Red Bird
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution
From a personal conversation, quoted from memory by Maxim Gorky in "V.I. Lenin" (1924) http://www.marxists.org/archive/gorky-maxim/1924/01/x01.htm <!-- first edition --> <br class="br">Attributions <br class="br">Context: I know of nothing better than the Appassionata and could listen to it every day. What astonishing, superhuman music! It always makes me proud, perhaps with a childish naiveté, to think that people can work such miracles! … But I can’t listen to music very often, it affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things, and pat the little heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. These days, one can’t pat anyone on the head nowadays, they might bite your hand off. Hence, you have to beat people's little heads, beat mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people. Hm — what a devillishly difficult job!
“Life isn't worth living, unless it is lived for someone else.”
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
“It's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life.”
Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“I will not live without love.”
Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)
“There is no worse bitterness than to reach the end of your life and realized you have not lived.”
M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) American psychiatrist
“If this country is ever demoralized, it will come from trying to live without work.”
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States
“The secret to living long is to have something to live for.”
David Levithan book Love Is the Higher Law
Source: Love Is the Higher Law
“I want to Live! Not Die, Not Hide, LIVE!”
Margaret Peterson Haddix Among the Hidden
Source: Among the Hidden
“for women live much more in the past… they attach themselves to places;”
Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
Context: I felt that night, on the stage, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming? (p. 145)
“We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.”
Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)
“I live perfectly in my house. I am supported by subscriptions for what they are bald.”
PewDiePie (1989) Swedish YouTuber and video game commentator
William Booth (1829–1912) British Methodist preacher
As quoted in Revolution (2005) by Stephen Court & Aaron White .
“All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.”
Kurt Vonnegut book Timequake
Timequake (1997)
“It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living.”
Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet
Ibid., p. 86
The Book of Disquiet
Original: É nobre ser tímido, ilustre não saber agir, grande não ter jeito para viver.
“Say that I live, but in such wise that I would not live.”
Vivere me dices, sed sic ut vivere nolim
III, vii, 7; translation by Arthur Leslie Wheeler
Tristia (Sorrows)
A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977) Indian guru
Srimad Bhagavatam, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1999. Canto 7, Chapter 14, verse 36, purport. Vedabase http://www.vedabase.com/en/sb/7/14/36 <br class="br">Quotes from Books: Loving God, Quotes from Books: Regression of Science
Michael Moorcock book The Land Leviathan
Book 1, Chapter 6 “A Haven of Civilization” (p. 214)
The Land Leviathan (1974)
Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist
In a letter to her aunt Mary Hill, from Worpswede, June 1899; as quoted in Paula Modersohn-Becker – The Letters and Journals, ed: Günther Busch & Lotten von Reinken; (transl, A. Wensinger & C. Hoey; Taplinger); Publishing Company, New York, 1983, p. 135
1899