Quotes about living

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Source: Moloka'i

Source: Lolita

Source: Cold Days

Source: Blue Moon

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Ich bin Leben, das leben will, inmitten von Leben, das leben will.
Reverence for Life (1969)
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

Source: Witches Abroad

Source: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

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.

Source: Face the Fire

Source: Unwind

Source: Letters and Papers from Prison

Source: Battle of Angels

Source: Daja's Book

Source: Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

Source: Let Me be a Woman

Variant: We live in a world where we have to hide to make love, while violence is practiced in broad daylight.

Source: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Source: Time Enough for Love (1973)

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest

Source: My Name is Red

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

Source: Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography

Letter Ten (26 December 1908)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

Source: Infamous

Source: Diaries of Adam & Eve

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

Source: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

Source: The Collector

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).

Source: King Lear

Source: Autobiography of a Yogi

"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.

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Dear Me (1977)

Source: Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

Source: Mostly Harmless

Variant: It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.
Source: Les Misérables

Source: Henry VIII

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.

Variant: Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

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.

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest

Source: Red Bird

Source: The Dark Tower

Source: The Viscount Who Loved Me

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 -->
Attributions
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!

Source: The Book of Disquiet

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: The Architecture of Happiness

Source: Love Poems

Source: The Selected Poetry

Source: Duino Elegies

Source: Love Is the Higher Law

Source: Among the Hidden

Source: Night

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

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)

Source: Elsewhere

Source: The 48 Laws of Power

As quoted in Revolution (2005) by Stephen Court & Aaron White .

Source: Christian Science (1907), Ch. 4

Timequake (1997)

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Ibid., p. 86
The Book of Disquiet
Original: É nobre ser tímido, ilustre não saber agir, grande não ter jeito para viver.

III, vii, 7; translation by Arthur Leslie Wheeler
Tristia (Sorrows)

Srimad Bhagavatam, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1999. Canto 7, Chapter 14, verse 36, purport. Vedabase http://www.vedabase.com/en/sb/7/14/36
Quotes from Books: Loving God, Quotes from Books: Regression of Science

Book 1, Chapter 6 “A Haven of Civilization” (p. 214)
The Land Leviathan (1974)

1870s, Letter to war veterans (1875)

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