Quotes about living
page 33

“Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

"The Grizzly and the Gadgets", The New Yorker (date unknown); Further Fables for Our Time (1956); This statement is derived from one of Henry David Thoreau: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
From Fables for Our Time and Further Fables for Our Time

Men

“Sometimes one gets the feeling that life still thinks it's living in Paris in the '30s.”

Tom Robbins (1932) American writer

Life, Feeling, Thinking

“I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.”

Anne Tyler (1941) American novelist

Life, Reading

“I used to be afraid of dying. Now I’m afraid of not living. There’s a difference. We go through life planning for a future, but sometimes that future never comes.”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: Challenger Deep

Life, Future

“Isn’t it funny to think that this magnificent piece of matter is in a state of decay? Really, can you think of any other living thing that looks this glorious as it’s dying?”

Tiffanie DeBartolo (1970) American writer

Source: How to Kill a Rock Star

Thinking

“Some men fish all their lives without knowing it is not really the fish they are after.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Men, Fish

“The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book Middlesex

Source: Middlesex

“Where I am always thou art. Thy image lives within my heart.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Bad Moon Rising

Art, Heart

“You're mine, damn ye, Claire Fraser! Mine, and I wilna share ye, with a man or a memory, or anything whatever, so long as both shall live.”

Diana Gabaldon book Dragonfly in Amber

Source: Dragonfly in Amber

Memory

“At first she was overjoyed that he would be with her, but then she recalled that human people could not live under the water, and he could only visit her father's palace as a dead man.”

Hans Christian Andersen book The Little Mermaid

Source: The Little Mermaid

People, Water, Dead

“Everything is so alive, that I can be alive. Without moving I can see it all. In your life I see everything that lives.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Life

“In a world that lives like a fist
mercy is not more than waking
with your hands open.”

Mark Nepo (1951) American writer

World

“You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

“Ideals of College” http://books.google.com/books?id=_VYEIml1cAkC&pg=PA15&dq=%22You+are+not+here+merely%22, Swarthmore (25 October 1913) <br class="br">1910s <br class="br">Context: You are not here merely to prepare to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.

World, Hope, Hope, Leadership

“I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

Source: Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Learning

“Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Spring

“How terrible it is to have no cares, no longings. I do not fit. I feel too deeply and want too much. As cages go, it is a gilded one, but I shall not live well in it or any cage, for that matter.”

Libba Bray book The Sweet Far Thing

Source: The Sweet Far Thing

Feeling

“We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.”

Hélène Cixous (1937) French philosopher and writer

Falseness

“I lived like a man who wanted to die but who had no courage to do it himself.”

Anne Rice book Interview with the Vampire

Source: Interview with the Vampire

Courage

“You can't live your life to suit other people. The harder you try, the more restrictions they'll put on you just for the fun of seeing you jump through their hoops.”

Judith McNaught (1944) American writer

Source: Paradise

Life, People

“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

The New Yorker (March 29, 1976)

People, Sense

“If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Love, Life, God, Lovers

“Librarians save lives: by handing the right book, at the right time, to a kid in need”

Judy Blume (1938) American children's writer

Books, Time

“Think, Travel, Celebrate, Charm, Decorate, Dress, Live - colorfully”

Kate Spade (1962–2018) American fashion designer

Source: Becoming Myself: Reflections on Growing Up Female

Travel, Thinking

“He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch-22 (1961)

Time

“A lie cannot live.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Lie

“This is the trap of having something to live for:
Everything else seems lifeless.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

“Death! Strange that there should be such a word, and such a thing, and we ever forget it; that one should be living, warm and beautiful, full of hopes, desires and wants, one day, and the next be gone, utterly gone, and forever!”

Harriet Beecher Stowe book Uncle Tom's Cabin

Source: Uncle Tom's Cabin

Death, Beauty, Hope, Forgetting

“It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.”

Stephen Fry book Moab Is My Washpot

Referencing Oscar Wilde from the preface of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"; "All art is quite useless".
1990s, Moab is My Washpot (autobiography, 1997)
Source: Moab Is My Washpot
Context: … but love, like all art, as Oscar said, it's quite useless. It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe but not worth bothering with.

Love, Life, Beauty, Art

“It's not as if our lives are simply divided into light and dark. There's a shadowy middle ground. Recognizing and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does.”

Haruki Murakami book After Dark

Source: After Dark

Intelligence, Understanding, Light

“To Scarlett, there was something breath-taking about Ellen O'Hara, a miracle that lived in the house with her and awed her and charmed and soothed her.”

Margaret Mitchell book Vom Winde verweht (1937 German edition)

Source: Gone with the Wind

Housing

“If you're alive, kick into drive. Chase whimsies. See if you can turn dreams into a way to make a living, if not an entire way of life.”

Kevin Smith (1970) American screenwriter, actor, film producer, public speaker and director

Source: Tough Shit: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good

Life, Dreams, Way

“What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Religion

“Music, such music, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music-not too much, or the soul could not sustain it-from time to time.”

Vikram Seth book An Equal Music

Source: An Equal Music

Happiness, Hope, Music, Soul

“We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.”

Justin Cronin The Passage

Source: The Passage

Way, Help

“He had lived a very long time, and only since he gained Anna had he learned to fear. He’d discovered that he had never been brave before—just indifferent. She had taught him that to be brave, you have to fear losing something.”

Patricia Briggs book Fair Game

Source: Fair Game

Fear, Learning, Time, Indifference

“A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about.”

Joseph Roth (1894–1939) austrian novelist and journalist

Source: The Radetzky March

Truth, Books, World

“For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

Dead

“No one should live beyond 30”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

“If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.”

Lewis Buzbee (1957) American writer

Source: The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History

Books, Age, Reading

“It is possible to live happily in the here and now. So many conditions of happiness are available—more than enough for you to be happy right now. You don't have to run into the future in order to get more.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: Being Peace

Happiness, Future

“Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion… Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Life, Money, People, Way

“One must work and dare if one really wants to live.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

“You’re not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for the greater you are.”

Orson Scott Card The Worthing Chronicle

Source: The Worthing Chronicle

Life

“girls
please give your
bodies and your
lives
to
the young men
who
deserve them

besides
there is
no way
I would welcome
the
intolerable
dull
senseless hell
you would bring
me

and
I wish you
luck
in bed
and
out

but not
in
mine

thank
you.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

Men, Way, Girl, Hell

“These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed.”

Abigail Adams (1744–1818) 2nd First Lady of the United States (1797–1801)

Letter to John Quincy Adams (19 January 1780)
Context: These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues.
Context: These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by the scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

Life, Time

“You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”

Walker Percy (1916–1990) Southern philosophical novelist

Source: Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

Age, Idea

“In the dark and the shadows where secrets lived, that was where Julian survived. It was how he had managed for years.”

Cassandra Clare book Lady Midnight

Source: Lady Midnight

Secret

“I know this is insane, but I somehow wish I had been in Auschwitz with my parents so I could really know what they lived through! I guess it's some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did.”

Art Spiegelman (1948) cartoonist from the United States

Source: The Complete Maus

Life, Parent

“Defining relationships over here? I see that even as the world plunges into darkness and peril, you two stand around discussing your love lives. Teenagers.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Magnus Bane, to Clary Fray and Simon Lewis, pg. 61
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Heavenly Fire (2014)

Love, World

“So you can't live in Manhattan?' she asked.
Amos's brow furrowed as he looked across at the Empire State Building. 'Manhattan has other problems. Other gods. It's best we stay separate.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

God, Problem

“It must be good to die in the knowledge that one has done some truthful work… and to know that, as a result, one will live on in the memory of at least a few and leave a good example for those who come after.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Truth, Knowledge, Memory

“You don't fear so you live, you live so you fear.”

James Miller

Fear

“Due to attachment, anger, and foolishness, I have committed numberless mistakes in speech, deed and thought. I bow my head and repent. I vow from today to begin anew, to live day and night in mindfulness, and not to repeat my previous mistakes.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Anger, Night

“You dont have to live forever just live.”

Natalie Babbitt book Tuck Everlasting

Source: Tuck Everlasting

“Difference between motivation and inspiration - Motivation is external and short lived. Inspiration is internal and lifelong”

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (1956) spiritual leader

Motivation

“History, despite its wrenching pain cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage need not be lived again.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Pain, History, Courage

“The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts. Such grace, such dignity, such a tragedy.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Variant: The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.
Source: The Kite Runner

Spring, Flowers

“The love of every single one of my lives.”

Alyson Nöel book Blue Moon

Source: Blue Moon

Love

“Our minds work alike, she thought. She had found her partner, her equal, the one to work and live and love with her. Her soulmate.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Night World, No. 2

Love

“Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Reality

“There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: Jayber Crow

Heart

“… I think I know the secret to a long and happy marriage - just choose someone you can't live without.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Smooth Talking Stranger

Marriage, Happiness, Secret, Thinking

“We recognize that all knowledge is mediated through the body and that feeling is a profound source of information about our lives”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

Feeling, Knowledge

“It’s because of you when I’m in bed in the morning that I can wind my spring and tell myself I have to live another good day.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Variant: It's because of you when I'm in bed in the morning that I can wind my spring and tell myself I have to live another good day.
Source: Norwegian Wood

Spring

“It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Life, World, Beauty, Nature

“How do most people live without any thought? There are many people in the world,--you must have noticed them in the street,--how do they live? How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning?”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

People, World, Clothes

“No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.”

Adrienne Rich book The Dream of a Common Language

Source: The Dream of a Common Language

Imagination, Tree, Passion, Animals

“Anxiety was born in the very same moment as mankind. And since we will never be able to master it, we will have to learn to live with it—just as we have learned to live with storms.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Manuscrito encontrado em Accra

Learning

“This is the worst problem with living history museums. They always leave the best parts out. Like typhus. And opium. And scarlet letters. Shunning. Witch-burning.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Choke

Source: Choke

History, Problem, Parting

“For those that were never wounded by love, they will never be able to say: “I lived”. Because they haven’t.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Love

“Study and in general the pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Letter to Adrianna Enriques (October 1921), p. 83
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)

Children, Truth, Beauty, Study

“And when her lips met mine, I knew that I could live to be a hundred and visit every country in the world, but nothing would ever compare to that single moment when I first kissed the girl of my dreams and knew that my love would last forever.”

Nicholas Sparks book Dear John

Source: Dear John

Love, World, Dreams, Girl

“Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise”

Alice Walker (1944) American author and activist

“Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.”

Wally Lamb (1950) american novelist

Source: The Hour I First Believed

Books

“To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Love, Life, Wisdom, School

“He lives.
I breathe.
I want. Him. Always.
Fire to my ice. Ice to my fever.
-Mac”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Shadowfever

“When I glanced at the chair, it started to shake. I’d like to think it was scared of me, but I rarely invoked that response in living things, let alone inanimate objects.”

Kelley Armstrong book Stolen

Source: Stolen

Thinking

“No matter how much time has passed, these things still affect us and the world we live in. If you don't pay attention to the past, you'll never understand the future. It's all linked together.”

Sarah Dessen book Just Listen

Source: Just Listen

World, Understanding, Time, Past

“Love’em or hate’em, by blood or by heart, family was a kind of oxygen. Necessary for the living.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover at Last

Family, Heart

“Be true to the thought of the moment and avoid distraction. Other than continuing to exert yourself, enter into nothing else, but go to the extent of living single thought by single thought.”

Tsunetomo Yamamoto book Hagakure

Source: Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

“Let us love nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write threescore: this is the second of our reign.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

The Anniversary, last stanza
Source: The Complete English Poems

Love

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”

Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House

Source: The Haunting of Hill House

Dreams, Reality

“Most good things have been said far too many times and just need to be lived.”

Shane Claiborne (1975) American activist

Variant: Most good things have already been said far too many times and just need to be lived.

Time

“The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love

Truth

“She worked in order to live, and presently fell in love, also in order to live, for the heart, too, has its hunger.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Love, Hunger, Heart

“Despite the forecast, live like it's spring.”

Lilly Pulitzer (1931–2013) American fashion designer

Spring, Wise, Deep, Inspirational

“I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.”

Dave Eggers book What Is the What

Variant: If I ever fall in love again, I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.
Source: What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (2006), Ch. 21, pp. 317-318
Source: What Is the What
Context: I cannot count the times I have cursed our lack of urgency. If I ever love again, I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.

Love, Way, Thinking, Time

“Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith. Faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Faith, Universe

“I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Life, Peaceful

“Live today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Just today. Inhabit your moments. Don't rent them out to tomorrow.”

Jerry Spinelli book Love, Stargirl

Source: Love, Stargirl

“The misery of keeping a dog is his dying so soon. But, to be sure, if he lived for fifty years and then died, what would become of me?”

Walter Scott (1771–1832) Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet

Dogs

“Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand--and melting like a snowflake…”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

Star, New Year

“No one has to know. No one would. It would be her secret, one she would share with the mountains only. The question is whether it is a secret she can live with, and Parwana thinks she knows the answer. She has lived with secrets all her life.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

Life, Secret, Mountain, Question

“He die one day, and then he go above of my head to live with your father."
He weared the long hair, and after he died, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples."
He nice, the Jesus.”

David Sedaris book Me Talk Pretty One Day

Source: Me Talk Pretty One Day

People

“The longer I live, the more I realize that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time!”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Pain, Time

“I wondered why I hadn't loved that day more, why I hadn't savored every bit of it… why I hadn't known how good it was to live so normally, so everyday. But you only know that, I suppose, after it's not normal and every day any longer.”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

Source: One True Thing

Love

“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”

Margaret Atwood book The Year of the Flood

Source: The Year of the Flood

Question

“There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even—the French air clears up the brain and does good—a world of good.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

World

“We'll have a 'rest of our lives' now”

Margaret Peterson Haddix (1964) American author

“You have the rest of your lives to catch up together. After all, soulmates always end up together. […] Ey-girlfriends are easily forgotten. Best friends stay with you for ever.”

Cecelia Ahern book Love, Rosie

Variant: After all, soulmates always end up together. Silly Bethany won't even be remembered then. Ex-girlfriends are easily forgotten. Best friends stay with you for ever.
Source: Where Rainbows End

Quotes about living page 33

Quotes about living
page 33