Quotes about living
page 36

“The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Soul

“The air will always be to filled with something. Your body too sore or tired. Your father too drunk. Your wife too cold. You will always have some excuse not to live your life.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Source: Haunted

Life

“always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair they loved or they loathed, they lived in a world of superlatives”

Nancy Mitford book The Pursuit of Love

Source: The Pursuit of Love

Love, Happiness, World, Water

“It’s not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

“Life was going on, and no one but a handful of people cared if I lived or died.”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: Pale Demon

Life, People

“Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

Variant: ... I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live...

Way, Feeling

“I have to tell you I love living in a world without clocks. The shackles are gone. I’m a puppy unleashed in a meadow of time. -- Stargirl”

Jerry Spinelli book Love, Stargirl

Source: Love, Stargirl

Love, World, Time

“She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.”

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

Source: Madame Bovary

“your lives be as full and happy as ours, and may the seasons be kind to you and your friends. The door of our Abbey is always open to any travellers roaming the dusty path between the woodlands and the plains.”

Brian Jacques (1939–2011) British fiction writer known for Redwall animal fantasy novels

Happiness, Travel, Season

“Forgive me, that I manage badly,
Manage badly but live gloriously,
That I leave traces of myself in my songs,
That I appeared to you in waking dreams.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Source: The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

Dreams, Forgiveness, Appearance

“But I'm not ready to stop listening to the screwed-up inner voice that's been ordering me around for a lifetime. My head thinks it can kill me… and go on living without me.”

Mary Karr (1955) American writer

Source: Lit

Thinking

“Guilty feelings about clothes are totally unnecessary. A lot of people earn their living by making clothes, so you should never feel bad.”

Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019) German fashion designer

People, Feeling, Clothes

“If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

People

“a lesson must be lived
in order to be learned
and the clarity to see and stop this now
that is what i've earned”

Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist

Learning

“If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.”

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

Source: Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

Nature

“Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Love, World, Way

“Death alone gives meaning to life, and you will never fully live until you know you must die. And make your peace with that knowledge.”

Alice Borchardt (1939–2007) American fiction writer

Source: The Raven Warrior

Life, Death, Peace, Knowledge

“Sometimes I think I live more closely to the past than the present.”

Patricia Briggs (1965) American writer

Source: Dragon Bones

Thinking, Past

“As long as you live, you hope. You think that everything will just… get better.”

Romain Gary book Au-delà de cette limite votre ticket n'est plus valable

Source: Au-delà de cette limite votre ticket n'est plus valable

Hope, Thinking

“Today I have so much to do:
I must kill memory once and for all,
I must turn my soul to stone,
I must learn to live again—
Unless …”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Translated by Judith Hemschemeyer from Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova (1989)
Requiem; 1935-1940 (1963; 1987), The Sentence
Context: Today I have so much to do:
I must kill memory once and for all,
I must turn my soul to stone,
I must learn to live again—
Unless... Summer's ardent rustling
Is like a festival outside my window.

Soul, Learning, Memory

“We can only learn so much and live.”

Thomas Harris book Hannibal

Source: Hannibal

Learning

“When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God's. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.”

Eugene H. Peterson (1932–2018) American translator

God, Reading

“They weren't nice words he said. He could've lived a good life and died never having made a person feel rubbed down to bones and too sad to hold together.”

Shannon Hale book Book of a Thousand Days

Source: Book of a Thousand Days

Life, Sadness, Feeling, Personality

“He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.”

Pat Conroy book The Prince of Tides

Source: The Prince of Tides

Love, Men

“Life is a challenge" he once told me, "and only those who rise to the challenge truly know what it means to live.”

Darren Shan book Vampire Mountain

Source: Vampire Mountain

Life

“(existing's tricky:but to live's a gift)”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Source: Selected Poems

“Not if we blow it up," Gale says brusquely. His intent, his full intent, becomes clear. Gale has no interest in preserving the lives of those in the Nut. No interest in caging the pray for later use.
This is one of his death traps.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

Death

“And in your smile, I will live forever”

Nicholas Sparks book The Longest Ride

Source: The Longest Ride

Smile

“What difference does it make if the Gospel is mostly a lie? It's an engrossing story and the words of its hero are excellent words to live by, even today.”

Tom Robbins (1932) American writer

Lie

“The first rule of truly living - do the thing you are most afraid of.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

“Live and let live, do not judge, take life as it comes and deal with it, everything will be okay.”

James Frey book A Million Little Pieces

Source: A Million Little Pieces

Life

“You die how you live.”

August Wilson Gem of the Ocean

Gem of the Ocean

“When trust is lost, traumatized people feel that they belong more to the dead than to the living.”

Judith Lewis Herman (1942) American psychiatrist

Source: Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

People, Feeling, Dead

“Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.”

Cheryl Strayed book Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“I’m haunted by all
the space that I
will live without
you.”

Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) American novelist, poet, and short story writer

“The universe is full of dead people who lived by assumption.”

Alan Dean Foster book Splinter of the Mind's Eye

Source: Splinter of the Mind's Eye

People, Universe, Dead

“Live everyday as if it were your last because someday you're going to be right.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

“Boo, Forever

Spinning like a ghost
on the bottom of a
top,
I'm haunted by all
the space that I
will live without
you.”

Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) American novelist, poet, and short story writer

Source: The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster

“I want to confess as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face and feel loathing and horror. My indifference to man has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

Source: The Seventh Seal

World, Dreams, Feeling, Heart

“We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Life, Reading

“The trouble with you and me, is that we don't live in the real world. We dream of fantastic things that may never happen.”

Agatha Christie book Endless Night

Source: Endless Night

World, Dreams

“If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.”

Emily Dickinson Life, and Death, and Giants —

Life, p. 6
Collected Poems (1993)

Life, Pain, Help, Heart

“Attending church does not necessarily mean living the principles taught in those meeting. You can be active in a church but inactive in its gospel.”

Stephen R. Covey book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“It is the encounters with people that make life worth living.”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

Variant: It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living.

Life, People

“Don't ever ask me again if I hate living anywhere with you and Jasmina. This Rock reminds me of the boy I was and being with you in the palace reminds me of the man I want to be.'

'Not just any man,' she whispered. 'A King. Mine.”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: Froi of the Exiles

Hate, Boy

“You can con God and get away with it, Granny said, if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously entertaining thing you'll do next.”

Dean Koontz Odd Thomas

Source: Odd Thomas

Life, God, Imagination

“I've come to think that's what heaven is- a place in the memory of others where our best selves live on.”

Christina Baker Kline (1964) American writer

Source: Orphan Train

Thinking, Memory

“We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

"The Education of an Englishman" in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 138 (1926), p. 192.
1920s

Thinking

“I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, what is living. I seek harmony.”

Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003) German film director, photographer, actress and dancer

Beauty, Strong

“Gone is not forgotten, but our lives cannot be a memorial. This city cannot be a memorial. This city has to be a city. Our lives have to be our lives.”

David Levithan book Love Is the Higher Law

Source: Love Is the Higher Law

Memory

“I tried to pick Nykyrian’s pocket last year. (Jana)
And you let him live? (Kiara)
I have an age requirement before I kill someone. (Nykyrian)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Born of the Night

Age

“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”

Maya Angelou book All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes

Source: All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes

Home, Question

“Love can really screw you up before you learn to live with it.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Bride Quartet Boxed Set

Love, Learning

“From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Life, Pain, Way, Birth

“And I was struck all at once how life was out there going through its regular courses, and I was suspended, waiting, caught in a terrible crevice between living my life and not living it.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees (2002)

Life, Waiting

“Safety is a fence, and fences are for sheep. I would rather die at twenty-two, knowing the truth, then live in a cage of lies for a hundred years.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Shadowfever

Truth

“Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.”

Dean Wesley Smith (1950) science fiction author

“I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Courage

“Jesus is the starving, the parched, the prisoner, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the dying. Jesus is the oppressed, the poor. To live with Jesus is to live with the poor. To live with the poor is to live with Jesus.”

Jean Vanier (1928–2019) Canadian humanitarian

Source: Community And Growth

“What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Truth, Lying

“We are all the fools of time and terror: Days
Steal on us and steal from us; yet we live,
Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Life, Fools, Time

“I live, which is the main point.”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

“So I buy it. The most perfect little cardigan in the world. People will call me the Girl in the Gray Cardigan. I’ll be able to live in it. Really, it’s an investment.”

Sophie Kinsella book The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic

Source: Confessions of a Shopaholic

People, World, Girl, Perfection

“You are the answer to every prayer I've offered. You are a song, a dream, a whisper, and I don't know how I could have lived without you for as long as I have. I love you, Aliie, more than you can ever imagine. I always have, and I always will.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

Love, Dreams, Imagination

“I have no regrets. I wouldn't have lived my life the way I did if I was going to worry about what people were going to say.”

Ingrid Bergman (1915–1982) Film actress from Sweden

"An Uncommon Scold," by Abby Adams, 1989.

Life, People, Way

“Do you know the kind of things that live up there?… things without names 'cause no one who's seen 'em has lived long enough to give them any name besides 'AAAARG!”

Mercedes Lackey (1950) American novelist and short story writer

Source: The Oathbound

“Every day brings a chance to live free of regret and with as much joy, fun, and laughter as you can stand.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

Laughter, Chance, Joy

“A disciple… can never imitate his guide's steps. You have your own way of living your life, of dealing with problems, and of winning. Teaching is only demonstrating that it is possible. Learning is making it possible for yourself.”

Paulo Coelho book The Pilgrimage

Source: The Pilgrimage

Life, Way, Problem, Learning

“And you’ll return to real life. You need to live it to the fullest. No matter how shallow and dull things might get, this life is worth living. I guarantee it.”

Haruki Murakami book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Source: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Life

“Life can seem short or life can seem long, depending on how you live it.”

Paulo Coelho book The Devil and Miss Prym

Source: The Devil and Miss Prym

Life, Dependency

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live”

John Woods (1955) Irish long-distance runner

Guy

“You don't know me, but I know about you… I can't make you live longer. I can't stop you from hurting. But I can give you one wish, as someone did for me.”

Lurlene McDaniel (1944) American writer

Source: Sixteen and Dying

Hurt

“And die of nothing but a rage to live”

Alexander Pope Moral Essays

Variant: You purchase pain with all that joy can give and die of nothing but a rage to live.
Source: Moral Essays

Rage

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Source: Night (1960)

Life, God, Children, Faith

“Genius or fool, you don't live in the world alone. You can hide underground or you can build a wall around yourself, but somebody's going to come along and screw up the works.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985)

World, Fools

“It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is chooserules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.”

Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) American historian, writer, and environmentalist

Source: All the Little Live Things

Wisdom

“Socrates and Jesus, two teachers of virtue and love, were executed because of the unsettling, threatening power of their souls, which was revealed in their personal lives and in their words.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

Source: Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life

Love, Soul, Teachers, Personality

“Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own;
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Book III, Ode 29, lines 65–68.
Imitation of Horace (1685)

Happiness

“You aren't a hero and I'm not beautiful and we probably won't live happily ever after " she said. "But we're alive and together and we're going to be all right.”

Philip Reeve Mortal Engines

Source: Mortal Engines

Beauty

“I'm too much of a coward to kill myself. And too much of a coward to live”

Jodi Picoult book The Pact

Source: The Pact

“They don't realize evil lives on their streets”

Lisa Scottoline (1955) American writer

Source: Every Fifteen Minutes

Evil

“These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

People, Way, Reading

“How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?”

Carson McCullers book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Soul, Dead

“I live my life free of compromise, and step into the shadows without complaint or regret.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

Life

“In relationship there are always two types of person: one weaker and the other stronger one. It's never easier to live being as weaker one!”

Chetan Bhagat (1974) Indian author, born 1974

Source: Revolution 2020: Love, Corruption, Ambition

Personality

“Don’t lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want to be someone’s little home.”

Jeanette Winterson book Gut Symmetries

Source: Gut Symmetries

People, Lie, Home

“I'm feeling generous today. You get to live.”

Frank Beddor American skier and writer

Feeling

“A woman who is convinced that she deserves to accept only the best challenges herself to give the best. Then she is living phenomenally.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

“It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it.”

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) American folklorist, novelist, short story writer

Coffee

“I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

Life, Courage, Courageous

“Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten.”

Rob Sheffield (1966) American music journalist

Source: Love Is a Mix Tape

“You'd be surprised how many people violate this simple principle every day of their lives and try to fit square pegs into round holes, ignoring the clear reality that Things Are As They Are.”

Benjamin Hoff book The Tao of Pooh

Source: The Tao of Pooh

People, Reality

“Here she comes, running, out of prison and off the pedestal: chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) American feminist, writer, commercial artist, lecturer and social reformer

“There's nothing quite as good as folding up into a book and shutting the world outside. If I pick the right one I can be beautiful, or fall in love, or live happily ever after. Maybe even all three.”

Bill Condon (1955) American film director

Love, Books, World, Beauty

“We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.”

Ira Glass (1959) American radio personality

Pleasure, World, Joy

“Time talks behind our back. To our face it's friendly and logical, never hesitating to give more of itself. But when we're not looking, it steals our lives and says bad things about us to the parts of us it's stolen”

Jonathan Carroll book A Child Across the Sky

Source: A Child Across the Sky

Time, Parting

“Ah, that we lack the courage of our romantic convictions; and thereby miss the wine of life, forgoing the very thing that makes living worthwhile.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Life, Courage, Wine

“I'm looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can't-live-without-each-other love.”

Candace Bushnell book Summer and the City

Source: Summer and the City

Love

“A man who trusts everyone is a fool, and a man who trusts no one is a fool. We are all fools, if we live long enough.”

Robert Jordan Winter's Heart

Lews Therin Telamon
(9 November 2000)
Source: Winter's Heart

Fools

Quotes about living page 36

Quotes about living
page 36