Quotes about living
page 49

“That is the trick of good government. To make folk desire to live in such a way that there is no need for its intervention.”

Robin Hobb book Assassin's Apprentice

Source: Assassin's Apprentice

Way

“Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to throw away. Death stands at your elbow. Be good for something while you live and it is in your power.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

Death

“Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there's no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

Source: View With a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems

Love, People, Faith

“you shall above all things be glad and young
For if you're young, whatever life you wear

it will become you; and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become.”

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

Life

“You've got passion to kill but you need to find passion to live.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: Steelheart

Passion

“I think we ought to live happily ever after.”

Diana Wynne Jones book Howl's Moving Castle

Source: Howl's Moving Castle

Thinking

“If I wanted death, Edward would give it to me. Because we both understand that it isn't death that we fear. It's living.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Obsidian Butterfly

Source: Obsidian Butterfly

Death, Fear, Understanding

“Youthfulness is about how you live not when you were born.”

Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019) German fashion designer

Youth

“Any planet is 'Earth' to those that live on it.”

Isaac Asimov book Pebble in the Sky

Source: Pebble in the Sky

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) Czech author of Czech and French literature

Life, Perfection

“It does not matter how long you live, but how well you do it.”

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

“I never had intimate friends, and the few who came close are in New York. By which I mean they're dead, because that's where I suppose condemned souls go in order not to endure the truth of their past lives.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Source: Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Truth, Soul, Past, Dead

“(…)while it's true that the unexamined life is not worth living, it's also true that the unlived life isn't worth examining.”

Robert McKee (1941) American academic specialised in seminars for screenwriters

Source: Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

Life

“Those in whom the Spirit comes to live are God's new Temple. They are, individually and corporately, places where heaven and earth meet.”

N.T. Wright (1948) Anglican bishop

Source: Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

God

“You can't live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.”

Debbie Macomber (1948) American writer

Source: One Simple Act: Discovering the Power of Generosity

Perfection

“People can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them.”

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

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

People, Change

“Every man lives by exchanging.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

“The art of life is to live in the present moment and to make that moment as perfect as we can by the realization that we are the instruments and expression of God himself.”

Emmet Fox (1886–1951) American New Thought writer

Life, God, Art, Perfection

“As long as one suffers one lives.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 5, ch. 1
Source: The End of the Affair (1951)

Suffering

“I'm not better than anyone, and I'm not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what's right. I'm trying to convince them to live by their own.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Eating Animals

Source: Eating Animals (2009)
Context: People care about animals. I believe that. They just don't want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It's wrong. They're packed body to body, and can't escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It's wrong. They feel their slaughters. It's wrong, and people know it's wrong. They don't have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. I'm not better than anyone, and I'm not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what's right. I'm trying to convince them to live by their own.

People

“What's a mediator you ask? Oh, a person who acts as a liason between the living and the dead. Hey, wait a minute… what're you doing with that strait jacket?-Suze Simon's imagination”

Meg Cabot book Twilight

Source: Twilight

Imagination, Waiting, Personality, Dead

“i imagine that yes is the only living thing.”

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

Imagination

“Christianity is not about learning how to live within the lines; Christianity is about the joy of coloring.”

Mike Yaconelli (1942–2003) American theologian

Source: Dangerous Wonder

Color, Learning, Joy

“I want to live in a world where people are judged by who they are instead of what size they wear.”

Jennifer Weiner book Good in Bed

Source: Good in Bed

People, World

“Walls, towns, rules, and day-to-day life doesn't make us civilized… That's organization and ritual. Civilization lives in our hearts and heads or it doesn't exist at all.”

Jonathan Maberry book Dust & Decay

Source: Dust & Decay

Life, Heart

“You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.”

Karen Blixen book Out of Africa

Source: Out of Africa

“Codependents are reactionaries. They overreact. They under-react. But rarely do they act. They react to the problems, pains, lives, and behaviors of others. They react to their own problems, pains, and behaviors.”

Melody Beattie (1948) American writer

Source: Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself

Pain, Behavior, Problem

“To travel is to live.”

Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) Danish author, fairy tale writer, and poet

The Fairy Tale of My Life
Fairy Tales (1835)
Source: The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography

Travel

“I don’t live in either my past or my future. I’m interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we’re living now.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

Life, Happiness, Past, Future

“The end of Religion is not to teach us how to die, but how to live….”

Anne Brontë book Agnes Grey

Source: Agnes Grey

Religion

“There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.”

Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) American speculative fiction writer

Source: The Great Book of Amber

Art

“I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.”

Thomas Hardy book Far from the Madding Crowd

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd

Way

“Kat laughed. 'Who wants to live forever?'
Kish put his hand up. 'For the record, I do.'
Sin scowled at him. 'Then why do you irritate me so often?'
Suicidal tendencies are inherent in my species?”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Devil May Cry

Suicide

“Live out of your imagination, not your history.”

Stephen R. Covey (1932–2012) American educator, author, businessman and motivational speaker

As quoted in Wake-up Calls : You Don't Have to Sleepwalk through your Life, Love, or Career! (1992) by Eric Allenbaugh, p. 65

Imagination, History, Motivational, Success

“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

People

“I’m living in separate universes, and I have no idea where I actually belong.”

Jonathan Tropper (1970) American writer

Source: This is Where I Leave You

Idea, Universe

“Are you telling me you think Ranger's a superhero?'
Think about it. We don't know where he lives. We don't know anything about him.'
Superheroes are make-believe.'
Oh yeah?' Lula said. 'What about God?”

Janet Evanovich Three to Get Deadly

Source: Three to Get Deadly

God, Thinking

“What they don't know is that I went over the edge years ago, and lived to tell the tale.”

Rebecca Wells book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Variant: I have been to the edge and lived to tell the tale..
Source: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

“Those of us with water in our personalities don't pick where we'll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Water, Personality

“Yeah, okay. But, Nico, youchoose how to live your life. You want to trust somebody? Maybe take a risk that I'm really your friend and I'll accept you. It's better than hiding.”

Rick Riordan book The House of Hades

Source: The House of Hades

Life

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

" The Round River: A Parable http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/AldoLeopold/AldoLeopold-idx?type=turn&entity=AldoLeopold.ALDeskFile.p0655&id=AldoLeopold.ALDeskFile&isize=XL" (c. 1940-48); Published in Round River, Luna B. Leopold (ed.), Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 165. <br class="br">1940s

World, Education, Penalty

“LIVE. If you live, god will live with you. If you refuse to run his risks, he'll retreat to that distant heaven and be merely a subject for philosophical speculation.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Veronika Decides to Die

God, Distant

“In spite of where we were, how we had gotten here and why we had come, I felt that at this moment of our lives, this place was exactly where we belonged. We were not drifting but rising, rising toward something right and of significance.”

Dean Koontz (1945) American author

“We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think that yours is the only path.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Pain, Feeling, Thinking, Personality