Quotes about living
page 50

“It's better to die laughing than to live each moment in fear.”

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) American author, screenwriter, film producer

“If you live long enough, you'll make mistakes. But if you learn from them, you'll be a better person. It's how you handle adversity, not how it affects you. The main thing is never quit, never quit, never quit.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

Learning, Personality, Life

“We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.”

John Dewey book Experience and Education

Source: Experience and Education

Time, Future

“You don't even realize you're living in a before until you wake up one day and find yourself in an after.”

Robin Wasserman (1978) American writer of speculative fiction for young people

Source: The Book of Blood and Shadow

“I am yours," he whispered. "I live to hold you, Risa. I breathe to touch you.”

Lora Leigh (1965) American writer

“Live for each second without hesitation”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Motivational, Deep, Happy, Inspirational

“Character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

Disease, Change

“His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.”

Laura Hillenbrand book Seabiscuit: An American Legend

Source: Seabiscuit: An American Legend

Men, Books, Way

“He was a man without a past, whose future was the imminent grave and whose present was a bitter fever of living.”

Jack London Martin Eden

Source: Martin Eden

Past, Future

“There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives…”

Salman Rushdie book Midnight's Children

Source: Midnight's Children

War

“I live lies because I cannot endure the weakness of anger, and I cannot admit the irrationality of love.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Source: Blood And Gold

Love, Anger

“If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

People, Hope

“The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.”

Barbara Taylor Bradford (1933) British author

Source: Unexpected Blessings

Past, Future, Help

“A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?”

Alexander McCall Smith In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

Source: In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

Life, People, Animals, Dead

“I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Source: Wuthering Heights

Life, Soul

“The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children.”

Bret Easton Ellis book Less Than Zero

Source: Less Than Zero

Children, People, Parent, Madness

“The greatest honor we can give Almighty God is to live gladly because of the knowledge of his love.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

Love, God, Knowledge

“This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view.”

William James Is Life Worth Living?

"Is Life Worth Living?"
1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

Life

“We all live in a kind of continuous dream,” I told him. “When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality.”

Jeff VanderMeer book Annihilation

Source: Annihilation

Dreams, Reality

“All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Way, Madness

“One has not lived until one has carried a sixty-pound dog down a sweeping flight of stairs at half-past V in the morning.”

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog

Dogs, Past

“We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.”

Georges Simenon (1903–1989) Belgian writer

“If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live. If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.”

Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist

Source: My Life on the Road

People, Hope, Change

“All of us are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

World

“Neglecting to broaden their view has kept some people doing one thing all their lives.”

Napoleon Hill (1883–1970) American author

Source: Think and Grow Rich: The Landmark Bestseller - Now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century

People

“There's no scarcity of opportunity to make a living at what you love. There is only a scarcity of resolve to make it happen.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

Love

“The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.”

Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) Russian and American poet and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate

“So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Life

“Things are so hard to figure out when you live from day to day in this feverish and silly world.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Source: On the Road: The Original Scroll

World

“I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk, or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what i want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God.”

Elizabeth Gilbert (1969) American writer

God, Pleasure, World, Learning

“Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.”

Guy Debord book The Society of the Spectacle

Source: The Society of the Spectacle

Children

“As a purely mathematical fact, people who sleep less live more.”

Amy Chua book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

Source: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

People, Mathematics, Sleep

“Living creatively is really important to maintain throughout your life. And living creatively doesn't mean only artistic creativity, although that's part of it. It means being yourself, not just complying with the wishes of other people.”

Matt Groening (1954) American cartoonist

Life, People, Parting

“She did not believe that things could remain the same in different places, and since the portion of her life that lay behind her had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.”

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

Source: Madame Bovary

Life

“Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

Universe

“Love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of yes live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds”

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

Love, World, Peace

“People--stupid when they lived; potentially stupid when they died.”

Rob Thurman (1950) American writer

Source: Roadkill

People, Stupidity

“Our lives are made up of thousands of everyday choices. Over the years these little choices will be bundled together and show clearly what we value.”

Boyd K. Packer (1924–2015) American Mormon leader

50 Years of Boyd K. Packer and Church History http://www.lds.org/church/news/50-years-of-boyd-k-packer-and-church-history Boyd K. Packer, 50 Years Church History, 30 September 2011

“As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.”

Iris Murdoch book Nuns and Soldiers

Source: Nuns and Soldiers

“My dad used to say that living with regrets was like driving a car that only moved in reverse.”

Jodi Picoult book House Rules

Source: House Rules

Cars

“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

"Poetry is Not a Luxury"
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

Dreams, Hope, Feeling, Spring

“The more we narrow the definition of beauty, the more beauty we shut out of our lives.”

Jim C. Hines (1974) American writer

Source: Codex Born

Beauty

“I start to think there really is no cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isn't one I'll have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if it's worth it.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

Happiness, Thinking, Fight

“Frightened people live in their own special hell. You could say they make it themselves, but they can't help it. It's the way they're built. They deserve sympathy and compassion.”

Stephen King book Revival

Source: Revival

People, Way, Hell, Help

“The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Suffering

“There is no difference in quality between a life lived forward and a life lived backwards, she thinks. She had come to love this backward life. It was, after all, the only life she had.”

Gabrielle Zevin book Elsewhere

Source: Elsewhere

Love, Life, Thinking

“Men are not dogs. We merely think we are and, on occasion, act as if we are. But, by believing in our nobler nature, women have the amazing power to inspire us to live up to it.”

Neil Strauss book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists

Source: The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (2005)

Women, Men, Dogs, Nature

“It's okay," said Adrian breezily. He rested his arm casually on the table. "I don't really need a job or extra money. After Rose and I get married, the kids and I'll just live off of her guardian paycheck.”

Richelle Mead book Spirit Bound

Source: Spirit Bound

Money

“And also… well… i told them I want to get an apartment with him next year rather than live in the dorms."
What'd they say?"
Over their dead bodies."
What did you say?"
I asked whether they wanted to be burie or cremated.”

Carolyn Mackler (1973) American writer

Dead

“Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.”

Daniel H. Pink book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Source: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

People, Business

“Sometimes it feels like we're all living in a Prozac nation. The United States of Depression.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

Feeling

“The only thing that makes life worth living is the possibility of experiencing now and then a perfect moment. And perhaps even more than that, it's having the ability to recall such moments in their totality, to contemplate them like jewels.”

Paul Bowles (1910–1999) American composer, writer, translator

Source: The Spider's House

Life, Perfection

“Determine to live life with flair and laughter.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Life, Laughter

“Sometimes I thought about nothing and sometimes I thought about my life. At least I made a living. What kind of living? A living. It wasn't easy. I found out how little is unbearable.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love

Life

“The hardest part of living is making peace with your past. Most of all, it’s making peace with yourself.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Retribution

Peace, Past, Parting

“May you get exactly what you want and live long enough to regret it.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Born of Shadows

“Rock 'n' roll is an attitude, it's not a musical form of a strict sort. It's a way of doing things, of approaching things. Writing can be rock 'n' roll, or a movie can be rock 'n' roll. It's a way of living your life.”

Lester Bangs (1948–1982) American music critic and journalist

Life, Music, Way

“I want life. I want to read it and write it and feel it and live it. I want, for as much of the time as possible in this blink-of-an-eye existence we have, to feel all that can be felt.”

Matt Haig book Reasons to Stay Alive

Source: Reasons to Stay Alive

Life, Feeling, Time, Reading

“It's not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives. It's what we do consistently.”

Anthony Robbins (1960) Author, actor, professional speaker

“In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.”

Elena Ferrante (1943) Italian writer

Source: The Story of the Lost Child

“Truly living required risk.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: Alice in Zombieland

“The horror of knowing someone and living with them and even thinking you're lucky and then wham and now you know that every person is really two people and how can you ever know what the other half is up to.”

Michelle Tea (1971) American writer

Source: The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America

People, Thinking, Personality

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”

Guy Debord (1931–1994) French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker and founding member of the Situationist International (SI)

Source: Society of the Spectacle (1967), Ch. 1, sct. 1.

Life

“… owning a dog always ended with this sadness because dogs just don't live as long as people do.”

John Grogan (1958) American journalist

Source: Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

People, Sadness, Dogs

“I was aware too how strange adults were, how theirs lives were vaster than they wanted anyone to realize, that they actually stretched on and on like deserts, dry and desolate, with an unpredictable, shifting sea of dunes.”

Marisha Pessl Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Source: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Sea

“The dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

Dead

“Lust is temporary, romance can be nice, but love is the most important thing of all. Because without Love, lust and romance will always be short-lived.”

Danielle Steel (1947) American author of romance novels

Love

“People don't want other people to get high, because if you get high, you might see the falsity of the fabric of the society we live in.”

Ken Kesey (1935–2001) novelist

People

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Attributed to Emerson in Life’s Instructions for Wisdom, Success, and Happiness (2000) by H. Jackson Brown Jr., as well as numerous on-line sources since, the article "The Purpose of Life Is Not To Be Happy But To Matter" at the Quote Investigator https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/29/purpose/ indicates that this quote is probably derived from various statements first made by Leo Rosten, including the following words delivered at the National Book Awards held in New York in 1962: "The purpose of life is not to be happy — but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all." <br class="br">Misattributed

Life, Happiness, Wise

“Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Beauty

“It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.”

John Fowles book The French Lieutenant's Woman

Source: The French Lieutenant's Woman

“After a certain age, you couldn't even say where you were from. You went someplace, and lived there. And then you went someplace else.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs

Age

“There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can't die soon enough. Time gets strange there from too much sky, too many miles from crack to crease in the flat surface of the land.”

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Source: Geek Love

Time, Parting, Flying

“The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

This Business of Living (1935-1950)
Source: Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950
Context: When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.

“Each day I live in a glass room
Unless I break it with the thrusting
Of my senses and pass through
The splintered walls to the great landscape.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

"Each Day I Live in a Glass Room," A Reverie of Bone and other Poems (1967)

Sense

“Whatever, crazy chick who maybe lives here and maybe also breaks into Michael's house when they're all gone. I'm out. Have a nice delusion. -Shayne”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Ghost Town

Housing

“Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Ethics of Ambiguity

Source: The Ethics of Ambiguity

Death, Time

“Every time I think that it’s not worth it – that the people in it deserve the misery of their lives – I come across someone who makes me rethink that.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Invincible

People, Thinking, Time

“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.”

Jack London book Call of the Wild

Source: The Call of the Wild

Life, Forgetting

“I have no place left to live but in my own heart.”

Anne Enright The Gathering

Source: The Gathering

Heart

“He was going to live in New York, and be known at every restaurant and café, wearing a dress suit from early evening to early morning, sleeping away the dull hours of the forenoon.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

Sleep

“He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Life, Way

“Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.”

Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) American writer and philosopher

People, Mountain

“By engaging in a delusive quest for happiness, we bring only suffering upon ourselves. In our frantic search for something to quench our thirst, we overlook the water all around us and drive ourselves into exile from our own lives.”

Sharon Salzberg (1952) American writer

Happiness, Search, Suffering, Water

“Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Speed

“You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

Truth, Bird

“You see, the mailman saw your husband during one of his walks."
"He's my fiancé," I told her. "We are living in sin."
Heather blinked, momentarily knocked off her stride, but recovered. "Oh, that's nice."
"It's very nice. I highly recommend it.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Shifts

“She is brave and strong and broken all at once. As she speaks it is as if her existence is no longer real to her in itself, more like a living epitaph to a life that was.”

Anna Funder (1966) Australian writer

Source: Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

Life, Strong

“Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.”

Henry James book The Ambassadors

Source: The Ambassadors

Motivational, Beauty, Faith

“It kind of makes me wish that the worst thing that will ever happen to me would just hurry up and happen already. That way I could live the rest of my life in bliss, if only because I know how much worse things could be.”

Megan McCafferty (1973) American novelist

Source: Sloppy Firsts

Life, Way

“You live your life as if it's real……. a thousand kisses deep”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

Life, Kiss

“I am obsessed with you, angel. Addicted to you. You're everything i've ever wanted or needed, everything i've dreamed of. You're everything. I live and breathe you. For you.”

Sylvia Day (1973) American writer

Variant: I'm obsessed with you, angel. Addicted to you. You're everything I've ever wanted or needed, everything I've ever dreamed of. You're everything. I live and breathe you. For you.
Source: Reflected in You

Dreams, Angels

“I know many lives worth living.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

“Even chance meetings are the result of karma… Things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there’s no such thing as coincidence.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

Life, Fate, Chance