Quotes about living
page 58

François Lelord photo
John Keats photo
Alan Lightman photo
Ned Vizzini photo

“I want to live but I want to die. What do I do?”

Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story

Paulo Coelho photo

“Seek to live. Remembrance is for the old.”

By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994)
Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Axel Munthe photo
Rick Riordan photo
David Levithan photo

“Honestly, I'm just trying to live day to day”

Source: Every Day

Raymond Carver photo

“there isn't enough of anything
as long as we live. But at intervals
a sweetness appears and, given a chance
prevails.”

Raymond Carver (1938–1988) American short story author and poet

Source: Ultramarine: Poems

Haruki Murakami photo

“I don’t know what it means to live.”

Source: Kafka on the Shore

Julian Barnes photo

“We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.”

Julian Barnes (1946) English writer

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of

Nicholas Sparks photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
David Sedaris photo
Augusten Burroughs photo

“And I hope she does not live in a dark world. Because even the most terrible loss doesn't have to make you darker; it can make you deeper.”

Augusten Burroughs (1965) American writer

Source: This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

Anaïs Nin photo
Leo Rosten photo

“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.”

Leo Rosten (1908–1997) American writer

"The Myths by Which We Live", in The Rotarian, Vol. 107, No. 3 (September 1965), p. 55
Variant: The purpose of life is not to be happy at all. It is to be useful, to be honorable. It is to be compassionate. It is to matter, to have it make some difference that you lived.

Dennis Lehane photo
Plutarch photo
Don Marquis photo
David Mamet photo
Ayn Rand photo
Paramahansa Yogananda photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Garrison Keillor photo
Groucho Marx photo
Dorothy Parker photo

“Living well is the best revenge.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist
Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
Carl Sagan photo

“We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. That's a clear prescription for disaster.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Bringing Science Down to Earth (1994), co-authored with Anne Kalosh, in Hemispheres (October 1994), p. 99 http://books.google.com/books?id=gJ1rDj2nR3EC&lpg=PA99&pg=PA99; this is similar to statements either mentioned in earlier interviews or published later in the book The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)
Variants:
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
"Why We Need To Understand Science" in The Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 14, Issue 3 (Spring 1990) http://www.csicop.org/si/show/why_we_need_to_understand_science
Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world.
"With Science on Our Side" https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1994/01/09/with-science-on-our-side/9e5d2141-9d53-4b4b-aa0f-7a6a0faff845/, Washington Post (9 January 1994)
We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it?
Charlie Rose: An Interview with Carl Sagan http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/4553, May 27, 1996.
I know that science and technology are not just cornucopias pouring good deeds out into the world. Scientists not only conceived nuclear weapons; they also took political leaders by the lapels, arguing that their nation — whichever it happened to be — had to have one first. … There’s a reason people are nervous about science and technology.
And so the image of the mad scientist haunts our world—from Dr. Faust to Dr. Frankenstein to Dr. Strangelove to the white-coated loonies of Saturday morning children’s television. (All this doesn’t inspire budding scientists.) But there’s no way back. We can’t just conclude that science puts too much power into the hands of morally feeble technologists or corrupt, power-crazed politicians and decide to get rid of it. Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history. Advances in transportation, communication, and entertainment have transformed the world. The sword of science is double-edged. Rather, its awesome power forces on all of us, including politicians, a new responsibility — more attention to the long-term consequences of technology, a global and transgenerational perspective, an incentive to avoid easy appeals to nationalism and chauvinism. Mistakes are becoming too expensive.
"Why We Need To Understand Science" in The Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 14, Issue 3 (Spring 1990)
Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything — new ideas and established wisdom. We need wide appreciation of this kind of thinking. It works. It’s an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change. Our task is not just to train more scientists but also to deepen public understanding of science.
"Why We Need To Understand Science" in The Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 14, Issue 3 (Spring 1990)
Science is [...] a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.
Charlie Rose: An Interview with Carl Sagan http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/4553 (27 May 1996)

Thich Nhat Hanh photo
Victor Borge photo
Jim Henson photo

“As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us that world of make-believe continues into adulthood.”

Jim Henson (1936–1990) American puppeteer

It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider https://books.google.com/books?id=IiKY1H0A_QEC&pg=PT102 (Hyperion, 2005).
Cf. Wisdom from It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider https://books.google.com/books?id=EEiqMIgAl3UC&pg=PA49 (White Plains, N. Y.: Peter Pauper Press, Inc., 2007), p. 49.

Sean O`Casey photo
Agatha Christie photo
Albert Einstein photo

“If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination … no more men!”

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

A variant — "Professor Einstein, the learned scientist, once calculated that if all bees disappeared off the earth, four years later all humans would also have disappeared" — appears in The Irish Beekeeper, v.19-20, 1965-66, p74, citing Abeilles et Fleurs (Bees and Flowers, the house magazine of Union Nationale de l'Apiculture Française) for June 1965. Snopes.com mentions its use in a beekeepers' protest in 1994 in Europe http://www.snopes.com/quotes/einstein/bees.asp suggesting invention and attribution to Einstein for political reasons.
Misattributed

Brandon Sanderson photo
William James photo
Franz Kafka photo

“Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.”

Source: The Trial (1920), Ch. 10
Context: Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live. Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the men closed round his throat, just as the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it twice.

Norman Vincent Peale photo
Rick Riordan photo
Alice Hoffman photo

“The best way to die is when your living”

Alice Hoffman (1952) Novelist, young-adult writer, children's writer
Mercedes Lackey photo
Giacomo Casanova photo

“There is no such thing as destiny. We ourselves shape our lives.”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice
Charles Bukowski photo
Stephen King photo
Matthew Arnold photo

“We mortal millions live alone.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools
Marjane Satrapi photo

“I was a westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identity. I didn't even know anymore why I was living.”

Marjane Satrapi (1969) Artist

Source: Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

Paulo Coelho photo
Walter Mosley photo

“We born dyin'… But you ask a man an' he talk like he gonna live forevah.”

Walter Mosley (1952) American writer

Source: The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

Yasmina Khadra photo
Robert Frost photo
Andrew Carnegie photo
Frederick Buechner photo
Michel De Montaigne photo
Evelyn Waugh photo
Elizabeth Taylor photo

“You might as well live”

Elizabeth Taylor (1932–2011) British-American actress
Rob Sheffield photo
Julian of Norwich photo
Cheryl Strayed photo
Sylvia Plath photo

“So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Evelyn Waugh photo
Christopher Hitchens photo

“We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

Christopher Hitchens photo
Bram Stoker photo
Suzanne Collins photo
Charles Bukowski photo
Vince Flynn photo

“If you're not busy living, you're dying.”

Vince Flynn (1966–2013) American writer of fiction

Source: American Assassin

Stephen King photo
Robin Hobb photo

“But a living is not a life.”

Source: Assassin's Quest

Robert F. Kennedy photo

“Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

"Conflict in Vietnam and at Home" speech http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rfk/filmmore/ps_ksu.html at Kansas State University on March 18, 1968 as part of the Alfred M. Landon Lectures on Public Issues.

Joseph Campbell photo
Lois McMaster Bujold photo
Molière photo

“One must eat to live, and not live to eat.”

Il faut manger pour vivre, et non pas vivre pour manger.
L'Avare (1668), Act III, sc. i.
Firstly, an inaccurate sourcing: in Act III, yes—but in Scene I, no: rather, in Scene V—HARPAGON, VALÈRE, MASTER JACQUES (see, e.g., the Project Gutenberg HTML version of the English translation: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6923/6923-h/6923-h.htm). Secondly, a misattribution made clear by the Molière text—the character in the play, VAL, obviously points out that the quote refers to a "saying of one of the ancients" (and the quote is precisely written in quotation marks as well), in the full line of dialogue below:
Know, Master Jacques, you and people like you, that a table overloaded with eatables is a real cut-throat; that, to be the true friends of those we invite, frugality should reign throughout the repast we give, and that according to the saying of one of the ancients, "We must eat to live, and not live to eat."
The "ancients" to which VAL/Molière refers is Cicero, Diogenes Laertius, and the oldest known attribution, Socrates (whom Laertius explicitly attributes—and Cicero presumably invokes). Various books of quotations document this—e.g., Elizabeth Knowles' 2006 The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (http://books.google.com/books?id=r2KIvsLi-2kC&dq=%22one+must+eat+to+live+not+live+to+eat%22&source=gbs_navlinks_s) and Jennifer Speake's 1982 A Dictionary of Proverbs (http://books.google.com/books?id=-IpkOkM3IfEC&dq=%22one+must+eat+to+live+not+live+to+eat%22&source=gbs_navlinks_s): the former lists the quote as "a proverbial saying, late 14th century, distinguishing between necessity and indulgence; Diogenes Laertius says of Socrates, 'he said that other men live to eat, but eats to live.' A similar idea is found in the Latin of Cicero, 'one must eat to live, not live to eat'"; the latter, reiterates this. Moreover, in William Shepard Walsh's 1909 Handy-book of Literary Curiosities, he adds that "According to Plutarch, what Socrates said was, 'Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.'" He also adds that Atheneus quotes similarly to Laertius, as well as explores other later variations (http://books.google.com/books?id=hrJkAAAAMAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s).
Misattributed

Alice Waters photo
Nicole Krauss photo
James Joyce photo

“Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

Letter to Fanny Guillermet (Zurich, 5 September 1918)

Khaled Hosseini photo

“The problem, of course, was that [he] saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can't love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.”

Source: The Kite Runner (2003)
Context: With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world around him to his liking. The problem, of course, was that Baba saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can't love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.

Confucius photo

“The wise find pleasure in water; the virtuous find pleasure in hills. The wise are active; the virtuous are tranquil. The wise are joyful; the virtuous are long-lived.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Analects, Chapter VI

Haruki Murakami photo
Milan Kundera photo
William James photo
David Sedaris photo