Quotes about living
page 78

Pat Condell photo
William Somervile photo

“He taught them how to live and how to die.”

William Somervile (1675–1742) English poet

In Memory of the Rev. Mr. Moore, line 21.

Lawrence M. Schoen photo

“She hated politics and she had no patience for the ultra-serious, wide-eyed dreamers who wanted to change your world whether you wanted to live with those changes or not.”

Lawrence M. Schoen (1959) American writer and klingonist

Source: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard (2015), Chapter 4, “Solutions in Memory” (p. 53)

H.L. Mencken photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford photo
Franklin D. Roosevelt photo
Khalil Gibran photo
Paul Simonon photo
Alistair Cooke photo

“(The Negro) is a permanent invalid in American society. And the places he lives, whether in the town or the country, are its casualty wards.”

Alistair Cooke (1908–2004) British journalist and broadcaster

Source: Alistair Cooke's America (1973), p. 146.

Phil Hartman photo

“Troy: Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such other medical films as "Mommy, What's On That Man's Face?" and "Alice Doesn't Live Anymore".”

Phil Hartman (1948–1998) Canadian American actor, comedian, screenwriter, and graphic artist

On the Simpsons, Troy McClure

Jane Roberts photo
George W. Bush photo
Julian of Norwich photo
Charles Taze Russell photo
Lewis Mumford photo
Diogenes Laërtius photo

“He used to say that other men lived to eat, but that he ate to live.”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Socrates, 16.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 2: Socrates, his predecessors and followers

Fyodor Dostoyevsky photo

“If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author

Book II, ch. 6 (trans. Constance Garnett)
Pyotr Miusov, summarizing an argument made by Ivan at a social gathering
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)

Quentin Crisp photo
Parker Palmer photo
Conor Oberst photo
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky photo

“"There is often greater martyrdom to live for the love of, whether man or an ideal, than to die" is a motto of the Mahatmas.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) occult writer

Collected Writings, vol. IV, p. 603 (October 1889) http://www.katinkahesselink.net/blavatsky/articles/v4/y1883_092.htm

Herbert Marcuse photo

“Who is, in the classical conception, the subject that comprehends the ontological condition of truth and untruth? It is the master of pure contemplation (theoria), and the master of a practice guided by theoria, i. e., the philosopher-statesman. To be sure, the truth which he knows and expounds is potentially accessible to everyone. Led by the philosopher, the slave in Plato’s Meno is capable of grasping the truth of a geometrical axiom, i. e., a truth beyond change and corruption. But since truth is a state of Being as well as of thought, and since the latter is the expression and manifestation of the former, access to truth remains mere potentiality as long as it is not living in and with the truth. And this mode of existence is closed to the slave — and to anyone who has to spend his life procuring the necessities of life. Consequently, if men no longer had to spend their lives in the realm of necessity, truth and a true human existence would be in a strict and real sense universal. Philosophy envisages the equality of man but, at the same time, it submits to the factual denial of equality. For in the given reality, procurement of the necessities is the life-long job of the majority, and the necessities have to be procured and served so that truth (which is freedom from material necessities) can be. Here, the historical barrier arrests and distorts the quest for truth; the societal division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition. If truth presupposes freedom from toil, and if this freedom is, in the social reality, the prerogative of a minority, then the reality allows such a truth only in approximation and for a privileged group. This state of affairs contradicts the universal character of truth, which defines and “prescribes” not only a theoretical goal, but the best life of man qua man, with respect to the essence of man. For philosophy, the contradiction is insoluble, or else it does not appear as a contradiction because it is the structure of the slave or serf society which this philosophy does not transcend. Thus it leaves history behind, unmastered, and elevates truth safely above the historical reality. There, truth is reserved intact, not as an achievement of heaven or in heaven, but as an achievement of thought — intact because its very notion expresses the insight that those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.”

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 128-130

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Subramanian Swamy photo

“I feel that only those who have been oppressed by the society and have been forced to live a backward life should given reservations. If Muslims want to study, then should be given scholarships, good schools, But Muslims and Christians can't have reservation as they have ruled our country.”

Subramanian Swamy (1939) Indian politician

On giving reservations to Muslims and Christians, as quoted in "Muslims and Christians shouldn't ask for reservation, says Subramanian Swamy" http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-muslims-and-christians-shouldn-t-ask-for-reservation-says-subramanian-swamy-1995886, DNA India (16 June 2014)
2011-2014

“You were put on this earth to achieve your greatest self, to live out your purpose, and to do it fearlessly.”

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 36

Gordon B. Hinckley photo
Wilhelm Frick photo

“Long live eternal Germany!”

Wilhelm Frick (1877–1946) German Nazi official

Last words, 10/16/46, quoted in "The Mammoth Book of Eyewitness World War II" - Page 565 - by Jon E. Lewis - History - 2002

Bob Dylan photo

“People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around — the music and the ideas.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

The Guardian (13 February 1992)

Robert F. Kennedy photo
Jim Steinman photo
Auguste Rodin photo

“Then I gathered the éléments of what people call my symbolism. I do not understand anything about long words and theories. But I am willing to be a symbolist, if that defines the ideas that Michael Angelo gave me, namely that the essence of sculpture is the modelling, the general scheme which alone enables us to render the intensity, the supple variety of movement and character. If we can imagine the thought of God in creating the world, He thought first of the construction, which is the sole principle of nature, of living things and perhaps of the planets. Michael Angelo seems to me rather to derive from Donatello than from the ancients; Raphaël proceeds from them. He understood that an architecture can be built up with the human body, and that, in order to possess volume and harmony, a statue or a group ought to be contained in a cube, a pyramid or some simple figure. Let us look at a Dutch interior and at an interior painted by an artist of the present day. The latter no longer touches us, because it docs not possess the qualities of depth and volume, the science of distances. The artist who paints it does not know how to reproduce a cube. An interior by Van der Meer is a cubic painting. The atmosphere is in it and the exact volume of the objects; the place of these objects has been respected, the modem painter places them, arranges them as models. The Dutchmen did not touch them, but set themselves to render the distances that separated them, that is, the depth. And then, if I go so far as to say that cubic truth, not appearance, is the mistress of things, if I add that the sight of the plains and woods and country views gives me the principle of the plans that I employ on my statues, that I feel cubic truth everywhere, and that plan and volume appear to me as laws of all life and ail beauty, will it be said that I am a symbolist, that I generalise, that I am a metaphysician? It seems to me that I have remained a sculptor and a realist. Unity oppresses and haunts me.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 65-67

Thomas Gray photo

“Hands, that the rod of empire might have swayed,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

St. 12
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc (written 1750, publ. 1751)

Joseph Joubert photo
John Herschel photo
Václav Havel photo
George Eliot photo
Alain de Botton photo
Ba Jin photo
Allen C. Guelzo photo
Michael Hudson (economist) photo
James Russell Lowell photo

“For a cap and bells our lives we pay,
Bubbles we earn with a whole soul's tasking:
'Tis heaven alone that is given away,
'Tis only God may be had for the asking.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Prelude to Pt. I, st. 4
The Vision of Sir Launfal (1848)

“Europeans have just been better organized for genocide… Far from enjoying the prospect of taking over Europe by having babies, Europe’s Muslims are living on borrowed time…”

Ralph Peters (1952) American military officer, writer, pundit

Source: 2000s, Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the Twenty-First Century (2007), p. 334

Thomas Fuller (writer) photo
Claude Lévi-Strauss photo
Bell Hooks photo
Margaret Thatcher photo

“My policies are based not on some economics theory, but on things I and millions like me were brought up with: an honest day's work for an honest day's pay; live within your means; put by a nest egg for a rainy day; pay your bills on time; support the police.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

The News of the World (20 September 1981), quoted in Chris Ogden, Maggie: An Intimate Portrait of a Woman in Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 342.
First term as Prime Minister

Thomas Little Heath photo
Hildegard of Bingen photo
Russell L. Ackoff photo

“The higher standard of living, the more consideration we give to the fun we derive from what we do and its meaningfulness.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Ackoff (1994, p. 71) cited in: James P. Lewis (2002) Working Together: 12 Principles for Achieving Excellence. p. 35.
1990s

Syama Prasad Mookerjee photo
Philip K. Dick photo
Lars Løkke Rasmussen photo
John Ruysbroeck photo

“And there you In a new embrace, with a new torrent of eternal love: all the elect, angels and men, from the last to the first are embraced It is a living and fruitful unity, which is the source and the fount of all life All creatures are there without themselves as in their eternal origin, One essence and one life with God These enlightened people are lifted up with free mind above reason…To the summit of their spirit Their naked understanding is penetrated with eternal clarity as the air is penetrated by the light of the sun. The bare elevated will is transformed and penetrated with fathomless love, just as iron is penetrated by the fire [God] gives Himself in the soul’s essence…Where the soul’s powers are unified…And undergo God’s transformation in simplicity. In this place all is full and overflowing, for the spirit feels itself as one truth and one richness. And one unity with God All spirits thus raised up Melt away and are annihilated by reason of enjoyment in God’s essence They fall away from themselves and are lost in a bottomless unknowingWith God they will ebb and flow, and will always be in repose…They are drunk with love and have passed away into God in a dark luminosity must accept that the Persons yield and lose themselves whirling in essential love, that is, in enjoyable unity; nevertheless, they always remain according to their personal properties In the working of the Trinity. You may thus understand that the divine nature is eternally at rest and without mode according to the simplicity of its essence. It is why all that God has chosen and enfolded with eternal personal love, he has possessed essentially, enjoyably in unity, with essential love.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Little Book of Enlightenment (c. 1364)

“Like Kant before him, Darwin insists that the source of all error is semblance. Analogy, he says again and again, is always a ‘deceitful guide’ (see pp. 61, 66, 473). As against analogy, or as I would say merely metaphorical characterizations of the facts, Darwin wishes to make a case for the existence of real ‘affinities’ genealogically construed. The establishment of these affinities will permit him to postulate the linkage of all living things to all others by the ‘laws’ or ‘principles’ of genealogical descent, variation, and natural selection. These laws and principles are the formal elements in his mechanistic explanation of why creatures are arranged in families in a time series. But this explanation could not be offered as long as the data remained encoded in the linguistic modes of either metaphor or synecdoche, the modes of qualitative connection. As long as creatures are classified in terms of either semblance or essential unity, the realm of organic things must remain either a chaos of arbitrarily affirmed connectedness or a hierarchy of higher and lower forms. Science as Darwin understood it, however, cannot deal in the categories of the ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ any more than it can deal in the categories of the ‘normal’ and ‘monstrous.’ Everything must be entertained as what it manifestly seems to be. Nothing can be regarded as ‘surprising,’ any more than anything can be regarded as ‘miraculous.”

Hayden White (1928–2018) American historian

"The fictions of factual representation"

Alexander Maclaren photo
Luís de Camões photo

“Ah, Dinamene,
Thou hast forsaken him
Whose love for thee has never ceased,
And no more will he behold thee on this earth!
How early didst thou deem life of little worth!
I found thee
— Alas, to lose thee all too soon!
How strong, how cruel the waves!
Thou canst not ever know
My longing and my grief!
Did cold death still thy voice
Or didst thou of thyself
Draw the sable veil before thy lovely face?
O sea, O sky, O fate obscure!
To live without thee, Dinamene, avails me not.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

<p>Ah! minha Dinamene! Assim deixaste
Quem não deixara nunca de querer-te!
Ah! Ninfa minha, já não posso ver-te,
Tão asinha esta vida desprezaste!</p><p>Como já pera sempre te apartaste
De quem tão longe estava de perder-te?
Puderam estas ondas defender-te
Que não visses quem tanto magoaste?</p><p>Nem falar-te somente a dura Morte
Me deixou, que tão cedo o negro manto
Em teus olhos deitado consentiste!</p><p>Oh mar! oh céu! oh minha escura sorte!
Que pena sentirei que valha tanto,
Que inda tenha por pouco viver triste?</p>
Lyric poetry, Não pode tirar-me as esperanças, Ah! minha Dinamene! Assim deixaste

Revilo P. Oliver photo
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan photo

“The challenge of Christian critics impelled me to make a study of Hinduism and find out what is living and what is dead in it. My pride as a Hindu, roused by the enterprise and eloquence of Swami Vivekananda, was deeply hurt by the treatment accorded to Hinduism in missionary institutions.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Source: Donald Mackenzie Brown The Nationalist Movement: Indian Political Thought from Ranade to Bhave http://books.google.co.in/books?id=WgwpwG_XspsC&pg=PA153, University of California Press, 1970, p.153.

Martha Stewart photo

“Stewart: Well, that's great because we're all trying to do the same thing. Live well.”

Martha Stewart (1941) American businesswoman, writer, television personality, and former fashion model

On Charlie Rose, 15 September 1995

Jordan Peterson photo
Clive Staples Lewis photo
Tom Robbins photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Louis Auguste Blanqui photo

“I am accused of having told thirty million French people, proletarians like me, that they had the right to live.”

Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) French socialist and political activist

"Auguste Blanqui’s Defence Speech at the ‘Trial of the Fifteen’" (12 January 1832)

Chris Cornell photo
Fethullah Gülen photo

“The Qur’an declares that one who takes a life unjustly has, in effect, taken the lives of humanity as a whole, and that one who saves a life has, in effect, saved the lives of humanity as a whole.”

Fethullah Gülen (1941) Turkish preacher, former imam, writer, and political figure

"Gülen’s Condemnation Message of Terrorism", 2001

Richard Dawkins photo
Thomas Wolfe photo
James Comey photo

“One reason we cannot forget our law enforcement legacy is that the people we serve and protect cannot forget it, either. So we must talk about our history. It is a hard truth that lives on.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Syama Prasad Mookerjee photo
Leigh Brackett photo
Charles Symmons photo

“Yet have I lived!—and lived for noble ends!
My shade in glory to the shades descends.”

Charles Symmons (1749–1826) Welsh poet

Book IV, lines 878–879
The Æneis (1817)

John Wesley photo

“Lord, let me not live to be useless!”

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Journal (22 December 1763)
General sources

Andy Warhol photo
Fritz Leiber photo
Jean Paul Sartre photo
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson photo
John Hagee photo

“God says in Jeremiah 16 — "Behold I will bring them the Jewish people again unto their land that I gave unto their fathers" — that would be Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - "Behold I will send for many fishers and after will I send for many hunters. And they the hunters shall hunt them" — that will be the Jews — "from every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks." If that doesn't describe what Hitler did in the Holocaust — you can't see that. So think about this — I will send fishers and I will send hunters. A fisher is someone who entices you with a bait. How many of you know who Theodore Herzl was? How many of you don't have a clue who he was? Woo, sweet God! Theodore Herzl is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew that at the turn of the 19th century said, "this land is our land, God wants us to live there". So he went to the Jews of Europe and said, "I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel". So few went, Herzl went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the Holocaust. Then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says — Jeremiah righty? — "they shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and out of the holes of the rocks", meaning: there's no place to hide. And that will be offensive to some people. Well, dear heart, be offended: I didn't write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, "my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel". Today Israel is back in the land and they are at Ezekiel 37 and 8. They are physically alive but they're not spiritually alive. Now how is God going to cause the Jewish people to come spiritually alive and say, "the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, He is God"?”

John Hagee (1940) American pastor, theologian and saxophonist

late 2005 sermon at Cornerstone Church, quoted in

Jared Diamond photo
Amanda Palmer photo

“I'm not gonna live my life on one side of an ampersand.”

Amanda Palmer (1976) American punk-cabaret musician

"Ampersand" Live (2006)
Lyrics

Dashiell Hammett photo

“"Remember, I've got no idea what this is all about," said the girl when they were in the living room, a narrow room, where blue fought with red without ever compromising on purple.”

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) American writer

"The Assistant Murderer" (published in Black Mask, February 1926)
Short Stories

Elon Musk photo

“Never saw this British expat guy who lives in Thailand (sus) at any point when we were in the caves. Only people in sight were the Thai navy/army guys, who were great. Thai navy seals escorted us in — total opposite of wanting us to leave. Water level was actually very low & still (not flowing) — you could literally have swum to Cave 5 with no gear, which is obv how the kids got in. If not true, then I challenge this dude to show final rescue video. You know what, don’t bother showing the video. We will make one of the mini-sub/pod going all the way to Cave 5 no problemo. Sorry pedo guy, you really did ask for it.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

Refering to British diver Vern Unsworth, who participated in the Tham Luang cave rescue. As quoted in Elon Musk calls British diver who helped rescue Thai schoolboys 'pedo guy' in Twitter outburst https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/thai-cave-rescue-elon-musk-british-diver-vern-unsworth-twitter-pedo-a8448366.html (15 July 2018) by Eleanor Busby, The Independent.

Thomas Wolfe photo
Margaret Cho photo

“How many Americans lives have been lost in this brutal and needless war? How many Iraqi? How many names do we know on either side?”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, WAR

“Fine Art then, records by idealised imitation the glorious works of good men, whilst it holds those of bad men up to our abhorrence — it gives to posterity their images, either on the tinted canvass or the sculptured marble — it imitates the beautiful effects of nature as seen in the glowing landscape or the rising storm, and perpetuates the appearance of those beauteous gems of the seasons — flowers and fruits, which, though fading whilst the painter catches their tints, yet live after decay by and through his genius.
Industrial Art, on the contrary, aims at the embellishment of the works of man, by and through that power which is given to the artist for the investigation of the beautiful in nature; and in transferring it to the loom, the printing machine, the potter's wheel, or the metal worker's mould, he reproduces nature in a new form, adapting it to his purpose by an intelligence arising out of his knowledge as an artist and as a workman. In short, the adaptation of the natural type to a new material compels him to reproduce, almost create, as well as imitate — invent as well as copy”

design as well as draw!
George Wallis. " Art Education for the people. No IV. The principles of Fine Art as Applied to Industrial Purposes http://books.google.com/books?id=l55GAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA231." In: People's & Howitt's Journal: Of Literature, Art, and Popular Progress, Vol. 3. John Saunders ed. 1847, p. 231.

Anatoly Kudryavitsky photo

“The knack of living —
how skilfully it kills!”

Anatoly Kudryavitsky (1954) a Russian/Irish novelist, poet, literary translator and magazine editor

Poems, Shadow of Time (2005)

Antonin Scalia photo

“I don't think it's a living document, I think it's dead. More precisely, I think it's enduring. It doesn't change. I think that needs to be orthodoxy.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Speech at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Virginia (April 2008). http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/04/no_to_cameras_yes_to_60_minute.html
2000s