Quotes about living
page 85

Khalil Gibran photo
Arshile Gorky photo

“Movement is the translation of life, and if art depicts life, movement should come into art, since we are only aware of living because it moves.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

Source: posthumous, Astract Expressionist Painting in America, p. 64, in an unpublished letter of Gorky

Chuck Palahniuk photo
Elizabeth Cady Stanton photo

“All honor to the noble women that have devoted earnest lives to the intellectual needs of mankind!”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) Suffragist and Women's Rights activist

Susan B. Anthony (1884)

Erving Goffman photo
Sam Manekshaw photo
Colin Wilson photo
A.S. Neill photo
John Woolman photo
Deendayal Upadhyaya photo

“A monotonous life, lived without any purpose or direction, is not worth much. To achieve anything big in life, you should be prepared to risk your all and take a leap of faith for whatever they believed in.”

Deendayal Upadhyaya (1916–1968) RSS thinker and co-founder of the political party Bharatiya Jana Sangh

'Dao lagaao zindagi pe’ (put a stake on your life), Deendayalji’s article, quoted in L.K. Advani, My Country My Life (2008)

Samuel Butler photo
James Dickey photo

“Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.”

James Dickey (1923–1997) American writer

The Heaven of Animals (l. 1–6).
The Whole Motion; Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)

Stephen King photo
Dana Perino photo

“The telephone companies that were alleged to have helped their country after 9/11 did so because they are patriotic and they certainly helped us and they helped us save lives.”

Dana Perino (1972) Former White House Press Secretary

Press Briefing, referring to the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy, February 12, 2008 http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/02/on-cusp-of-sena/ http://mediamatters.org/blog/200802130006

Norman Thomas photo
Kevin Rudd photo
Thornton Wilder photo
Aldo Capitini photo
Jean Paul Sartre photo

“The live dead-man is dead as a producer and alive insofar as he consumes”

139
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Ogden Nash photo
Pope Benedict XVI photo
Narendra Modi photo
Anton Chekhov photo
Colin Wilson photo
Parker Palmer photo

“The attempt to live by the reality of our own nature, which means our limits as well as our potentials, is a profoundly moral regimen.”

Parker Palmer (1939) American theologian

Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999), p. 50

“Most people have music in the center of their lives. I believe my work sheds light on how music affects us and why it is so influential.”

Susan McClary (1946) American musicologist

from http://web.archive.org/20030225083736/www.ucla.edu/spotlight/archive/html_2001_2002/fac0502_mcclalry.html

Albert Camus photo

“Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me.”

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), An Absurd Reasoning

Elizabeth Bisland Whetmore photo

“It was well to have thus once really lived.”

Elizabeth Bisland Whetmore (1861–1929) American writer and journalist

Referenced in T he Public Domain Review http://publicdomainreview.org/2013/10/16/elizabeth-bislands-race-around-the-world/

“Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else.”

Book II, Chapter 1, p. 149
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

Aron Ra photo

“I was born in the richest, most technologically advanced (and consequently the most powerful) country in the world. We were the leaders in science, so of course we had a better economy, and we had a higher standard of living than anyone else at that time. The rest of the globe sent their best and brightest to enroll in our schools because our students were among the most inventive, innovative and involved. Some of the greatest American scientists were the immigrants who stayed and enabled the United States to achieve more than anyone else had in the history of mankind. That's when our secular government still cared about better education. Sadly, that is not the country I still live in. America was number one, but saying that now reminds me of Aesop's fable where the hare is still resting on its laurels long after the tortoise has passed. In the fifty years since I was born, America's rating in science has fallen from number one to number thirty-seven. We have one of the lowest science scores of all countries in the developed world (or first world). Foreign scholars and foreign scientists don't stay here long after graduation (if they come at all), because what sort of environment do we offer intellectuals now? Our own scientists, our own graduate scholars are leaving as well, moving to Europe or Asia where they're more welcome, although an American going abroad now means that he will have to try to live down new stereotype instead of living up to the old one.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Don't Blame the Atheists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0Ca88xNw_w (October 21, 2012)

Mata Amritanandamayi photo
Margaret Mead photo
Michelle Gomez photo
Charles Taze Russell photo
David Lloyd George photo

“I lay down as a proposition that most of the people who work hard for a living in the country belong to the Liberal Party. I would say, and I think, without offence, that most of the people who never worked for a living at all belong to the Tory Party.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Newcastle (9 October 1909), quoted in Better Times: Speeches by the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P., Chancellor of the Exchequer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), p. 160.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

“Coming to the period following Islamic invasions, Hindu society did not bother to remember the Arabs, the Ghaznavids, the Ghurids, the Mamluks, the Khaljis, the Tughlaqs, the Sayyads, the Lodis, and the Mughals. But it took pride in Bapa Raval who had humbled the Arabs; in Maharani Nayakidevi of Gujarat and Prithivi Raj Chauhan who had defeated Muhammad Ghuri again and again; in Gora and Badal who had rescued Rana Ratan Singh from the camp of Alauddin Khalji and then laid down their lives in defence of Padmini and her Chittor; in Harihara and Bukka who had founded the Vijayanagar Empire which stood like a rock against Islamic imperialism for more than two centuries; in Rana Sangram Singh who had crossed swords with Babur; in Maharana Pratap who had defied the mightiest Mughal in the midst of great adversity; in Durgadas Rathor who had despised the wrath of Aurangzeb in defence of his right to give refuge to a rebellious Mughal prince; in Chhatrapati Shivaji who devised a new diplomacy and innovated a new art of warfare which finally worsted the most powerful Muslim empire and rolled back the Islamic invasion; in Chhatrasal Bundela and Maharaja Surajmal who revived Hindu rule in the north; in Banda Bairagi who avenged the wrongs done by Muslim despots to Guru Arjun Deva, Guru Tegh Bahadur and Guru Gobind Singh; and in Maharaja Ranjit Singh who liberated the Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province from Islamic stranglehold.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1987)

Alvin C. York photo
Tibor Fischer photo
Henry Adams photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Roger Ebert photo
Orson Scott Card photo
Paul Scofield photo

“I decided a long time ago I didn’t want to be a star personality and live my life out in public. I don’t think it’s a good idea to wave personality about like a flag and become labeled.”

Paul Scofield (1922–2008) English actor

Quoted in Benedict Nightingale, "Paul Scofield, British Actor, Dies at 86" http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/movies/21scofield.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin, The New York Times (2008-03-21)

John Holloway photo
Joe Hill photo

“Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
But when asked how 'bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:

You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

"The Preacher and the Slave" http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Preacher_and_the_Slave (1911)

William Binney photo

“This approach costs lives, and has cost lives in Britain because it inundates analysts with too much data. It is 99% useless. Who wants to know everyone who has ever [been] at Google or the BBC? We have known for decades that that swamps analysts”

William Binney former U.S. intelligence official and cryptoanalyst; whistleblower

Snooper's charter' will cost British lives, MPs are warned ' http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/06/snoopers-charter-will-cost-british-lives-mps-warned, published by The Guardian on 6th January 2016.

Horatius Bonar photo
Jerome David Salinger photo

“Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next.”

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Seymour: An Introduction (1959)

Peter Hitchens photo

“We're not close. We're different people, we have different lives, we have entirely different pleasures, we live in different continents. If we weren't brothers we wouldn't know each other.”

Peter Hitchens (1951) author, journalist

2009-05-14
Question Time
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/may/14/peter-hitchens-interview

Katherine Mansfield photo
Francisco Franco photo

“If saving human lives is the great desideratum, then there is more to be gained by the prevention of drowning, and auto wrecks than by the abolition of war.”

Brian Hayes (scientist) (1900) American scientist, columnist and author

Source: Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008), Chapter 5, Statistics Of Deadly Quarrels, p. 89

Henry David Thoreau photo
Golda Meir photo
Samuel Butler photo
William March photo
Andrew Bacevich photo

“Plan for your success; Live your successio.”

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 53

Ilana Mercer photo

“Self-government, and not imposed government, implies that society, and not The State, is to develop value systems. The State's role is to protect citizens as they go about their business peacefully, living in accordance with their peaceful values.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Beware The Values Cudgel," http://dailycaller.com/2017/02/03/beware-the-values-cudgel/ The Daily Caller, February 2, 2017
2010s, 2017

Cat Stevens photo
Alfred Austin photo

“So long as faith with freedom reigns
And loyal hope survives,
And gracious charity remains
To leaven lowly lives;
While there is one untrodden tract
For intellect or will,
And men are free to think and act,
Life is worth living still.”

Alfred Austin (1835–1913) British writer and poet

Source: Poetry Quotes, Is Life Worth Living? http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/1/9/3/1/19316/19316.htm (1896)

“Sex and politics - sex and politicians. I never understand how any politician gets a shag, really. Can you? A classic example: the David Mellor sex scandal. I bet you're the same as me. We're not shocked by these scandals involving politicians. I bet when that happened, your response was not 'Good God, that's outrageous! A man in his job, he should be running the country, not messing about like this; no wonder we're in a state; terrible!' No, that wasn't the response. You open the paper, you read about that, and you go 'Ha ha ha ha - I don't think so, Dave! I don't think so. In your dreams, perhaps.' The interesting person in that relationship is not him; it's her - Antonia. A woman of mystery; a mystery woman. Antonia de Sancha, always described as an 'unemployed actress'. Unemployed actress? How's she an unemployed actress? God! if you can feign sexual interest in David Mellor, I should think Chekhov's a piece of piss. So, she thinks 'I'm an actress. It's a role. I'll prepare'. She gets to the bedroom situation. He's in a kit-off situation, and there's Antonia giving it 'Red lorry, yellow lorry - Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper'. But the hair - that's the main unattractive thing. What barber told him that suited him? Someone winding him up there. 'Yes, David, that'll suit you, mate: a greasy, oily flap of dirty-looking patent leather, wafting about down one side of your moosh; that'll drive those unemployed actresses mental!' (Linda Live, 1993)”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

Stand-up

John Zerzan photo
Tom Clancy photo
Mark Burns (televangelist) photo
Gerald of Wales photo

“It is only in the case of musical instruments that I find any commendable diligence in the [Irish] people. They seem to me to be incomparably more skilled in these than any other people that I have seen. The movement is not, as in the British instrument to which we are accustomed, slow and easy, but rather quick and lively, while at the same time the melody is sweet and pleasant. It is remarkable how, in spite of the great speed of the fingers, the musical proportion is maintained. The melody is kept perfect and full with unimpaired art through everything – through quivering measures and the involved use of several instruments – with a rapidity that charms, a rhythmic pattern that is varied and a concord achieved through elements discordant.”
In musicis solum instrumentis commendabilem invenio gentis istius diligentiam. In quibus, prae omni natione quam vidimus, incomparabiliter instructa est. Non enim in his, sicut in Britannicis quibus assueti sumus instrumentis, tarda et morosa est modulatio, verum velox et praeceps, suavis tamen et jocunda sonoritas. Mirum quod, in tanta tam praecipiti digitorum rapacitate, musica servatur proportio; et arte per omnia indemni inter crispatos modulos, organaque multipliciter intricata, tam suavi velocitate, tam dispari paritate, tam discordi concordia, consona redditur et completur melodia.

Gerald of Wales (1146) Medieval clergyman and historian

Topographia Hibernica (The Topography of Ireland) Part 3, chapter 11 (94); translation from Gerald of Wales (trans. John J. O'Meara) The History and Topography of Ireland ([1951] 1982) p. 103.

Jonathan Edwards photo

“Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

No. 6.
Seventy Resolutions (1722-1723)

Walter Scott photo
Marianne von Werefkin photo
Homér photo
Horace Bushnell photo

“I envied him these passions. If you had passions, you were living. Without them, you were watching––the way I was watching desert sand and half-dead creosote go by and wishing I’d stop craving attention from Charles.”

Andrea Lewis (writer) Microsoft employee

"Tierra Blanca" Bryant Literary Review, Vol. 11 http://bryantliteraryreview.org/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=2&cntnt01returnid=56 (2010)
2010-

Winston S. Churchill photo
F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead photo

“May I be perfectly candid? I also am still a Unionist in this sense. If I were certified of twenty years of unbroken power in this country, I am still most clearly of opinion that the solution of the Irish question which would be best for England and best for Ireland would be the prosecution during that period of the policy which, in our opinion at least, had attained so large a measure of success in the year 1906. In saying this I make it quite plain that I am conscious that there are many of my colleagues—there must be many of my colleagues—who would not take that view. You must make the reservation that you are given that power and that you are given that power for the requisite period. The late Lord Salisbury spoke of "twenty years of resolute government." The Unionist Party, in the period to the close of which I refer, had been given some ten years, and it was only given those ten years by what many members of this House would describe as the accident of the issue, with its repercussion on the Election, of the war in South Africa. That accident and that Election gave the Unionist Party some ten years of office. Is it not evident, in trying to descry what lies in front of us through the mists of the future, that no man living can claim that twenty years, or anything like twenty years, lie in front of any Party that believes in the maintenance of the relations between Ireland and this country on the lines that have existed since the passing of the Act of Union?”

F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead (1872–1930) British politician

Speech in the House of Lords http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1920/nov/23/government-of-ireland-bill on the Government of Ireland Bill (23 November 1920).

Bode Miller photo

“Fame is almost a poison. I couldn’t care less, in fact I lived better when I was a nobody.”

Bode Miller (1977) American alpine ski racer

Interview with Gazzetta dello Sport, 16 Feb. 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11385083/

“Promise me, this is my only will. Live on. Live on.”

Ritsuko Okazaki (1959–2004) Japanese singer

"I'm Always Close to You", For Ritz
Lyrics

Adolfo Bioy Casares photo

“Sometimes I think Johnson´s Lives of the English Poets is all I need to be happy.”

Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999) Argentine novelist

"A veces pienso que La vida de los poetas de Johnson es todo lo que necesito para ser feliz."
Descanso de caminantes, 2001.

William Hazlitt photo

“When a man is dead, they put money in his coffin, erect monuments to his memory, and celebrate the anniversary of his birthday in set speeches. Would they take any notice of him if he were living? No!”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On Living to One's-Self"
Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Guido Mantega photo

“Today we are practically living a trade war, a currency war because the exchange rate today is one of the important factors to determine the competitiveness or not of products. Generalized currency depreciation in my view is an explicit strategy used by countries and that threatens us.”

Guido Mantega (1949) Brazilian economist

Speech at the seminar " The Role of Industry in the Growth of Brazil https://www.fazenda.gov.br/divulgacao/noticias/2010/setembro/governo-nao-pretende-taxar-investimentos-estrangeiros-diz-mantega" organized by the Getulio Vargas Foundation, September 27, 2010

Friedrich Kellner photo
Aristophanés photo

“[Choir of] Men: O botheration take you all! How you cajole and flatter.
A hell it is to live with you; to live without, a hell:”

tr. Lindsay 1925, Perseus http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Aristoph.+Lys.+1014
Lysistrata, line 1038-1039
Lysistrata (411 BC)

John Heyl Vincent photo
Clive Staples Lewis photo

“Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

Letter to Arthur Greeves (29 December 1935) — in They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963) (1979), p. 477

Scott McNealy photo

“[Tech] is unstoppable. We're getting more tech in our lives every day as we go to VR or AR and all of the machine learning and artificial intelligence and all the rest of it.”

Scott McNealy (1954) American businessman

CNBC: "Silicon Valley pioneer Scott McNealy: Tech is 'unstoppable' and part of our lives more than ever" https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/09/silicon-valley-pioneer-scott-mcnealy-tech-is-unstoppable.html (9 February 2018)

Francis Turner Palgrave photo
Rollo May photo

“The crucial question which confronts us in psychology and other aspects of the science of man is precisely this chasm between what is abstractly true and what is existentially real for the given living person.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Existence (1958), p. 13; also published in The Discovery of Being : Writings in Existential Psychology (1983), Part II : The Cultural Background, Ch. 5 : Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud, p. 52

“So, all through the medieval period, Foreign and Indian Muslims strove hard to make India a Muslim country by converting and eliminating the Hindus. They killed and converted, and converted and killed by turns. In the earlier centuries of their presence here, the picture was sombre indeed. Turkish rule was established in northern India at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Within fifteen years of Muhammad Ghori’s occupation of Delhi, the Turks rapidly conquered most of the major cities of northern India. Their lightening success, as described by contemporary chroniclers, entailed great loss of life. Qutbuddin Aibak’s conquests during the life-time of his master and later on in the capacity of king (c.1200-1210) included Gwalior, parts of Bundelkhand, Ajmer, Ranthambhor, Anhilwara, as well a parts of U. P. and Malwa. In Nahrwala alone 50,000 persons were killed during Aibak’s campaign.8 No wonder, he earned the nickname of killer of lacs.9 Bakhtiyar Khalji marched through Bihar into Bengal and massacred people in both the regions. During his expedition to Gwalior Iltutmish (1210-36) massacred 700 persons besides those killed in the battle on both sides. His attacks on Malwa (Vidisha and Ujjain) were met with stiff resistance and were accompanied by great loss of life. He is also credited with killing 12,000 Khokhars (Gakkhars) during Aibak’s reign.10 The successors of Iltutmish (Raziyah, Bahram, etc.) too fought and killed zealously. During the reigns of Nasiruddin and Balban (1246-86) warfare for consolidation and expansion of Turkish dominions went on apace. Trailokyavarman, who ruled over Southern U. P., Bundelkhand and Baghelkhand, and is called “Dalaki va Malaki” by Persian chroniclers, was defeated after great slaughter (1248). In 1251, Gwalior, Chanderi, Narwar and Malwa were attacked. The Raja of Malwa alone had 5,000 cavalry and 200,000 infantry and would have been defeated only after great loss of life. The inhabitants of Kaithal were given such severe punishment (1254) that they ‘might not forget (the lesson) for the rest of their lives.’ In 1256 Ulugh Khan Balban carried on devastating warfare in Sirmur, and ‘so many of the rebellious Hindus were killed that numbers cannot be computed or described.’ Ranthambhor was attacked in 1259 and ‘many of its valiant fighting men were sent to hell.’ In the punitive expedition to Mewat (1260) ‘numberless Hindus perished under the merciless swords of the soldiers of Islam.’ In the same year 12,000 men, women and children were put to the sword in Hariyana.”

Indian Muslims: Who Are They (1990)

P.G. Wodehouse photo