Quotes: Life, Living, Moments, Transitoriness, Existence, Death
Quotes: Life, Living, Moments, Transitoriness, Existence, Death
To live and breathe is nothing, to want to live and breathe is everything.
-Timothy Findley
When we speak the word "life," it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.
-Antonin Artaud
Every man dies but not every man really lives.
-Braveheart
The land of the living was not far removed from the domain of the ancestors. There was coming and going between them, especially at festivals and also when an old man died, because an old man was very close to the ancestors. A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.
-Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
The supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
-D.H. Lawrence
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
-E. B. White
I want to feel all there is to feel. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn't forget: I'm alive, I know I'm alive; I mustn't forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.
-Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
The meaning of life is that it stops.
-Franz Kafka
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
-Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
-George Bernard Shaw
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
-Joseph Campbell
Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.
-Jean Baudrillard
Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.
-Neil Gaiman
Die when I may, I want it said by those who knew me best that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.
-Abraham Lincoln
The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity--it’s envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is just a passing shadow of a cloud.
-Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Of all the creatures that were made, man is the most detestable. Of the entire brood he is the only one-the solitary one-that possesses malice. That is the basest of all instincts, passions, vices-the most hateful. He is the only creature that has pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. Also-in all the list he is the only creature that has a nasty mind.
- Mark Twain
I exist. It's sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you'd think it floated all by itself.
It stirs. It brushes by me, melts and vanishes. Gently, gently.
-Jean Paul Sartre
Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. The atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. You are all stardust. All the things that matter for evolution and for life weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars. The only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.
-Lawrence Krauss
There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life.
-Frederico Fellini
I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it.
-Albert Einstein
The unexamined life is not worth living.
-Socrates
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
-Anne Sexton
Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.
-Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.
-Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
The windows of my soul I throw wide open to the sun.
-John Greenleaf Whittier
I shall no longer ask myself if this or that is expedient, but only if it right. I shall do this, not because I am noble or unselfish, but because life slips away, and because I need for the rest of my journey a star that will not play false to me, a compass that will not lie. I do this not because I am courageous and honest, but because it is the only way to end the conflict of my deepest soul. I do it because I am no longer able to aspire to the highest with one part of myself, and to deny it with another. I would rather die than live like that.
-Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton
Yo sueño que estoy aquí destas prisiones cargado, y soñé que en otro estado más lisonjero me vi. ¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí. ¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión, una sombra, una ficción, y el mayor bien es pequeño: que toda la vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son.
I dream that I am in here with these chains and prisons burdened yet I dreamt that I in other, more fulsome state saw myself. What is life? A frantic moment, What is life? But an illusion, but a shadow, but a fiction, and the greatest good is small: for life is all but a dream and dreams are just that, they're dreams.
-Pedro Calderón, "Monólogo de Segismundo: La vida es sueño"
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of it's noisiest authorities insisted on being recieved, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
-Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Her life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, violence, melodrama, honey...None of it moved her. She adressed the world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I dont love you.
-Jonathon Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
It's best to develop a passion for the world itself, a revolving rapture that is both poetic and scientific. Natural and manmade objects can anchor one to the world, where we seem to have so little mooring. We enter into them, pathically, lovingly, and grow sturdier. Indeed, one can lose one's self and become an Everyman, an artist who is powerful and keen-eyed and full of joy.
-Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of Love
Filled with rapture, his soul yearned for freedom, space, vastness. Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining stars, hung boundlessly. From the zenith to the horizon the still-dim Milky Way stretched its double strand. Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring, enveloped the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the church gleamed in the sapphire sky. The luxuriant autumn asleep till morning. The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens and the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars.
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The world, Govinda, is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people - eternal life. It is not possible for one person to see how far another is on the way; the Buddha exists in the robber and dice player; the robber exists in the Brahmin. During deep meditation it is possible to dispel time, to see simultaneously all the past, present and future, and then everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman. Therefore, it seems to me that everything that exists is good - death as well as life, sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly. Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding; then all is well with me and nothing can harm me. I learned through my body and soul that it was necessary for me to sin, that I needed lust, that I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary world, some imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it.
-Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all, those who live without love.
-J.K. Rowling, Dumbledore
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
-Cicero
Literally nothing is held against you. Love has no memory or perception of guilt. The universe is always ready to help you start over.
-Marianne Williamson
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
-Bessie Anderson Stanley
Rule number one is, don’t sweat the small stuff. Rule number two is, it’s all small stuff.
-Robert Eliot
Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.
-Buddha
Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer.
- Yann Martel, Life of Pi
At this point a sharp realization burned within me: each man has his 'function' but none which he can choose himself, define, or perform as he pleases. It was wrong to desire new gods, completely wrong to want to provide the world with something. An enlightened man had but one duty--to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led. The realization shook me profoundly. I had often speculated with images of the future, dreamed of roles that I might be assigned, perhaps as poet or prophet or painter, or something similar. All that was futile. I did not exist to write poems, to preach or to paint, neither I nor anyone else. All of that was incidental. Each man had only one genuine vocation--to find the way to himself. He might end up as a poet or a madman, as prophet or criminal--that was not his affair, ultimately it was of no concern. His task was to discover his own destiny--not an arbitrary one--and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's inwardness. The new vision rose up before me, glimpsed a hundred times, possibly even expressed before but now experienced for the first time by me. I was an experiment on the part of Nature, a gamble within the unknown, perhaps for a new purpose, perhaps for nothing, and my only task was to allow this game on the part of primeval depths to take its course, to feel its will within me and make it wholly mine. That or nothing!
-Hermann Hesse, Demian
If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.
-Lao Tzu
This is your movie. Live out your dreams and fantasies. Whisper questions to the Sphinx at night. Sit for hours at sidewalk cafes and drink with your heroes. Make pilgrimages to Mougins and Abiquiu. Look up and down. Believe in the unknown for it is there. Live in many places. Live with flowers and music and books and paintings and sculpture. Keep a record of your time. Learn to read well. Learn to listen and speak well. Know your country, know your world, know your history, know yourself. Take care of yourself physically and mentally. You owe it to yourself. Be good to those around you. And do all of these things with passion. Give all that you can. Remember: life is to short and death is long.
-Fritz Scholder
All of the animals except for man know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it.
-Samuel Butler
I want all my senses engaged. Let me absorb the world’s variety and uniqueness.
-Maya Angelou
Everything is miraculous. It is miraculous that one does not melt in one's bath.
-Pablo Picasso
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
-Albert Einstein
Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time.
-Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I was crying because I was suddenly very aware of the fact that it was me standing up in that tunnel with the wind over my face. Not caring if I saw downtown. Not even thinking about it. Because I was standing in the tunnel. And I was really there. And that was enough to make me feel infinite.
-The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
-Annie Dillard
All we ever have is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can’t relive it, and we can hope for the future, but we don’t know if there is one.
-George Harrison
I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk. My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth, dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs.
-Virginia Woolf, “The Waves”
Each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. A day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered. Life is about sitting together on benches next to ancient creeks and sometimes, on good days, for falling in love.
-Nicholas Sparks
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
-Lin Yu-T’ang
The touch of an infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the familiar, making it break out into ineffable music…the trees, the stars, and the blue hills ache with a meaning which can never be uttered in words.
- Rabindranath Tagore
You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
-John Green, Looking for Alaska
Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.
-Roald Dahl
Observe the marvels as they happen around you. Don’t claim them. Feel the beauty moving through and be silent.
-Rumi
A great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.
-Albert Schweitzer
We laugh and laugh, and nothing can ever be sad, no one can be lost, or dead, or far away: right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment.
-Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife
That’s the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and… this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever. I need to remember… Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it, like my heart’s going to cave in.
-American Beauty
Drink wine. This is life eternal: this is all that youth will give you. It is the season for wine, roses, and drunken friends. Be happy for this moment; this moment is your life...
-Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat
Life is short. Eat dessert first.
-Jacques Torres
She wanted to live, dance, make love, travel, to gather people around her in order to demonstrate how wise she was, to show off her gifts, to provoke neighbors, to make the most of all that is profane to us.
-Paulo Coelho, The Witch of Portobello
One must be for ever drunken: that is the sole question of importance. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time that bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be drunken without cease. But how? With wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what you please. But be drunken.
-Charles Beaudelaire
My chest feels full of glitter and helium, the way it used to when I was little and riding my father’s shoulders at twilight, when I knew that if I held up my hands and spread my fingers like a net, I could catch the coming stars.
-Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper
Go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.
-Jack Kerouac, “Dharma Burns”
Awaken to the brilliance of ordinary moments. See goodness in the world. Strive to be your best. Be bold. Be grateful. Be wild and gloriously free. Be you.
-Jeanette LeBlanc
When a man says no to champagne, he says no to life.
-The Deer Hunter
Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof, and instant coffee! To unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and goodhearted landlords! To music and warm bodies and contraceptives, and to 'the good life,' whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.
-Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway
I always tell the girls, never take it seriously, if ya never take it seriously, ya never get hurt, ya never get hurt, ya always have fun, and if you ever get lonely, just go to the record store and visit your friends.
-Almost Famous
Start living now. Stop withholding your love until that special person materializes. Every day you are alive is a special occasion. Every minute, every breath, is a gift.
-Mary Manin Morrisey
Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls, and interesting people. Forget yourself.
-Henry Miller
We spend most of our lives forgetting that our nature and purpose is, more than anything else, to love and to make love, to take joy from the beauty of the world, to live with an awareness that the future is not as real a place for any of us as are the present and the past.
-Dean Koontz
Nothing is important, so, people, realising that, should get on with their lives, go mad, take their clothes off, jump in the canal, jump into one of those supermarket trolleys, race around the supermarket and steal Mars bars and kiss kittens.
-Morrissey
I’ll go out there and make my mistakes. I’ll fall down, get hurt, cry, laugh, love, and get back up. I’ll stand on the highest mountaintop and go into the deepest caverns. I’ll roam across the world, visit the moon and swim in outer space. I’ll let my imagination run wild and let my spirit soar. Why? Because when my life flashes before my eyes in those final moments, I want to have something worthwhile to watch, with plenty of love and laughter, good times and bad. I don’t want to regret a thing and I plan not to. Remember, it’s not usually the things you do that you regret, it’s the things you don’t do and leave unsaid. Laugh out loud. Cry in the rain. Love with all your heart and soul. Get hurt. Tell the truth. Go crazy. But never forget that you only get one shot. One shot at this day, one shot at this minute. One shot at this age. One shot at life. So make sure your life is one you will enjoy watching in your final moments.
-Anna Floyd
Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.
-Samuel Beckett
All I want is to stand in a field and to smell green, to taste air, to feel the earth want me, without all this concrete hating me.
-Phillip Pulfrey
The most important thing about life here is that people let themselves be absorbed into things… It’s like when you’re in the forest, you become a seamless part of it. When you’re in the rain, you’re a part of the rain. When you’re in the morning, you’re a seamless part of the morning. When you’re with me, you become a part of me.
-Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest or a wildflower in spring -- these are some of the rewards of the simple life.
-John Burroughs
Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
-Kahlil Gibran
I think of life itself now as a wonderful play that I’ve written for myself, and so my purpose is to have the utmost fun playing my part.
-Shirley MacLaine
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
Live so that you won't be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip.
-Will Rogers
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
-Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils.
-Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather my spark burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled in dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of my being in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not just exist. I shall use my time.
-Jack London
Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new semsations. Be afraid of nothing...
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
-Jonathon Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
-Mark Twain
Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.
-Mae West
Most things, excerpt agriculture, can wait.
-Jawaharlal Nehru
It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
We've been in the rain, We've been on the mountain
We've been round the fire
In fancy hotels, Drank water from farm wells
We sang with the choir
I kissed your dry lips, We jumped off the high cliffs
And splashed down below
Skin to skin, In the salty river
Made love in the shadows
Read books to each other, Read the mind of the other
Flew one thousand jets
We laughed and we cried, At movies and real life
In our ridiculous beds
We danced in the moonlight at midnight
We pressed against back doors and wooden floors
And you never faked it
And frequently, We ignored our love
But we could never mistake it
We met on the front porch, Fell in love on the phone
Without the physical wreck
You gave me the necklace, That used to hang
Around your mother's neck
We questioned religions, Fed bread to the pigeons
We learned how to pray
We stood by the ocean, Turned our hearts into one
We laid in bed all day
We skipped on the sidewalk, Skipped stones on the water
We skipped town
We've seen the sunrise with new eyes
We've seen the damage of gossip and true lies
We've seen the sun go down
Had passionate makeouts, And passionate freakouts
We built this world of our own
It was in the back of a taxi, When you told me you loved me
And that I wasn't alone.
-Ben Kweller, "Thirteen"
The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What's that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating...and you finish off as an orgasm.
-George Carlin
Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is - that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself - that comes too late - a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be.
-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness