Selected life quotes

1. I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don't remember ever having seen one weep.

2. Immortality alone could teach this mortal how to die.

3. There never was night that had no morn.

4. Nothing but a speck we seem In the waste of waters round, Floating, floating like a dream, - Outward bound.

5. An author departs, he does not die.

6. I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door - or I'll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.

7. It is very important to generate a good attitude, a good heart, as much as possible. From this, happiness in both the short term and the long term for both yourself and others will come.

8. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

9. Follow the three Rs: Respect for self, Respect for others and Responsibility for all your actions.

10. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

11. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

12. Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.

13. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

14. Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.

15. I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.

16. If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

17. In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.

18. It is a pity that, as one gradually gains experience, one loses one's youth.

19. One must work and dare if one really wants to live.

20. You write in your letter something which I sometimes feel also: Sometimes I do not know how I shall pull through.

21. I do not intend to spare myself, not to avoid emotions or difficulties. I don't care much whether I live a longer or shorter time: the world concerns me only in so far as I feel a certain debt toward it, because I have walked on this earth for thirty years, and out of gratitude I want to leave some souvenir.

22. There are some people who begin the Zoo at the beginning, called WAYIN, and walk as quickly as they can past every cage until they get to the one called WAYOUT, but the nicest people go straight to the animal they love the most, and stay there.

23. There, like the wind through woods in riot, Through him the gale of life blew high; The tree of man was never quiet: Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.

24. Lest Arab governments be tempted out of sheer routine to rush into impulsive rejection, let me suggest that tragedy is not what men suffer but what they miss.

25. Life is an incurable disease.

26. The better part of one's life consists of his friendships.

27. To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.

28. If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.

29. A callous disregard for the claims of innocent human life is the heart and soul of the evil of terrorism.

30. You can't build marriage on a foundation of selfish hedonism, because that would be to promise people only roses, and marriage is also thorns.

31. Material existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind, whose nature and geography are unexplored.

32. There is not love of life without despair about life.

33. I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.

34. What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.

35. What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

36. At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

37. I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.

38. The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

39. To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.

40. Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.

41. I have grown weary of the winds of heaven. I will not be a reed to hold the sound Of whatsoever breath the gods may blow, Turning my torment into music for them. They gave me life; the gift was bountiful, I lived with the swift singing strength of fire, Seeking for beauty as a flame for fuel - Beauty in all things and in every hour. The gods have given life - I gave them song; The debt is paid and now I turn to go.

42. Life has loveliness to sell, All beautiful and splendid things, Blue waves whitened on a cliff, Soaring fire that sways and sings, And children's faces looking up Holding wonder like a cup.

43. Spend all you have for loveliness, Buy it and never count the cost; For one white singing hour of peace Count many a year of strife well lost, And for a breath of ecstasy Give all you have been, or could be.

44. I try to catch at many a tune Like petals of light fallen from the moon, Broken and bright on a dark lagoon, But they float away - for who can hold Youth, or perfume or the moon's gold?

45. O lovely chance, what can I do To give my gratefulness to you? You rise between myself and me With a wise persistency; I would have broken body and soul, But by your grace, still I am whole.

46. So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.

47. My life has been one long series of mistakes.

48. Life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore, nor actual difficulty in our life.

49. I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.

50. One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.

51. One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, 'I will always be here.'

52. It was as though some stubborn god spent their time in an immutable and absurd balancing act between life and death, prosperity and poverty.

53. In horror, in terror, she accepted the metamorphosis - gnat, foam, ant, until death. And it's only the beginning, she thought. She stood motionless, as if it were possible to play tricks with time, possible to stop it from following its course. But her hands stiffened against her quivering lips. When the bells began to sound the hour she let out the first scream.

54. In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. There was Stalingrad and there was Buchenwald, and neither of the two wipes out the other. Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.

55. To will freedom and to will to disclose being are one and the same choice; hence, freedom takes a positive and constructive step which causes being to pass to existence in a movement which is constantly surpassed.

56. A conquest of this kind is never finished; the contingency remains, and, so that he may assert his will, man is even obliged to stir up in the world the outrage he does not want. But this element of failure is a very condition of his life; one can never dream of eliminating it without immediately dreaming of death. This does not mean that one should consent to failure, but rather one must consent to struggle against it without respite.

57. Work almost always has a double aspect: it is a bondage, a wearisome drudgery; but it is also a source of interest, a steadying element, a factor that helps to integrate the worker with society. Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.

58. I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.

59. If things blow up then that's awesome and if things don't, I still can live a normal life and be able to go to the grocery store without people following me.

60. La chair est triste, helas! et j'ai lu tous les livres.

61. Le monde est fait pour aboutir a un beau livre.

62. Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel? ...Sometimes he makes us live.

63. This is how we go on: one day a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root canal at a time; boat builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.

64. The world has teeth and it can bite you with them any time it wants.

65. Did they live happily ever after? They did not. No one ever does, in spite of what the stories may say. They had their good days, as you do, and they had their bad days, and you know about those. They had their victories, as you do, and they had their defeats, and you know about those, too. There were times when they felt ashamed of themselves, knowing they had not done their best, and there were times when they knew they had stood where their God had meant them to stand. All I'm trying to say is that they lived as well as they could.

66. Understand death? Sure. That was when the monsters got you.

67. You can go through your whole life telling yourself that life is logical, life is prosaic, life is sane. Above all, sane. And I think it is. I've had a lot of time to think about that.

68. Susan Brooks was one of those girls who never say anything unless called upon, the ones the teachers always have to ask to speak up, please. A very studious, very serious girl. A rather pretty but not terribly bright girl - the kind who isn't allowed to give up and take the general or the commercial courses, because she had a terribly bright older brother or older sister, and the teachers expect comparable things from her. In fine, one of those girls who are holding the dirty end of the stick with as much good grace and manners as they can muster. Usually they marry truck drivers and move to the West Coast, where they have kitchen nooks with Formica counters - and they write letters to the Folks Back East as seldom as they can get away with. They make quiet, successful lives for themselves and grow prettier as the shadow of the bright older brother or sister falls away from them.

69. He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation's equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on?

70. There are a great many ways to commit suicide you know.

71. 'The reason all of this is so horrible,' McVries said, 'is because it's just trivial. You know? We've sold ourselves and traded our souls on trivialities. Olson, he was trivial. He was magnificent, too, but those things aren't mutually exclusive. He was magnificent and trivial. Either way, or both, he died like a bug under a microscope.'

72. Perhaps we go to the forbidden door or window willingly because we understand that a time comes when we must go whether we want to or not...and not just to look, but to be pushed through. Forever.

73. We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other...except through faith.

74. If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.

75. Maybe I did it because kids need to know that sometimes dead is better.

76. What you buy is what you own, and sooner or later what you own will come back to you.

77. In a book, all would have gone according to plan.... but life was so fucking untidy - what could you say for an existence where some of your most crucial conversations of your life took place when you needed to take a shit, or something? An existence where there weren't even any chapters?

78. We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long. (closing line)

79. Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around.

80. Don't live in this place. If you're a grad student or if you have a few more courses to pick up, fine. But if you're still hanging out in Orono or Old Town three years from now, living like an undergraduate in some sleazy apartment or trailer park, there's something wrong with you. This is not Never-Neverland. Peter Pan graduated back in '73 and now has a nice little farm in Bethel. You are not the Lost Boys and Lost Girls, but if you stay here too long, you will grow the equivalent of donkey ears. For most of you, it's time to move on. If you didn't have a better time here than you did in high school, you're weird. If you want to stay here and keep being an undergraduate, you're very weird.

81. Each life makes its own imitation of immortality.

82. All the same, there is a difficulty. I should like him to be happy in heaven here, But he cannot come by wishing. Only by being already at home here.

83. So I fancy my Muse says, when I wish to die, Oh no, Oh no, we are not yet friends enough, And Virtue also says: We are not yet friends enough.

84. I believe in the existence of a Supreme Intelligence pervading the Universe.

85. There is time for everything.

86. Sure, for all our blindness; secure, for all our helplessness; strong, for all our weakness; gaily in love, for all the pressures on our hearts.

87. The man whose silent days In harmless joys are spent, Whom hopes cannot delude, Nor sorrow discontent: That man needs neither towers Nor armour for defence, Nor secret vaults to fly From thunder's violence.

88. The universe is an intelligence test.

89. I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over.

90. I just put on what the lady says. I've been married three times, so I've had lots of supervision.

91. Now and then it occurs to one to reflect upon what slender threads of accident depend the most important circumstances of his life; to look back and shudder, realizing how close to the edge of nothingness his being has come.

92. Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end, life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.

93. Life cannot be destroyed for good, neither ... can history be brought entirely to a halt. A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy lid of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undercutting it. It may be a long process, but one day it must happen: the lid will no longer hold and will start to crack. This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique ... something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.

94. Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.

95. The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

96. Man is in fact nailed down - like Christ on the Cross - to a grid of paradoxes . . . he balances between the torment of not knowing his mission and the joy of carrying it out, between nothingness and meaningfulness. And like Christ, he is in fact victorious by virtue of his defeats.

97. There are no exact guidelines. There are probably no guidelines at all. The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance. Awareness of all the most dangerous kinds of vanity, both in others and in ourselves. A good mind. A modest certainty about the meaning of things. Gratitude for the gift of life and the courage to take responsibility for it. Vigilance of spirit.

98. It's not true that you should first think up an idea for a better world and only then 'put it into practice,' but, rather, through the fact of your existence in the world, you create the idea or manifest it - create it, as it were, from the 'material of the world,' articulate it in the 'language of the world.'

99. The real test of a man is not how well he plays the role he has invented for himself, but how well he plays the role that destiny assigned to him.

100. A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear-sighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.