4,486 Life Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Life is an incurable disease.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

There is not love of life without despair about life.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

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.

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.

They claim everyone was born, but I don't recall it. Maybe I was having one of my blackouts.

You know that it would be untrue You know that I would be a liar If I was to say to you Girl, we couldn't get much higher. Come on baby, light my fire - Come on baby, light my fire - Try to set the night on fire.

'When you die you're just getting rid of that old body.'

'Music is Magic. Magic is Life' (part of the lyrics to an unfinished song - found written on a piece of paper after his death)

'If I can reach 50 without growing up then I don't have to.'

Fay: What will you do when you're old? Hal: I shall die. Fay: I see you're determined to run the gamut of all experience.

Cum ergo audimus, Deum omnia facere, nil aliud debemus intelligere, quam Deum in omnibus esse, hoc est, essentiam omnium subsistere.

There's not a hair Sticks on my head but, like a leaden plummet, It sinks me to the grave: I must creep thither; The journey is not long.

I long for rural and domestic scenes, for the warbling of Birds and the Prattle of my Children. Don't you think I am somewhat poetical this morning, for one of my Years, and considering the Gravity, and Insipidity of my Employment? - As much as I converse with Sages and Heroes, they have very little of my Love or Admiration. I should prefer the Delights of a Garden to the Dominion of a World.

These two guys in the front yard-- Are they here to help?

I am bound to say that it took me a long time to understand what he meant. He began by saying that everybody thought of Space as an 'empty homogeneous medium.' 'Never mind at present what the ultimate constituents of that medium are. We take it as a finished product, and we think of it as mere extension, something without any quality at all. That is the view of civilised man. You will find all the philosophers taking it for granted. Yes, but every living thing does not take that view.

'There's a queer performance going on in the other world,' he said. 'It's unbelievable. I never dreamed of such a thing. I - I don't quite know how to put it, and I don't know how to explain it, but - but I am becoming aware that there are other beings - other minds - moving in Space besides mine.'

We look for romance in the well-cultivated garden-plots, and when it springs out of virgin soil we are surprised, though any fool might know it was the natural place for it.

'We are here to see and contemplate the great spectacle.' (p.10)

'In us or through us the Primal Mind will have contemplated and enjoyed its own works and will continue to do so as long as human life endures on this planet.' (p.111)

'...your underwear is clean in case you should be hit by a taxicab and have to be undressed by strangers.'

Farewell the hope that mocked, farewell despair That went before me still and made the pace. The earth is full of graves, and mine was there Before my life began; my resting-place.

Ever charming, ever new, When will the landscape tire the view?

Sometimes people need a breather.

The world's a fine place for those who go out to take it; there's lots of unknown stuff' in it yet. I'll fill your lap, my pretty, so full of treasures that you shan't know yourself. A man wasn't meant to sit at home...

Life was to be lived - not torpidly dozed through in this queer cultured place, where age was in the blood! Life was for love - to be enjoyed!

I sat, just watching the moon creep up, and hearing the thin, dry rustle of the leaves along the holly hedge. And there came to me this thought: What is this Universe - that never had beginning and will never have an end - but a myriad striving to perfect pictures never the same, so blending and fading one into another, that all form one great perfected picture? And what are we - ripples on the tides of a birthless, deathless, equipoised Creative-Purpose - but little works of Art?

So goth the world, now wo, now wel.

A manly form at her side she saw, And joy was duty and love was law. Then she took up her burden of life again, Saying only, 'It might have been.'

There are too many ironies in the fire!

Who lesethe his fredam, in faith! he loseth all.

The lazy leaden-stepping Hours, Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace.

In mirth that after no repenting draws.

Mirth, admit me of thy crew, To live with her, and live with thee, In unreproved pleasures free.

Such strains as would have won the ear Of Pluto, to have quite set free His half-regained Eurydice. These delights, if thou canst give, Mirth, with thee, I mean to live.

I have known many dogs, and many a story I could tell of their wisdom and devotion; but to none do I owe so much as to Stickeen. At first the least promising and least known of my dog-friends, he suddenly became the best known of them all. Our storm-battle for life brought him to light, and through him as through a window I have ever since been looking with deeper sympathy into all my fellow mortals.

If the soul has not reached the state of unitive love, it is necessary for it to make acts of love, as well in the active as in the contemplative life. But when it has reached it, it is not requisite it should occupy itself in other and exterior duties - unless they be matters of obligation - which might hinder, were it but for a moment, the life of love in God, though they may minister greatly to His service; because an instant of pure love is more precious in the eyes of God and the soul, and more profitable to the Church, than all other good works together, though it may seem as if nothing were done.

'Man is called to a fullness of life which far exceeds the dimensions of his earthly existence, because it consists in sharing the very life of God. The loftiness of this supernatural vocation reveals the greatness and the inestimable value of human life even in its temporal phase.'

We do not live, love, or die for practice.

Somebody was trying to tell me that CDs are better than vinyl because they don't have any surface noise. I said, 'Listen, mate, life has surface noise'.

(After playing 'Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want' by The Smiths): Well, I wanted a video camera for Christmas but I didn't get one.

The power which causes the several portions of the plant to help each other, we call life. Much more is this so in an animal. We may take away the branch of a tree without much harm to it; but not the animal's limb. Thus, intensity of life is also intensity of helpfulness - completeness of depending of each part on all the rest. The ceasing of this help is what we call corruption; and in proportion to the perfectness of the help, is the dreadfulness of the loss. The more intense the life has been, the more terrible is its corruption.

The question was, whether, if the reformers of society and government could succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were free and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures.

Of what is't fools make such vain keeping? Sin their conception, their birth, weeping: Their life, a general mist of error, Their death, a hideous storm of terror.

Cash: I went into a coma and I was there for 12 days. They all thought I was dying and they couldn't diagnose what was wrong with me. They finally came up with a diagnosis of Shy-Drager syndrome. It was few months later they realized I didn't have that so it was Parkinson's. And then it was not that. Then finally it was autonomic neuropathy. ... And I'm pretty well resolved to the fact that that's what it is. And it's a slow process of the nerve endings. King: No cure? Cash: No, I don't think so. But that's all right. There's no cure for life either.

We're all interconnected, we're all essential parts of this story here we call reality. Remember, have an open mind. Throw pessimism out the door. Anything is possible. And be attached to nothing. Things come and they go. And they come again. It has been my pleasure being here with you. I hope to see each and every one of you again. I take your hearts with me. I leave my heart with you. Live long, and prosper!

Que el cielo exista, aunque mi lugar sea el infierno.

In life, he suffered from a sense of unreality, as do many Englishmen.

The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts'ui Pen conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us.

And yet, and yet : Negar la sucesion temporal, negar el yo, negar el universo astronomico, son desesperaciones aparentes y consuelos secretos. Nuestro destino no es espantoso por irreal: es espantoso porque es irreversible y de hierro. El tiempo es la sustancia de que estoy hecho. El tiempo es un rio que me arrebata, pero yo soy el rio; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego. El mundo desgraciadamente es real; yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges.

He sospechado alguna vez que la unica cosa sin misterio es la felicidad, porque se justifica por si sola.

Solo aquello que se ha ido es lo que nos pertenece.

Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour - of youth!... A flick of sunshine upon a strange shore, the time to remember, the time for a sigh, and - goodbye! - Night - Goodbye!

Great hour! Spent together, rejoicing and dreaming. Days and years are gathering. We are a still island in the ocean of the world. Beginning and end! Border between life and eternity! Euphoria, fulfillment, existence!

Germans...we do not know how to live: but we know how to die...yes, and fabulously!

He is wealthy enough, that wanteth not: he is great enough, that is his own master: he is happy enough, that lives to die well.

The years are too short, the days are too long.

In my middle years, I have exchanged the position of the fetus for the position of a corpse.

Whether God is dead or not hardly matters, for we would use him no differently anyway.

I hate God and I hate life. And the closer I come to death, the more I hate life.

The wise man dies no better or more wisely than the fool. In what way, then, is the wise man wise?

How dispiriting I find it, even after all my personal triumphs, that we must grow up and grow sad, that we must age, weaken, and in time go home to our long home in the ground, and that even golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust.

The last thing any sensible human being should want is immortality. As it is, life lasts too long for most of us.

All is vanity, you know, ALL in the long run is but vanity and vexation of spirit.

I imagine that God Himself frequently wants to feel like a king. Why else would He create the world?