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. People understand the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider that the object of that activity is pleasure. ...People understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, i.e., pleasure.

42. And all people live, not by reason of any care they have for themselves, but by the love for them that is in other people.

43. In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

44. Only those live who do good.

45. All the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call the 'fifties' or 'sixties,' as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix.

46. Each religion is a brave guess at the authorship of Hamlet. Yet, as far as the play goes does it make any difference whether Shakespeare or Bacon wrote it? Would it make any difference to the actors if their parts happened out of nothingness, if they found themselves acting on the stage because of some gross and unpardonable accident? Would it make any difference if the playwright gave them the lines or whether they composed them themselves, so long as the lines were properly spoken? Would it make any difference to the characters if A Midsummer Night's Dream was really a dream?

47. As a people we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body.

48. When I am happy I feel like crying, but when I am sad I don't feel like laughing. I think it is better to be happy; then you get two feelings for the price of one.

49. How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?

50. 'It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.'

51. Welcome to Barrayar, son. Here you go: have a world of wealth and poverty, wrenching change and rooted history. Have a birth; have two. Have a name. Miles means 'soldier,' but don't let the power of suggestion overwhelm you. Have a twisted form in a society that loathes and fears the mutations that have been its deepest agony. Have a title, wealth, power, and all the hatred and envy they will draw. Have your body ripped apart and re-arranged. Inherit an array of friends and enemies you never made. Have a grandfather from hell. Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it. Always be a moving target. Live. Live. Live.

52. Now I am beginning to live a little and feel less like a sick oyster at low tide.

53. This Life is a fleeting breath, And whither and how shall I go, When I wander away with Death By a path that I do not know?

54. To make the public sentiment, on the side of all that is just and true and noble, is the highest use of life.

55. The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

56. Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

57. There are many causes I would die for. There is not a single cause I would kill for.

58. There is more to life than increasing its speed.

59. Victory is sweetest when you've known defeat.

60. There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness: is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase ''the pursuit of happiness'' is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world.

61. We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

62. I helped deliver one of my best friend's children ... I just was so amazed by my friend, because she was not just a woman, she was not just a mother. At that moment she was creation; she was life; she was God. And as I looked in her eyes, BOOM, her pussy exploded.

63. I've been married three times- and each time I married the right person.

64. A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.

65. We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.

66. All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.

67. I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

68. How would man exist if God did not need him, and how would you exist? You need God in order to be, and God needs you- for that is the meaning of your life.

69. Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head, Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.

70. There must be more to life than having everything!

71. My life has been one great big joke A dance that's walked A song that's spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke When I think about myself.

72. Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence- neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish- it is an imponderably valuable gift.

73. I live and love in God's peculiar light.

74. I'm the most translated writer in the world, behind Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorki and Jules Verne. And they're all dead...

75. Everything that lives, does so under the categorical condition of decisively interfering in the life of someone else....

76. 'What's the use of dying in a ward surrounded by a lot of groaning and croaking incurables? Wouldn't it be much better to throw a party with that twenty-seven thousand and take poison and depart for the other world to the sound of violins, surrounded by lovely drunken girls and happy friends?'

77. 'I had the pleasure of meeting that young man at the Patriarch's Ponds. He almost drove me mad myself, proving to me that I don't exist. But you do believe that it is really I?'

78. 'For me, music and life are all about style.'

79. Lines formed at Ruby Pier - just as a line formed someplace else: Five people, waiting, in five chosen memories, for a little girl named Amy or Annie to grow and to love and to age and to die, and to finally have her questions answered - why she lived and what she lived for. And in that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: That each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.

80. 'Man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage.'

81. 'If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine.'

82. 'Once you accept the existence of God -however you define him, however you explain your relationship to him - then you are caught forever with his presence in the center of all things.'

83. Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It's not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything.

84. We have one life; it soon will be past; what we do for God is all that will last.

85. The movies were custard compared to politics.

86. It is because the spirit is inestimable that the lifeless body is so little valued.

87. Every individual has a place to fill in the world, and is important, in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not.

88. Life - and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison - is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

89. The world is always ending, for someone.

90. All my life I struggled to stretch my mind to the breaking point, until it began to creak, in order to create a great thought which might be able to give a new meaning to life, a new meaning to death, and to console mankind.

91. Death's dry bones glowed with light in the erotic dark but he woke not nor felt the two warm bodies merge; the male worm then took heart and in his wife's ear whispered: 'With one sweet kiss, dear wife, we've conquered conquering Death!'

92. How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. . . . All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart.

93. As I watched the seagulls, I thought: 'That's the road to take; find the absolute rhythm and follow it with absolute trust.'

94. : I had seen the princess and let her lie there unawakened, because the happily ever after was so damnably much work.

95. Happiness can depend as easily on useless things as on useful ones.

96. Even gentle people recognize that sometimes the decision not to kill is a decision to die.

97. Life is a suicide mission.

98. That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very very good.

99. Here, then, is what I wanted to tell you of my architecture. I created it with courage and idealism, but also with an awareness of the fact that what is important is life, friends and attempting to make this unjust world a better place in which to live.

100. Life is very fleeting. It's important to be gentle and optimistic. We look behind and think what we've done in this life has been good. It was simple; it was modest. Everyone creates their own story and moves on. That's it. I don't feel particularly important. What we create is not important. We're very insignificant.