Quotes About Life

The city is a place where nature is excised and then mourned, killed off then raised from the dead, only to be entombed in caged-off spaces of floral tribute.

So here is one of my theories on happiness: we cannot know if we have lived a truly happy life until the very end. This view of life and death was reinforced by my close witnessing of the buildup to the death of Philip Gould. Philip was without doubt my closest friend in politics. When he died, I felt like I had lost a limb.

Friends have suggested that I am the least qualified person to talk about happiness, because I am often down, and sometimes profoundly depressed. But I think that's where my qualification comes from. Because to know happiness, it helps to know unhappiness.

Clinton is a big personality who has led a big life, and for some of the media conventional wisdom to boil it down to a view that 'all people are really interested in' are a few moments of madness in the Oval Office gets him, the importance of the presidency, and the significance of his life, all wrong.

I am far more interested in being a beginner than in trying to become an expert. Life is difficult and complicated for everyone - but it's very, very short.

Ikigai is the overlap of what you want to do, what you ought to do, and what you have to do.

The life that I could still live, I should live and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think

Only the curious have, if they live, a tale worth telling at all.

And what cats have to tell on each return from hell is this: that dying is what the living do, that dying is what the loving do, and that dead dogs are those who do not know that dying is what, to live, each has to do.

I wish to have both things in my life: adventure and comfort.

Then they'd be wrong. It's only our deeds that make us evil, Tanner; they're what define us, nothing else, not our intentions or feelings. But what are a few bad deeds compared to a life, especially the kinds of lives we can live now?

Without risk in our lives, we're scarcely better than machines ourselves.

only an anxious need to be an hour or two ahead in the story of her life, reflecting with giddy relief on the difficult business that was now behind her.

I was on a moon in one of them. Earth's, I think. And I kept on trying to get inside this alien structure. Fucking thing kept killing me, but I'd always keep going back inside, like I was being brought back to life each time just for that.

All I knew was the way that colour spoke to me, as if I'd been waiting my whole life to find it, to set it free." He thought for a moment. "There's always been something about blue. A thousand years ago Yves Klein said it was the essence of colour itself: the colour that stood for all other colours.

It was not that intelligent life was rare, it seemed, but that intelligent life was very, very prone to becoming extinct. Almost as if something was deliberately wiping it out. The wolves were the missing element in the puzzle, the agency responsible for the extinctions. Implacable, infinitely patient machines, they homed in on the signs of intelligence and enacted a terrible, crushing penalty. Hence, a lonely, silent galaxy, patrolled only by watchful machine sentries.

Birth and death frame a life, give it shape. Without that border it just becomes a kind of sprawling mess, a thing with no edge, no definition, no centre.

With me being the bookworm I am, it might seem queer that I didn't go to the library sooner than I did. But books were a nice thing in my life, a luxury and a reminder of better times, and I didn't want to start letting nice things back into my world until I thought there was at least a chance of making it through the next couple of days.

Being a thing with a central nervous system complex enough to understand the concept of being a thing with a central nervous system. Simply being. Consider all the inanimate

Chiku felt something very close to vertigo, a dizzy sort of perception that she had only just begun to grasp the vertical depth of a very long life, the sense of how far it plumbed the past. A life that went down like a lift-shaft, each floor containing an ordinary life's worth of love and loss, adventure and disappointment, dreams and ruins, joy and sorrow.

Life was a very odd thing indeed, he reflected, when you really thought about it.

What's the point in longevity if every day is a grey duplicate of the one before?

Soon there would be a final morning, a final afternoon, a final sunrise. She measured her life by these thoughts and then reprimanded herself for not simply enjoying such pleasures while she still could.

Somewhere out beyond the Empty there now shone stars that had been born in gas clouds after this room was decorated. There were stars that had been alive then that were just corpses now, if they had left the least trace of themselves. There was just too much past, too much time that had already happened, and our lives were as nothing against that endless black conveyor belt, ceaselessly rolling, stretching and stretching ever further backward into a dread eternity.