Quotes About Life

The nature of life is change

I try to wrap my mind around this paradox: self-sabotage as a form of control. If I screw up my life, I can engineer my own death rather than have it happen to me.

You'll turn thirty or forty or fifty anyway, whether your hours are finished or not," she said. "What does it matter what age you are when that happens? Either way, you won't get today back." We all went quiet. You won't get today back. What a chilling idea. We knew that our supervisor was trying to tell us something important. But we didn't have time to think about it.

People may seek peace and clarity, understanding and healing, but deathbeds themselves are often a stew

You won't get today back. And the days were flying by.

we're all time-traveling into the future and at exactly the same rate: sixty minutes per hour.

a good number may have had momentary awakenings, done a little soul-searching, added more to their lists—and then neglected to tick things off. People tend to dream without doing, death remaining theoretical.

If we no longer feel, we should be grieving our own deaths.

What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?' I thought I knew what I planned to do, but now everything has changed.

I know how affirming it feels to blame the outside world for my frustrations, to deny ownership of whatever role I might have in the existential play called My Incredibly Important Life.

You'll turn thirty or forty or fifty anyway, whether your hours are finished or not," she said. "What does it matter what age you are when that happens? Either way, you won't get today back." We all went quiet. You won't get today back.

You'll turn thirty or forty or fifty anyway, whether your hours are finished or not," she said. "What does it matter what age you are when that happens? Either way, you won't get today back." We all went quiet. You won't get today back. What a chilling idea.

our awareness of death helps us live more fully—and with less, not more, anxiety.

What people don't like to think about is that you can do everything right—in life or in a treatment protocol—and still get the short end of the stick. And when that happens, the only control you have is how you deal with that stick—your way, not the way others say you should. I'd let Julie do it her way—I was so inexperienced that I didn't have a strong sense of what a "way" should look like—and it seemed to help.

But, Wendell says, like my patient, I've come up with my own way to cope. If I screw up my life, I can engineer my own death rather than have it happen to me. It may not be what I want, but at least I'll choose it. Like cutting off my nose to spite my face, this is a way to say, Take that, uncertainty.

Whereas Freud believed that people are driven to seek pleasure and avoid pain (his famous pleasure principle), Frankl maintained that people's primary drive isn't toward pleasure but toward finding meaning in their lives.

I know how affirming it feels to blame the outside world for my frustrations, to deny ownership of whatever role I might have in the existential play called My Incredibly Important Life. I know what it's like to bathe in self-righteous outrage, in the certainty that I'm completely right and have been terribly wronged, because that's exactly how I've felt all day.

Life has a 100 percent mortality rate. Every single one of us will die, and most of us have no idea how or when that will happen. In fact, as each second passes, we're all in the process of coming closer to our eventual deaths. As the saying goes, none of us will get out of here alive.

I once told Wendell that I'm a terrible decision maker, that often what I think I want doesn't turn out the way I'd imagined. But there were two notable exceptions, and both proved to be the best decisions of my life. In each case, I was nearly forty. One was my decision to have a baby. The other was my decision to become a therapist.

Fatal is fatal, but it doesn't have to be all downhill.

In some ways, Mary thought, Irma lived her whole life anxious to get things over with, as if she knew the end of her story all along, and didn't feel the middle pages worth the effort of a read.

It was Aunt Lovey's belief that all ordinary people led extraordinary lives, but just didn't notice.

Plus vieux, tu comprendras que, malgré les apparences, il n'y a pas de bon ou mauvais moment. Il y a un moment, point final.

How cruel it must be for a man to live past his soul.