Quotes About Life

Would that the simple maxim, that honesty is the best policy, might be laid to heart that a sense of the true aim of life might elevate the tone of politics and trade till public and private honor become identical.

Art can only be truly Art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.

Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.

There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes.

Perhaps life is like an hour glass, with dear ones the sand that slips from the upper glass--the earth--into the second--eternity.

Now I felt the long-forgotten urgency of lovemaking, when it seems one's human selves leave, to be replaced by hungry beasts bolting their food. Gone are the civilized beings who talk of manners and journeys and letters; in their places are two bodies straining to give birth to a burst of inhuman pleasure followed by a great, floating nothingness. An explosion of life followed by death - in this we live, and in this we foreshadow our own sweet deaths.

Philip would not be afraid to die. But to live; to take over the mastery of more than half the world; to make swift decisions in the heat of action; to break the power of his arrogant nobles and then seem to make friends with them, while always distrusting them; to trust no one, depend on no one, to listen to advice and take none of it - yes, Philip was afraid to live.

The future cannot be determined. I can only be experienced as it is occurring. Life doesn't know what it will be until it notices what it has become.

Life offers us this great gift of self-organization, how we can be held in the basin of shared meaning and, within that, exercise individual freedom. It is such a shame to waste it on fear and doubt. Or to seek to contain and control it.

We think there is *one* planet called Earth, but there are thousands, even *millions*, like a snake shedding its skin every so often, but with all the old skins still bunched around it. You live inside the creature for quite a while, so it comes as a shock to find you're living now in one of the husked-off skins, and sometimes you can touch and know about the creature as it is now and sometimes you can't.

The river flowed both ways.

Women, as well as men, in all ages and in all places, have danced on the earth, danced the life dance, danced joy, danced grief, danced despair, and danced hope. Literally and metaphorically, by their very lives.

The struggle is not lost. I believe we have to live, as long as we live, in the expectation and hope of changing the world for the better. That may sound naive. It may even sound sentimental. Never mind: I believe it. What are we to live for, except life itself? And, with all our doubts, with all our flaws, with all our problems, I believe that we will carry on, with God's help.

Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling.

Whenever you start coaxing a new Focal Point to life, think about the categories of help you might need. For each category, come up with three friends, associates, or contacts who could supply it. (A person can supply more than one form of help, but remember that the point here is to avoid leaning on any one person so hard that you push him or her over the edge.)

Dr. Barbara Reinhold, author of Free to Succeed: Designing Your Life in the New Free Agent Economy,

This was the hidden machinery of life, not a clean, clinical well-oiled engine, monitored by a thousand meticulous dials, but a crazy, stumbling contraption made up of strange things roughly fitted together – things like a huge water tap, the dogleg stairs, cheese in the soap dish, and a crocheted tea cosy stiff with dirt and topped by a doll's broken face.

The poet W.H. Auden wrote that people come in two varieties: Utopians, who imagine the perfect world in the future, and Edenists, who, if life is not perfect now, believe it once was in the past.

Il destino è come il cuore: è dentro di noi fin dal primo istante, perciò è inutile cercare di cambiarlo.

My child, I don't know where people go when they die, but I know where they stay.

Life is a storeroom filled with boxes, some empty, some misplaced forever. We're what remains, what we've grabbed hold of.

È inutile indagare le occasioni mancate. Non sai mai se ti sei salvato dalla morte, o ti sei perso la vera vita.

Ci sono cose. Piccole cose che non dimenticherò, che sono niente e invece restano più forti di tutto.

Non posso fingere di non sapere quanto la volontà di un ottimo chirurgo sia ininfluente rispetto al compiersi di un destino. Le braccia di un uomo sono ferme alla terra, figlia mia, Dio, se c'è, è alle nostre spalle.