Quotes About Life

sometimes the biggest influence isn't what's present in your life, but what's absent. Those missing pieces that shape you and change you, the silences that are louder than the noise.

I love traveling, because your escaping into life instead of hiding from it.

I love traveling, because you're escaping into life instead of hiding from it.

There is nothing more perplexing in life than to know at what point you should surrender your intellect to your faith.

With any group of people in life, sad things happen, and crazy things, and happy things. When you're in the public eye, it's just amplified, that's all.

She knew she oughtn't to scold but she couldn't bear such a hyperbole. People couldn't live without food and air or shelter and money. Romantic love was an extra, nice if it came along, but definitely superfluous to the main requirements of existence.

I am using the phrase "the hidden machinery" to refer to two different aspects of novel making: on the one hand how certain elements of the text—characters, plot, imagery—work together to make an overarching argument; on the other how the secret psychic life of the author, and the larger events of his or her time and place, shape that argument. (p. 29)

Kultur und Todeswissen sind eng miteinander verflochten, wir wissen um die Kurzfristigkeit, um die Begrenztheit des Lebens. Das Gewahrwerden des eigenen Todes ist entscheidende Bedingung für die kulturelle Schöpferkraft. Kultur verspricht Dauer, Kultur schöpft Sinn, Kultur handelt mit Transzendenz. Ihr implizites Ziel ist es, das, was vorgegeben ist, zu überschreiten und ihm so Dauer zu verleihen.

When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life.

Life is nice and round," he continued reflectively. "No beginning. No ending. I am now arrived at an age when you, my children, will carry on for me.

I didn't need clothes. I was allowed the opportunity to act out moments you don't get the opportunity to experience in your own life, let alone as a character in a film. I didn't feel naked.

I am in love with whatever is eccentric, devious, strange, singular, unique, out of this world-and with life as an incalculable, a chaotic thing, meaningful above and beyond the necessary and elemental data of my subject.

For me, a plain Middle Westerner, there is no middle way. I am in love with whatever is eccentric, devious, strange, singular, unique, out of this world—and with life as an incalculable, a chaotic thing.

He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandonds himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.

Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die; it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is not what I seek. Beloved boy, so willful and brooding, your sacrifice will have enriched not my life but my death. ... Centuries as yet unborn within the dark womb of time would pass by thousands over that tomb without restoring life to him, but likewise without adding to his death, and without changing the fact that he had been.

On n'est pas libre tant qu'on désire, qu'on veut, qu'on craint, peut-être tant qu'on vit.

When I die I'm sure I will have a Big Funeral. Curiosity seekers... coming to see if I am really Dead or just trying to make Trouble.

Older people are wise not only because they have lived longer. They're wise because they have lost more.

Life has a way of turning things around. Those who mourn well know this. As a result, they also live well--with courage and curiosity.

Yet if we are to take the Lacanian account of singularity seriously, we must admit that what really counts in life is not our ability to evade chaos, but rather our capacity to meet it in such a manner as to not be irrevocably broken or demolished.

Schopenhauer once put it, we insist on living our lives "with great interest and much solicitude as long as possible, just as we blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although with the perfect certainty that it will burst.

That is, when ordinary reality is perceived as a construction rather than as an objective fact, fantasy can no longer be thought of as what contaminates reality, but should instead be regarded as a process of bringing the world alive for us in a particularly vibrant fashion. According to this vision, "reality" is a fantasy that we elaborate on an increasingly intricate level during our entire lifetimes.

From this perspective, creativity is a means of diffusing and managing loss, of transforming it into something that we can tolerate and live through, and, in the long run, perhaps even use as a basis for new life.

If we are lucky, we gradually gain an appreciation for how destruction can give rise to unprecedented forms of vitality, how our capacity to survive distress leaves behind a smoldering residue that we can draw on to constitute empowering life narratives. Although the process of living is perhaps inherently damaging, we can learn to make use of this damage—the same way that we can learn to make use of accidents—to generate more vigorous forms of life.