Quotes About Life

Anyway, everybody gets something, and nobody gets everything, and that's the way it is.

There is hardly ever a complete silence in our soul. God is whispering to us wellnigh incessantly. Whenever the sounds of the world die out in the soul, or sink low, then we hear these whisperings of God. He is always whispering to us, only we do not always hear, because of the noise, hurry, and distraction which life causes as it rushes on. F. W. FABER.

The fabric of human life is woven with relationships. Once we thematize the importance of dialogue, the multiplicity of ongoing and created situations in which dialogical skills can be nurtured abound. As we have seen, this requires us to slow down and turn toward each other, having a clear sense of the relationship between our current footing in dialogue with one another and the future we are trying to create. The nurture of dialogical capacities is essential to human liberation.

That image of the countryside being a threatening place still exists. People continue to resist the challenge of learning about aspects of life they don't understand.

We did have some difficult times. Really, there were more good times than bad. I've been honest about a lot of the things that happened and the truth is, I have more good memories than bad ones.

It is the preservation of the species, not of individuals, which appears to be the design of Deity throughout the whole of nature.

There is nothing can pay one for that invaluable ignorance which is the companion of youth, those sanguine groundless hopes, and that lively vanity which makes all the happiness of life.

Considering what short lived, weak animals men are, is there any study so beneficial as the study of present pleasure?

But in some ways, the most significant choices one makes in life are done for reasons that are not all that dramatic, not earth-shaking at all; often enough, the choices we make are, for better or for worse, made by default.

For a long time I believed the opposite of passion was death. I was wrong. Passion and death are implicit, one in the other. Past the border of a fiery life lies the netherworld. I can trace this road, which took me through places so hot the very air burned the lungs. I did not turn back. I pressed on, and eventually passed over the border, beyond which lies a place that is wordless and cold, so cold that it, like mercury, burns a freezing blue flame.

The joy is an absurd yellow tulip, popping up in my life, contradicting all the evidence that shows it should not be there.

Bear in mind you have a life to live. There is an incredible loss. There is a profound grief. And there is, in the end, after a long time and more work than you ever thought possible, a time when it gets easier.

The biggest fear of my life is living. My second biggest fear is dying.

I relish my life. It's the one I have. It's difficult, beautiful, painful, full of laughter, passing strange. Whatever else it is, whatever it brings – it's mine.

You never come back, not all the way. Always, there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier, thin as the glass of a mirror. You never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.

perhaps our purpose is, for the time being, to be human, to live on this earth and in this human community, to receive something from it, and to give something back.

The spiritual realm is not the ethereal beyond our lived experience. It is our experience, lived fully and well.

But at that moment—the moment of realization that life as I'd been living it would have to end—I felt devastation unlike any I'd ever known. The barrenness was indescribable. The emptiness that opened up in me seemed to stretch on forever; I could see no end to it, could find no source of comfort in it, could not imagine any way out.

It is easy to write off childlike faith in the universe and childlike wonder at the world as simply a lack of knowledge about "how life really is." Well, how is life, really? Do we know—we who have been denying life, life's beauty and its true challenges, for such a long time? Or did we know better as children, when the whole world seemed to be filled with meaning and possibility, both good and bad?

This side of passion was my first perversion. The tendency toward excess veered out of control into bulimia, that state of fear and desire, that violent crashing back and forth between hunger and the abortion of hunger, between taking in and throwing back what is most needed and instinctively desired: food. The bread of life.

The reward is entrance to the "world of the Spirit," which is to say, entrance to this world, a place at this table, in this human life. I am not much concerned about the existence of a hereafter, a "next" life—this life is what I have, this is where I live, and I believe that my spiritual growth depends upon the work I do here and now. That work amounts to seeing this world clearly, moving through it gently, and learning to love it well.

I relish my life. It is a life of which I am fiercely protective. I have wrested it back from madness, and madness cannot take it from me again. I will not throw it away. So what if it isn't a normal life? It's the one I have.

the elements of myself that not so much want to die, but are afraid to live.

My most salient memories