Quotes About Life

And, just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live.

It might be a strange irony that the cure for worrying about ageing is sometimes, well, ageing .

History isn't something you need to bring to life. History already is alive. We are history. History isn't politicians or kings and queens. History is everyone. It is everything. It's that coffee. You could explain much of the whole history of capitalism and empire and slavery just by talking about coffee. The amount of blood and misery that has taken place for us to sit here and sip coffee out of paper cups is incredible.

I've never had a coconut chilli Martini before,' I tell him. 'That's the thing with getting older. You run out of new things to try.' 'Oh, I don't know,' he says, still the optimist. 'I have lived beside one ocean or another most of my life and I have yet to see the same wave twice. It's the mana, you see. It's everywhere. It's never still. It keeps the world new. The whole planet is a coconut chilli Martini.

while coal and diamonds are both carbon, coal is too impure to be able, under whatever pressure, to become a diamond. According to science, you start off as coal and you end up as coal. Maybe that was the real-life lesson.

Love is anxiety's greatest killer. Love is an outward force. It is our road out of our own terrors, because anxiety is an illness that wraps us up in our own nightmares. [...] Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.

Read poetry. Especially poetry by Emily Dickinson. It might save you. Anne Sexton knows the mind, Walt Whitman knows grass, but Emily Dickinson knows everything.

Just give yourself one simple reminder that the world is full of wonders. Even if we are at a point in life where we can't appreciate things, it sometimes helps to remember there are things in this world to enjoy, when we are ready.

Which is to say: don't kill yourself. Even when the darkness is total. Always know that life is not still. Time is space. You are moving through that galaxy. Wait for the stars.

To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live. When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.

You can't choose where you are born, you can't decide who won't leave you, you can't choose much. A life has unchangeable tides the same as history does. But there is still room inside it for choice. For decisions.

She didn't want to die. And she didn't want to live any other life than the one that was hers. The one that could be a messy struggle, but it was her messy struggle. A beautiful messy struggle.

Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can't be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try

Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don't even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.

If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment. Live in the breath.

40 pieces of helpful advice: No. 31 - Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.

The future isn't real. The future is abstract. The now is all we know. One now after another now. The now is where we must live. There are billions of different versions of an older you. There is one version of the present you. Focus on that.

It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.

All that humans create serves solely to lessen the terror of existence.

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself. —Albert Camus, A Happy Death

The truth is, you see, however much they would beg to disagree humans don't actually like to win. Or rather, they like winning for ten seconds, but if they keep on winning, they end up actually having to think about other things, like life and death. The only thing humans like less than winning is losing, but at least something can be done about that. With absolute winning, there is nothing to be done. They just have to deal with it.

But while choice is infinite, our lives have time spans. We can't live every life. We can't watch every film or read every book or visit every single place on this sweet earth. Rather than being blocked by it, we need to edit the choice in front of us. We need to find out what is good for us, and leave the rest. We don't need another world. Everything we need is here, if we give up thinking we need everything.

Imagine yourself as a baby. You would look at that baby and think they lacked nothing. That baby came complete. Their value was innate from their first breath. Their value did not depend on external things like wealth or appearance or politics or popularity. It was the infinite value of a human life.

it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunize you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can't have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you're in.