Quotes About Life

A love that is true to living persons and existing realities is steadfast and fine. But I saw then, for the first time, that a love which was fastened upon the dead and true to nothing but a past that was finished, is not a good nor true emotion. If it went on too long, it could become an incubus, throttling a man from the real life of the present, which is the life that we were fashioned to meet and experience.

All of us are too much concerned with this life," she remarked; she spoke as if what she were saying was an obvious fact instead of a philosophic platitude. "It is time that a man like Julian

It's too bad that one has to conceive of sports as being the only arena where risks are, for all of life is risk exercise. That's the only way to live more freely, and more interestingly.

The afterlife I leave to God, who is merciful and far too busy for impertinent questions from me. I may want to know more, but I don't need to. "One world at a time"-that's my feeling and that's more than enough given the present anguish that engulfs it.

Thank God, all you who have a spark of rational piety in your hearts, for the glorious commonplace of earth and sky,—for this cloud-embosomed planet in which you pass your lives.

It happens. Life (or death) taps you on the shoulder, interrupts what you're doing, and suddenly you find that nobody has been bothering you but yourself.

And in the end, Jody again has his pony—but at the terrible cost of learning even the most wondrous gifts are sometimes impermanent.

For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.

The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendour of life, yields a new thought with every petal. The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live.… This is real life, and all else is illusion, or mere endurance.

I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.

Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.

Our Story" Remind me again—together we trace our strange journey, find each other, come on laughing. Some time we'll cross where life ends. We'll both look back as far as forever, that first day. I'll touch you—a new world then. Stars will move a different way. We'll both end. We'll both begin. Remind me again.

The Dream Of Now" When you wake to the dream of now from night and its other dream, you carry day out of the dark like a flame. When spring comes north and flowers unfold from earth and its even sleep, you lift summer on with your breath lest it be lost ever so deep. Your life you live by the light you find and follow it on as well as you can, carrying through darkness wherever you go your one little fire that will start again.

Waiting for God" This morning I breathed in. It had rained early and the sycamore leaves tapped a few drops that remained, while waving the air's memory back and forth over the lawn and into our open window. Then I breathed out. This deliberate day eased past the calendar and waited. Patiently the sun instructed the shadows how to move; it held them, guided their gradual defining. In the great quiet I carried my life on, in again, out again.

Love in the Country We live like this: no one but some of the owls awake, and of them only near ones really awake. In the rain yesterday, puddles on the walk to the barn sounded their quick little drinks. The edge of the haymow, all soaked in moonlight, dreams out there like silver music. Are there farms like this where no one likes to live? And the sky going everywhere? While the earth breaks the soft horizon eastward, we study how to deserve what has already been given us

Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why. If you do not have things right in your life you will be overwhelmed: you may be heroic, but you will not be wise. If you have things right in your life but do not know why, you are just lucky, and you will not move in the little ways that encourage good fortune.

Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.

The Way It Is There's a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn't change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can't get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer and get old. Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding. You don't ever let go of the thread. ~ William Stafford ~

Yes It could happen any time, tornado, earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen. Or sunshine, love, salvation. It could, you know. That's why we wake and look out - no guarantees in this life. But some bonuses, like morning, like right now, like noon, like evening.

Life was...sad. And yet it was beautiful. The beauty was dimmed when the sadness welled up. And the beauty would be there again when the sadness went. So the beauty and the sadness belonged together somehow, though they were not the same at all.

The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

or in the case of half-stroke cycles like the Kondratieff wave, half a human life).

Crisis - that is, the serious encounter of a man with exactly that which now threatens his own life, with that which represents, signifies, and warns of his own death - is always terrible, wonderful, eventually inescapable, saving and holy.

Each layman must be his own apologist, responsible for his stewardship of the Gospel in his daily life and work.