Quotes About Living

If egotism means a terrific interest in one's self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living.

The memory of war was fading into the past as a nightmare vanishes with the dawn; soon it would lie outside the experience of all living men.

Any man who had ever worked in a hardened missile site would have felt at home in Clavius. Here on the Moon were the same arts and hardware of underground living, and of protection against a hostile environment; but here they had been turned to the purposes of peace. After ten thousand years, Man had at last found something as exciting as war.

It was difficult not to think of the Central Computer as a living entity, localised in a single spot, though actually it was the sum total of all the machines in Diaspar.

Nothing I have seen here in New Eden or on Earth suggests to me that humanity is capable of achieving harmony in its relationship with itself, much less with any other living creatures.

But old dreams never really died. They were always there, living as regrets for what might have been

Never had I been so conscious of the earth of the toughness and fragility and flowing life of it. I realised for the first time that the stones were not dead, nor the dust devoid of life, nor the waters vacuous. Our earth lived. It lived and breathed and sang and flowed and ached, in ever tiny part. And it's singing called to me - whispered, hummed, through the skin of my feet, through my whole self, until with all my being I was attuned to it.

Life was full of risks. Avoiding them might be comfortable, but was it really living?

Caro sat without speaking, turning toward him her look that was neither sullen nor expectant but soberly attentive; and, once, a glance in which tenderness and apprehension were great and indivisible, giving unbearable, excessive immediacy to the living of these moments. Paul had seen that look before, when they first lay down together at the inn beyond Avebury Circle.

When shall we live if not now?

Everything that makes the world like it is now will be gone. We'll have new rules and new ways of living. Maybe there'll be a law not to live in houses, so then no one can hide from anyone else, you see.

Well, she asked, how do you gentlemen like living in a haunted house? It's perfectly fine, Luke said, perfectly fine. It gives me an excuse to have a drink in the middle of the night.

It is unholy because it is heretic. It is foul. It is abominable to need something so badly that you cannot picture living without it. It is a contradiction to the condition of mankind.

Nessun organismo vivente può mantenersi a lungo sano di mente in condizioni di assoluta realtà

Well, she asked, how do you gentlemen like living in a haunted house? It's perfectly fine, Luke said, perfectly fine. It gives me an excuse to have a drink in the middle of the night.

Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else.

His song was only living aloud, His work, a singing with his hand!

Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation.

Tragedy is full of ghosts, ancient and modern, and the line separating the living from the dead is continually blurred. This means that in tragedy the dead don't stay dead and the living are not fully alive. What tragedy renders unstable is the line that separates the living from the dead, enlivening the dead and deadening the living.

Epigraph For this, indeed, is the main source of our ignorance—the fact that our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite. —Sir Karl Popper, lecture to the British Academy (1960) Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? —T. S. Eliot, The Rock (1934)

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.

And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

I hadn't known Chancel very well, but ten days earlier I had seen him laughing with the others around the Christmas tree. Maybe Robert was right; the distance between the living and the dead really isn't very great. And yet, like myself, those future corpses who were drinking their coffee in silence appeared ashamed to be so alive.