Quotes About Living

A friendship that was agony to continue but that would be a living death to lose.

There was loneliness and emptiness without Teddy, she had said. He had news for her. There was always loneliness and emptiness. It was part of the condition of living.

We are not old, and even if we are, we are not dead.

Do these people not know that civilized living ought not to start before noon or end before four in the morning?

Sometimes . . . life seems hardly worth living, does it, sir? If it were not for billiards, Sir Barry said, I might consider shooting myself, m'boy.

Your work is not only books and pictures. They are but bits of it. Your work is You, not less than you, not parts of you… These days when you "cannot work" are accomplishing it, are of it, like the days when you "can work." There is no division. It is all one. Your living is all of it; anything less is part of it. — Your silence will be read with your writings some day, your darkness will be part of the Light.

If you've got one foot in yesterday and one foot in tomorrow, you're straddling today—pissing all over it rather than living in it.

Going to Walden is not so easy a thing As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult Trick of living, and finding it where you are.

PERCY (NINE) Your friend is coming I say to Percy, and name a name and he runs to the door, his wide mouth in its laugh-shape, and waves, since he has one, his tail. Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart. How would it be to be Percy, I wonder, not thinking, not weighing anything, just running forward.

Thus the great ones (my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones) have taught me -- to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always care-ingly.

The witchery of living is my whole conversation with you, my darlings. All I can tell you is what I know. Look, and look again. This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes. It's more than bones. It's more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse. It's more than the beating of the single heart. It's praising. It's giving until the giving feels like receiving. You have a life—just imagine that! You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe still another.

But living like this is for me the difference between a luminous life and a ho-hum life. So be it! With my whole heart, I live as I live. My affinity is to the whimsical, the illustrative, the suggestive—not to the factual or the useful. I walk, and I notice. I am sensual in order to be spiritual.

Thus the great ones (my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones) have taught me - to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly.

pursued nature to her hiding-places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?

Like the first breath of living wind to the sailor becalmed and starving, I felt hope stir.

Quién, si sabe lo que es la <>, perseguiría esas febriles modalidades de existencia? Yo he vivido. [...] Renunciemos a la <> para poder vivir.

All men hate the wretched; how then must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things!

We can never know the answers to great spiritual questions, but it's all right not to understand. We have been born and are living on the earth to face directly the reality of living.

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive, well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, wine in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming, 'Woo-hoo! What a ride.

You don't have to understand life. You just have to live it.

This is the diagnostic feature of modern life, the very definition of a high standard of living: diverse consumption, simplified production. Make one thing, use lots.

This is the diagnostic feature of modern life, the very definition of a high standard of living: diverse consumption, simplified production

You'll then use your responses to the Valued Living Questionnaire in the following exercise, which will help you move toward engaging in what you value.

Survival here means simply an incomplete death, not a partial life -- to be trapped in a gap between the living and the dead. If I had a thousand tongues, I would not try to describe the agony!