Saturday,Jul 25 2009, 11:53:19 AMLife Quotes

A. Powell Davies: Life is just a chance to grow a soul. Abraham Lincoln: And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. Adrienne Rich: Life on the planet is born of woman. Alan Bennett: Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key. Albert Camus: All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out. Albert Einstein: True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness. Albert Einstein: Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile. Albert Schweitzer: There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats. Albert Schweitzer: Ethics cannot be based upon our obligations toward [people], but they are complete and natural only when we feel this Reverence for Life and the desire to have compassion for and to help all creatures insofar as it is in our power. I think that this ethic will become more and more recognized because of its great naturalness and because it is the foundation of a true humanism toward which we must strive if our culture is to become truly ethical. Albert Schweitzer: Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil. Civilization and Ethics, 1949 Albert Schweitzer: Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life and that to destroy, harm, or to hinder life is evil. Affirmation of the world -- that is affirmation of the will to live, which appears in phenomenal forms all around me -- is only possible for me in that I give myself out for other life. Alice Walker: Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for. Alice Walker: Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise. Amelia Burr: Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die. Anais Nin: Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death. Anais Nin: People living deeply have no fear of death. Anais Nin: The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself. Anais Nin: Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living. André Gide: The most decisive actions of our life ... are most often unconsidered actions. Anne Wilson Schaef: Life is a process. We are a process. The universe is a process. Annie Dillard: How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. Arthur Rubinstein: Love life and life will love you back. Love people and they will love you back. Barbara Kingsolver: Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up. Barry Lopez: How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light. Arctic Dreams Baruch Spinoza: What everyone wants from life is continuous and genuine happiness. Ben Jonson: A good life is a main argument. Benjamin Disraeli: Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory. Benjamin Franklin: Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that the stuff life is made of. Bernice Johnson Reagon: Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are. Bertrand Russell: Three passions have governed my life: The longings for love, the search for knowledge, And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind]. Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness. In the union of love I have seen In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined. With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of [people]. I have wished to know why the stars shine. Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens, But always pity brought me back to earth; Cries of pain reverberated in my heart Of children in famine, of victims tortured And of old people left helpless. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, And I too suffer. This has been my life; I found it worth living. adapted Bertrand Russell: The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Brother David Steindl-Rast : Gratefulness is the key to a happy life that we hold in our hands, because if we are not grateful, then no matter how much we have we will not be happy -- because we will always want to have something else or something more. Buckminster Fuller: Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it. Buddha: If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change. Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish each moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived. played by Patrick Stewart, from the film "Star Trek: Generations" Carl Jung: There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. Carl Sandburg: Our lives are like a candle in the wind. Carl Sandburg: Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep. Charles Schulz: My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right? Charlotte Bronte: Life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation. Chinese proverb: When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other. Colette: I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer. Colette: Life is nothing but a series of crosses for us mothers. Corita Kent: Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed. Corita Kent: Life is a succession of moments. To live each one is to succeed. Dorothy Thompson: Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow. Dorothy Thompson: Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live. E. B. White: You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that. Charlotte, "Charlotte's Web" Edith Wharton: Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue. Edna St. Vincent Millay: My candle burns at both its ends; It will not last the night; But oh, my foes, and oh, my friends -- It gives a lovely light. Edna St. Vincent Millay: Life is a quest and love a quarrel ... Elbert Hubbard: Life is just one damned thing after another. Elbert Hubbard: Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive. Eleanor Roosevelt: I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived. Curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life. Eleanor Roosevelt: People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built. Eleanor Roosevelt: I think somehow we learn who we really are and then live with that decision. Elie Wiesel: The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. (Oct. 1986) Elizabeth Drew: The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it. Emily Dickinson: Love—is anterior to Life— Posterior—to Death— Initial of Creation, and The Exponent of Earth— Emily Dickinson: If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain. If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain. Emily Dickinson: That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet. Emily Dickinson: To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else. Erik H. Erikson: Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired. Ernest Becker: The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive. Ernest Becker: [W]e now know that the human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of life and the fear of death... Heidegger brought these fears to the center of his existential philosophy. He argued that the basic anxiety of [humanity] is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world. That is, both fear of death and fear of life, of experience and individuation. Ernest Becker: I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow? Ernest Dowson: They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate: I think they have no portion in us after We pass the gate. They are not long, the days of wine and roses; Out of a misty dream Our path emerges for a while, then closes Within a dream. F. Forrester Church: Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die. Fran Lebowitz: Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep. Franklin P. Jones: Love doesn't make the world go 'round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile. Frederick Buechner: The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt. Friedrich Nietzsche: And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh. Gary Smalley: Life is relationships; the rest is just details. George Bernard Shaw: I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. George Eliot: What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other? George Sand: Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life. George Santayana: Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament. George Washington Carver: How far you go in life depends on you being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these. Germaine Greer: Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life. Goethe: A useless life is an early death. HH the Dalai Lama: What is the meaning of life? To be happy and useful. Harry Emerson Fosdick: Nothing else matters much -- not wealth, nor learning, nor even health -- without this gift: the spiritual capacity to keep zest in living. This is the creed of creeds, the final deposit and distillation of all important faiths: that you should be able to believe in life. Helen Keller: Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Henri Frederick Amiel: Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind. Henry David Thoreau: However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. Henry James: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. Henry Van Dyke: Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love, to work, to play, and to look up at the stars. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream! For the soul is dead that slumbers, and things are not what they seem. Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art; to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul. Immanuel Kant: Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. Isaac Asimov: If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. Isadora Duncan: People do not live nowadays - they get about ten percent out of life. James F. Bymes: Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem to be more afraid of life than death Jean-Paul Sartre: Everything has been figured out, except how to live. Joan Baez: You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now. John Dewey: Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. John Dewey: Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live. John Dewey: Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. John Lennon: Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. Joni Mitchell: I've looked at life from both sides now From win and lose and still somehow It's life's illusions I recall I really don't know life at all. Kalidasa: Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn! Look to this Day! For it is Life, the very Life of Life. In its brief course lie all the Verities and Realities of your Existence. The Bliss of Growth, The Glory of Action, The Splendor of Beauty; For Yesterday is but a Dream, And To-morrow is only a Vision; But To-day well lived makes Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness, And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope. Look well therefore to this Day! Such is the Salutation of the Dawn! Katharine Hepburn: Without discipline, there's no life at all. Leo Buscaglia: What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life. Lord Byron: The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain. Madame de Stael: The mystery of existence is the connection between our faults and our misfortunes. Marcus Aurelius: The universe is transformation; our life is what our thoughts make it. Marcus Aurelius: Remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses. Marcus Aurelius: And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last. Marcus Aurelius: Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid. Margaret Fuller: Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live. Maria Mitchell: Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow. Marian Wright Edelman: Service is what life is all about. Marie Curie: Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. Mark Twain: What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. Who was it who said, "Blessed is the man who has found his work"? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work--not somebody else's work. The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man's work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great. Mark Twain: Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. Mark Twain: There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy and a tragedy. Mark Twain: Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry. Mark Twain: Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. Martin Luther King, Jr.: An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. Mary Oliver: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Mary Oliver: To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. Blackwater Woods Matthew Arnold: Is it so small a thing To have enjoy'd the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done... May Sarton: A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself. Mohandas K. Gandhi: Where there is love there is life. Mortimer Adler: Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life. Nadine Stair (attributed, probably erroneously): If I had my life to live over, I'd dare to make more mistakes next time. I'd relax; I'd limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I'd have fewer imaginary ones. You see, I'm one of those people who lived sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I had my moments, and if I had to do it over again, I'd have more of them. In fact, I'd try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after the other, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I've been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat, and a parachute. If I had it to do over again, I would travel lighter than I have. If I had my life to live over again, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dance; I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies. The story behind this quotation Norbert Capek: It is worthwhile to live and fight courageously for sacred ideals. This entry continued ... Norman MacEwan: Happiness is not so much in having as sharing. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. Norman Vincent Peale: Live your life and forget your age. Oliver Wendell Holmes: It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living. Oliver Wendell Holmes: Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out. Oliver Wendell Holmes: A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve. Omar N. Bradley: Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Oscar Wilde: Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring. Oscar Wilde: To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. Paul Anka: And now the end is near And so I face the final curtain, My friends, I'll say it clear, I'll state my case of which I'm certain. I've lived a life that's full, I've travelled each and evr'y highway And more, much more than this, I did it my way. Paul Beattie: When My Mind is Still When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart, I remember things too easily forgotten: The purity of early love, The maturity of unselfish love that asks -- desires -- nothing but another's good, The idealism that has persisted through all the tempest of life. When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart, I can find a quiet assurance, an inner peace, in the core of my being. It can face the doubt, the loneliness, the anxiety, Can accept these harsh realities and can even grow Because of these challenges to my essential being. When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart, I can sense my basic humanity, And then I know that all men and women are my brothers and sisters. Nothing but my own fear and distrust can separate me from the love of friends. If I can trust others, accept them, enjoy them, Then my life shall surely be richer and more full. If I can accept others, this will help them to be more truly themselves, And they will be more able to accept me. When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart, I know how much life has given me: The history of the race, friends and family, The opportunity to work, the chance to build myself. Then wells within me the urge to live more abundantly, With greater trust and joy, With more profound seriousness and earnest service, And yet more calmly at the heart of life. Paul Beattie was a Unitarian Universalist minister, serving in congregations including in Kansas City, Missouri, and last at the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh, PA. He was also president of the Fellowship of Religious Humanists, among his many involvements. Paul Bowles: ... we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless. Pearl S. Buck: The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it. Pearl S. Buck: The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration. Rabindranath Tagore: The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.

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