c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Memory haunts me from age to age, and passion leads me by the hand--evil have I done, and with sorrow have I made acquaintance from age to age, and from age to age evil shall I do, and sorrow shall I know till my redemption comes.
— H. Rider Haggard, She
The depth of our compassion is proportional to the depth of our living. (65)
— Jean-Yves Leloup, Compassion and Meditation: The Spiritual Dynamic between Buddhism and Christianity
Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
Shannon: Only the living suffered. Only they were riddled with guilt and regret and unanswered questions.
— Nora Roberts, Born in Shame
...Who knows what death, anxiety of the living, Who knows what loneliness, end of the lovingI could say to myself of the love (I had): Let it not be immortal, since it is flame But let it be infinite while it lasts.
— Vinicius de Moraes
The details of life have a tendency to interfere with the actual living of life.
— Richard Diaz
You know how we’re thinking about food these days, less in terms of carbs and calories than in terms of color, vivacity, and life force? We can do the same with time. Then it’s no longer about having enough of it but about infusing color and vivacity and life force into every moment. (279)
— Victoria Moran, Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit
Are you doing life or are you living?
— Dale Forehand
Emma felt frightened, apprehensive, yes, but also elated and excited, her feelings all tumbled and mixed together like a stew of varied ingredients tossed into the same pot. She was aware of the blood coursing through her veins, the beat of her heart, the breath in her lungs. Was aware, too, of that clenched knot that hung in the pit of her stomach. This was what it was to be alive, to be at the edge, facing survival eye to eye, knowing, KNOWING, you would win.
— Helen Hollick, The Forever Queen
I drank a little California Mountain Red at home and thought--why not--wherever you turn someone is shouting give me liberty of I give you death. Perfectly sensible, thing-owning, Church-fearing neighbours flop their hands over their ears at the sound of a siren to keep fallout from taking hold of their internal organs. You have to be cockeyed to love, and blind in order to look out the window at your own ice-cold street.
— Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
[He] went on to say that during all those years he had done nothing at all, that all he had felt had been a need to live, to live actively, violently, noisily, a need to sing, to make music, to roam the woods, to drink a little too much and get involved in a brawl.
— Edmond de Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journals
Eat your vegetables, have a positive outlook, be kind to people, and smile - Kamada Nakasato, 102-y/o-female fr. Okinawa
— Dan Buettner
The first and last schoolmaster of life is living and committing oneself unreservedly and dangerously to living; to men who know this an Aristotle and a Plato have much to say; but those who have imposed cautions on themselves and petrified themselves in a system of ideas, them the masters themselves will lead into error
— Thornton Wilder, The Ides of March
I have argued that this sort of thinking is problematic in at least two regards:First, the notion that nonhuman animals do not have an interest in continued existence—that they do not have an interest in their lives—involves relying on a speciesist concept of what sort of self-awareness matters morally. I have argued that every sentient being necessarily has an interest in continued existence—every sentient being values her or his life—and that to say that only those animals (human animals) who have a particular sort of self-awareness have an interest in not being treated as commodities begs the fundamental moral question. Even if, as some maintain, nonhuman animals live in an “eternal present”—and I think that is empirically not the case at the very least for most of the nonhumans we routinely exploit who do have memories of the past and a sense of the future—they have, in each moment, an interest in continuing to exist. To say that this does not count morally is simply speciesist.Second, even if animals do not have an interest in continuing to live and only have interests in not suffering, the notion that, as a practical matter, we will ever be able to accord those interests the morally required weight is simply fantasy. The notion that we property owners are ever going to accord any sort of significant weight to the interests of property in not suffering is simply unrealistic. Is it possible in theory? Yes. Is it possible as a matter of practicality in the real world. Absolutely not. Welfarists often talk about treating “farmed animals” in the way that we treat dogs and cats whom we love and regard as members of our family. Does anyone really think that is practically possible? The fact that we would not think of eating our dogs and cats is some indication that it is not.
— Gary L. Francione
Dying is as natural as being born, and all of us have to face it someday. Some sooner than others. It's difficult to understand the meaning of it all. The question isn't, 'Why do we die?' The correct question is, 'Why do we live?
— S.M. Reine, Six Moon Summer
We're living in science fiction, but we don't realize it.
— Terry Pratchett
Year after year of dirty snow and bitter winds… houses and whole districts of people who aren’t really unhappy, but worse, who are neither happy nor unhappy; people who are ugly because they’re neither ugly nor beautiful; creatures that are dismally neutral, who long without longings as though they’re unconscious, unconsciously suffering from being alive.
— Eugène Ionesco, Rhinoceros / The Chairs / The Lesson
You can't run away from trouble. There ain't no place that far.
— Joel Chandler Harris
My environment reflects the life I've led, the places I've visited and the people I've loved.
— Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939
If it doesn't sweat, jiggle, or pant, it's not alive.
— Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, The Grooming of Alice
We start our sometimes tedious, sometimes exciting, often times sad and stressful march to the grave the moment we're born, so it might as well be a march worth remembering.
— Donna Lynn Hope
Rewards of life lived with principles; bloom, when life is about to end or has departed already.
— Aniruddha Sastikar
Don't worry and don't hurry and your days will be long.
— Deliaha Hicks
The majority of people don't want to plan. They want to be free of the responsibility of planning. What they ask for is merely some assurance that they will be decently provided for. The rest is a day-to-day enjoyment of life. That's the explanation for your Father Divines; people naturally flock to anyone they can trust for the necessities of life... They are the backbone of a community--solid, trust-worthy, essential.
— B.F. Skinner, Walden Two
Haldir had gone on and was now climbing to the high flet. As Frodo prepared to follow him, he laid his hand upon the tree beside the ladder: never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and texture of a tree's skin and of the life within it. He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter; it was the delight of the living tree itself.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Trust that whatever you are dealing with, whatever doorway to crisis you experience, it is leading you to a greater lesson in liwing where ideally the power of love is what you learn. Forgive, and broadcast your excitement to be alive.
— Barbara Marciniak, Family of Light: Pleiadian Tales and Lessons in Living
The venerable teachers, philosophers & spiritual practitioners throughout history have concluded that the greatest happiness we can experience comes from the development of an open, loving heart.
— Allan Lokos, Pocket Peace: Effective Practices for Enlightened Living
Now is everythingNow is the essenceNow is the focusFocus on the nowFor that is the key
— Karen Hackel, The Whisper of Your Soul
Sasha's green eyes were right up against yours, the lashes interlocking. "In Naples," she said, "there were kids who were just lost. You knew they were never going to get back to what they'd been, or have a normal life. And then there were other ones who you thought, maybe they will."...You opened your eyes, which you hadn't realized were shut again. "what I'm saying is, We're the survivors," Sasha said...."Not everyone is. But we are. Okay?
— Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
The harassed look is that of a desperately tired swimmer or runner; yet there is no question of stopping. The creature we are watching will struggle on and on until it drops. Not because it is heroic. It can imagine no alternative.Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face - the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young-man - all present still, preserved as fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us - we have died -what is there to be afra
— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man
…In this way that he sought to control the very passage of his life, deftly and without forethought, yet precisely and with enormous care. Part of it was to allow what was enormous, what was profound, without limiting it.
— Jesse Ball, The Curfew
No matter how we choose to live, we both die at the end.
— Adam Silvera, They Both Die at the End
The goal that you hope you will one day arrive at after a long and roundabout journey you are able to possess right now, if only you do not deny it to yourself. That is, if you can let go of the past, entrust the future to Providence and redirect the present according to justice and the sacred. To the sacred, so that you welcome what has been given to you, for Nature has brought this to you, and you to it; and to justice, in order that you may speak the truth freely and without distortion, and that you may act in accordance with what is lawful and right. Do not allow yourself to be hindered by the harmful actions, judgments, or the words of another, or by the sensations of the flesh which has formed itself around you. Let the body take care of those. But if, when you have come to the end, having let go of all other things, you honor only your guiding part and the divinity that is within you, and you do not fear ceasing to live so much as you fear never having begun to live in accordance with Nature--then you will be a man who is worth of the Cosmos that created you; and you will cease to live like a stranger in your own land, that is, surprised at unexpected everyday occurrences and wholly distracted by this and that.
— Marcus Aurelius, The Essential Marcus Aurelius
I've spent years living safely to secure a longer life, and look where that's gotten me. I'm at the finish line but I never ran the race.
— Adam Silvera, They Both Die at the End
We understand the ordinary business of living, We know how to work the machine
— T. S. Eliot
The moment you will be most stiff is when you die - you never get stiffer than that. So you've got to sleep well, eat well and keep moving.
— Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone
Living things are creations, masterpieces. All Life Matters!
— Brent M. Jones
With a cluther of limbs and organs, all that is needed to live again, to hold out a little time, I'll call that living, I'll say it's me, I'll get standing, I'll stop thinking, I'll be too busy, getting standing, staying standing, stirring about, holding out, getting to tomorrow, tomorrow week, that will be ample, a week will be ample, a week in spring, that puts the jizz in you.
— Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose 1950-1976
In the end, life is about collecting experiences and looking for the lesson and blessing in each one. Yet we are never to carry these experiences on our backs, only in our hearts. One will hold us back, while the other will keep us moving forward.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Heroes deal out vengeance, wiping out insults, and in an existential sense denying their own death. In twentieth-century camps, however, Todorov found, some people instead found transcendence by displaying kindness toward other people. Through small, everyday acts that committed them to the survival of other human beings--even at the cost of lowering their own chances--they demonstrated their own commitment to an abstract yet personal value. Although heroic acts were as suicidal in twentieth-century death camps as they were in nineteenth-century slave labor camps, even in hell there was still room to be a moral human being.
— Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
If you cannot peacefully coexist with many different cultures and beliefs, then you should probably not be living in the USA.
— Steven Magee
Okay, even if we disagree on that point, we still need to keep living our lives, don't we?...
— Susin Nielsen, Optimists Die First
And on a cold Sunday afternoon, he was joined in his home by a small group of friends and family for a 'living funeral'. Each of them spoke and paid tribute.. Some cried. Some laughed. One woman read a poem: 'My dear and loving cousin.. Your ageless heart as you ,love through time, layer on layer, tender sequoia..' .. And all the heartfelt things we never get to say to those we love, Morrie said that day.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Cloud travel is well and good when you have mastered the landings. I never have. I must live, not dream about living.
— Binyavanga Wainaina, One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir
It is not the small number of big decisions that we take but the large number of small decisions that we take in life, shapes our life.
— Ratish Edwards
Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.
— Alfred Adler
When we arrived at my home north of the city, my five-year-old son Magnus, brimming with the confidence he'd gained in two full weeks of kindergarten, opened the front door and asked John, "Is it true you live in a tent?""Yes, it is," John said."Why don't you have a house like everybody else?"John leaned in to meet Magnus' dubious stare. "Because I endeavor to remain flexible.
— Mark Adams
To die or not to die, that is the question; it is nobler to live in torment and rage than not to live at all?
— Anne Rice, Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis
You are the most sensual person I know; the goddess of my dreams; the gold at the end of the rainbow; the topping on my ice cream and the best thing that has ever happened to me.And when I wake up in the morning and still find you there next to me, I know that I am living my dream.
— Anthony T Hinkcs
I have drunk the night and swallowed the stars. I am dancing with abandon and singing with rapture. There is not a thing I do not love. There is not a person I have not forgiven. I feel a universe of love. I feel a universe of light. Tonight, I am with old friends and we are returning home. The moon is our witness.
— Kamand Kojouri
Just because we have birds inside is, we don't have to be cages. -from Instant Recognition between Strangers
— Dean Young, Fall Higher
The real lessons is the reality of living life.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
What a great grace to be alive?
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Live this life as gently as you would breathe in the seaside air. Then release all those dreams and wonders to the water. Keep breathing until you’re inches from where you wish to be. Then exhale, remembering that gentle life you grew up from.
— F.K. Preston
The unemotional life is not worth living.
— Marty Rubin
I have nothing to lose, only to live.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Just because we have birds inside is, we don't have to be cages.
— Dean Young, Fall Higher
Be still! Or life will pass you by.
— Anthony T. Hincks
I don't think about how to live my life. I just live it.
— Marty Rubin
I don’t necessarily sit around inviting life to knock me down, but when it does I don’t wait around for an invitation to stand back up either.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
You must choose the life you live at the time you live it.
— Claire North, The End of the Day
However, if the long shot is your only shot, then you have to take it.
— Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star
The price of living seems to always be death.
— Kiersten White, And I Darken
The life-loving, smart,good-hearted deaddon't want forty days of mourningor say, "After me the deluge!"Leaving behind some helpful things- a few words, a tree, a smile -each gets up and goesand does not burden the livingwith the darkness of the tomb,carrying the weightof his stone all alone.And because they ask for nothingfrom the living, it's as if they aren't d
— Nâzım Hikmet, Poems of Nazım Hikmet
Which is the right path for man to choose for himself? Whatever is harmonious for the one who does it, and harmonious for mankind.
— Yosef Marcus, Pirkei Avot: Ethics of the Fathers
When it comes to living and loving, we're all amateurs.
— Marty Rubin
Life - Don't waste it!
— Anthony T. Hincks
The only thing that matters is we are here to live our lives.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Reminding me how fragile this life is and how easily it can be lost. Compelling me to live and to live well, while I still can.Because sooner or later, we must all face eternity.
— Jessica Khoury, Origin
It is true: we love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.There is always a certain madness in love. But also there is always a certain method in madness.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
...to be able to enjoy the life you have spent, is to live it twice.
— Marcus Valerius Martialis, Epigrams
When I think of what I already lived through it seems to me I was shedding my bodies along the paths.
— Clarice Lispector
It wasn’t until I slowed the car and rolled down the windows that I realized I spend most of my days driving ‘through’ life without driving ‘in’ life. So, I’ve decided to walk because the pace is slower and the windows are always down.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Thus the activity of preservation should be distinguished from the nostalgia accompanying fantasies of a lost home from which the subject is separated and to which he seeks to return. Preservation entails remembrance, which is quite different from nostalgia.
— Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays
...you have to bear witness to your dead. You simply have to. You have to step into their energy field of whatever remains of their spirit, their soul, their essence and let it pass through your body. And in the passing, maybe a wisp of it adheres to you, grafts itself to your cells. And in this communion, the dead continue to live. Or strive to.
— Dennis Lehane, Since We Fell
Don't think you're living when you just exist!
— Ahmed Mostafa, Heartbreak & Other States
In the distance are the lights of town. People must be finishing their workdays, picking up their kids, figuring out dinner. They're talking to one another in easy voices about things of great significance and things that don't mean much. The distance between us and all of that living feels insurmountable.
— Nina LaCour, We Are Okay
We live, if we still do live, in a Sea of Chaos, out of which any fucking monster can evolve.
— Stephen Jones, Zombie Apocalypse!
I need my eulogy to look better than my resume. I'm living for that.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.
— Joan Didion, Goodbye To All That
None of my life is based on how others think I should have lived it.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
A school should not be a preparation for life. A school should be life.
— Elbert Hubbard
It’s really a rather simple thing to bring balance to my anger. All I need to do is remember that the ‘hand of cards’ that have been dealt to me pale in comparison to the ‘deck of cards’ that I’ve thrown at others.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
I'd forgotten about it, and now I forgot it again. There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.
— Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me
Call it Irony or destiny of life, but the fact is I failed to make a living from what 'I loved doing the most' nor did I justify for what I was paid for!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
Incidental, all of it, of course, but this was what this city bestowed that novels couldn't: not what you needed in order to live, but what made the living worth doing in the first place.
— Garth Risk Hallberg
It is time to stop standing at the edges of rooms. Hugging the walls. Living in my head. Wishing I had something to say.
— Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person
a little modesty averts disgrace
— Bemy Wells
Each of us is impermanent wave of energy folded into the infinite cosmic order. Acknowledgement of the fundamental impermanence of ourselves unchains us from the strictures of living a terrestrial life stuck like a needle vacillating between the magnetic pull of endless desire and the terror of death. Once we achieve freedom from any craving and all desires and we are relieved of all titanic fears, we release ourselves from living in perpetual distress. Once we rid ourselves from any impulse to exist, we discover our true place in the universal order. The composition of our life filament is exactly right when we accept the notion of living and dying with equal stoicism.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The moment we understand life, we will begin to live.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Is there any adventure like living life?
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Life is the greatest gift. As long as I live, I can only be grateful.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Directing a funeral isn’t about death at all. Funerals are for the living, not the dead.
— Rebecca McNutt, Restless Souls and Shallow Graves: A Short Story
The miracle is that the brilliance of the miraculous can live in the blandness of the mundane. The greater miracle is that we have enough brilliance in our own blandness to see it.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
I’d seen a thousand lifetimes come and go, but had never truly lived.
— Jacqueline Pawl, Defying Vesuvius
Bandit or demon, human or beast, none of it made any difference. The bandits had made this a situation of predators and prey. Only living mattered. Everything else was nothing more than an afterthought.
— Drew  Hayes, Split the Party
Before researchers become researchers they should become philosophers. They should consider what the human goal is, what it is that humanity should create.Doctors should first determine at the fundamental level what it is that human beings depend on for life...Modern scientific agriculture, on the other hand, has no such vision. Research wanders about aimlessly, each researcher seeing just one part of the infinite array of natural factors which affect harvest yields.Even though it is the same quarter acre, the farmer must grow his crops differently each year in accordance with variations in weather, insect populations, the condition of the soil, and many other natural factors. Nature is everywhere in perpetual motion; conditions are never exactly the same in any two years.Modern research divides nature into tiny pieces and conducts tests that conform neither with natural law nor with practical experiences. The results are arranged for the convenience of research, not according to the needs of the farmer.
— Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution
The hour is only love thus, if you've waited.
— J. Limbu
to live at all is to be bruised
— Sarah Perry
Show me a universal life manual and I will show you a ready-made scam.Life is spontaneous. Live and learn.
— Magnus Nwagu Amudi
When you live in a glass house,buying curtains for the windows doesn't help.
— Anthony T. Hincks
It feels like home, far from home, yet homely. I have always been a fan of Delhi's practical life not that i have lived in an aspiration or yearning to make a living here, but delhi has always been on my soapbox.
— Parul Wadhwa, The Masquerade
My past lives alone. That's why my loneliness wants to live in the past
— Munia Khan
If you live your life worried about the what-ifs, you're going to live a very desolate life.
— Katherine Bogle, Haven
You're alive, Haven, but when are you going to start living?
— Katherine Bogle, Haven
God is gathering a small number of chosen people who will live within the boundaries these times
— Sunday Adelaja
It's chance, I tell you,' he interrupted, ' as everything is in a man's life.
— H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau
This earth in which we are living is not our everlasting home
— Sunday Adelaja
I realized then that all of the problems in my life that I thought were unsolvable were in fact solvable—except for having just jumped.
— Ken Baldwin
Life is too short to spend it living for mundane things
— Topsy Gift
Outside your comfort zone is the only place worth living.
— Karina Bliss, Rise
Life is a mystery, not a riddle. It has to be lived, not solved.
— Osho, When the Shoe Fits: Stories of the Taoist Mystic Chuang Tzu
You cannot operate from a place of love when you are emotionally unstable.
— Kemi Sogunle, Beyond the Pain by Kemi Sogunle
Never grow weary of giving,Your small contribution can make someone else’s life worth living.
— Charmaine J. Forde
Transformations are a part of life. We are constantly being changed by things changing around us.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Life isn't about living the longest
—  it's about living the most.
Then again, that's how the most successful predators work, she thinks ruefully. We stumble into their traps and do their work for them while we're busy getting on with the business of living.
— Kimberly Morgan, On Angels and Rabbit Holes
Living and struggling, for others, is a great and dignified life. Whereas, living for oneself exhibits just egocentric and own importance, since mostly falls under it.
— Ehsan Sehgal
If safety is my goal, living life is not.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
We are living from inside out not from outside in.
— Sunday Adelaja
One moment now may give us moreThan fifty years of reason
— Our minds shall drink at every poreThe spirit of the season.
The Coming of Wisdom with TimeThough leaves are many, the root is one,Through all the lying days of my youthI swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;Now I may wither into the truth.
— W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
And maybe that is what it comes down to, knowing what the other person needs even before they know it themselves. Maybe it’s just that simple and it is only us who make it complicated with our anniversaries and our gifts, with grand declarations and public demonstrations, empty words and valuable stones.
— Shitij Sharma, The Girl from Rostov
Give yourself for the course of living for others, improving their lives, becoming a deliverer to a nation and you will never be at the losing end
— Sunday Adelaja
My existence is enough gift of grace.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers, and everything else worthwhile. And that's as true for the last man as the first.
— Fritz Leiber, A Pail of Air
There are big advantages of living for God, therefore try to spend every minute you have walking with Him, listening to Him and learning of His wisdom
— Sunday Adelaja
We are living on what we believe and the virtues upon which we stand.
— Sunday Adelaja
When Mathematics unfold through Origamis, when video games target Medicine and Education, when architecture embraces nature, when we defy gravity, when physics dance, and dance clubs play Einstein, when we stop playing war, when TV starts saying something, when we produce without wasting, when engineering meets humanity’s primary needs, when all of these are not just casualties, but a standard we all live UP to: Then we’ll know. I’ll know: we really live in the 21st century
— Natasha Tsakos
You cannot follow the trend of living independently of the realities of the kingdom of God without being naked
— Sunday Adelaja
To Extend The Kingdom Principles Is Living a Life Of Vision
— Sunday Adelaja
Living a life changing kingdom principles is a life that is worth living
— Sunday Adelaja
God put you on earth with a divine assignment- something prepared in advance for you to do. I've found that the things that make us sad, the things that make us righteously angry, or the things we care about that others don't are often a key that unlocks our reason for living. It's our burden.
— Craig Groeschel, Weird: Because Normal Isn't Working
Life is lie, Living is the truth.
— Naresh Soni
It's hard to think of such things when you are busy dreaming or loving or screwing. The context falls away.
— David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing
I'm going to live until I die and I'm not going to get life and death confused. While I'm on this earth I'm going to LIVE. Why only be half alive? Every minute a person spends worrying about dying is just one minute that fellow might as well have been dead.
— David J Schwartz, The Magic of Getting What You Want by David J. Schwartz Author of the Magic of Thinking Big
The more we understand the simplicity of life, the less complex we shall live.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
(On the myth of Eros)Each time I recall this myth, I wonder: Are we never to be able to see the true face of love? And I understand what the Greeks meant by this: Love is an act of faith and its face should always be covered in mystery. Every moment should be lived with feeling and emotion because if we try to decipher it and understand it, the magic disappears.
— Paulo Coelho, The Spy
I am not always just living, just following all my fantasies; I come up for air, for understanding.
— Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
You think this is living? This is eating, nothing else.
— Peter S. Beagle, A Fine and Private Place
So I had something to do, something I'd done, someplace to go, and something to look forward to. That's a reasonable way to live. I enjoyed myself living. I had a good time. How much else can you ask for?""A lot more," Laura said softly, "if you're greedy. I was greedy once.""So was I, but that was a long time ago. You're greediest when you're born, and after that it's downhill all the way. Live to be two hundred and you wouldn't demand anything.
— Peter S. Beagle, A Fine and Private Place
Instead of drifting away from God, you'll be firmly anchored, able to swim against the tide, offering living water to all you meet.
— Craig Groeschel, Weird: Because Normal Isn't Working
Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we've lived. To get a sense that we have already journeyed through something - survived it, experienced it - is often so much easier and less messy than the task of currently living through something.
— Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl
For people like us, looking towards the future can feel daunting. It can literally make us feel sick to the stomach and often induces panic attacks. Trust me, I’ve been there; I get it. That’s why the far-future should never be at the top of our “to-plan” list. It’s alright to have goals but to stress ourselves out with plans and options and worries of the future is a good way to drive us crazy. However, there is one time when I want you to consider the future. Always have something to look forward to.
— S.R. Crawford, From My Suffering: 25 Ways to Break the Chains of Anxiety, Depression & Stress
Less thinking, more living.
— S.R. Crawford, From My Suffering: 25 Ways to Break the Chains of Anxiety, Depression & Stress
He’s dying!’ Doctor Cove, one of the ship’s two medical officers told me, looking at his med-scanner as he kneeled at the broken body of the only living Corsair on the black ship. I remember the look on his face as he told me – which seemed more to be puzzlement than actual concern. The man was a Corsair after all, and had injuries I could see, but he was conscious, and none of them looked fatal. But then, I’m no doctor. I never was any good at healing anything – and my job was doing the opposite, and I admit I’m pretty good at it. Always have been.
— Christina Engela, Space Vacation
There was no better way to live, or worse. It was all terrible, and you had to do it constantly,
— Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
We are living out the drama of a pathetic story whose pages are smeared with our own handwriting.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
So many people die though they live, and it is not as if they don’t have life; they only refuse to keep breathing!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Don't grieve over the past, It's all gone!Don't worry about the future, It may never come! Live in the present, And enjoy every moment
— Mouloud Benzadi
My mother sings One day at a time sweet Jesus, and even Daddy likes to say that, one day at a time, as if it's some strategy for living. And yet the quickest way to not live at all is to take life one day at a time.
— Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings
We want life to make sense. If we don’t find meaning and orientation, we are bound to fabulate a living and invent an inspiring life story. When we write out a chosen script, we’ll have to make time to hunker down into attuning it to the hitches of the road map, time and again, with fractious patience. ( "Everybody his story" )
— Erik Pevernagie
Die every night so in the morning you are reborn.
— Kamand Kojouri
It maybe that we have all lived before and died, and this is hell.
— A.L. Prusick
Jenny and I once talked about how we manage to live despite the knowledge that we are all going to die. What's the point of it all? Why bother getting up in the morning when faced with such futility? Or is it the promise of death that inspires life? That we must grab what we can while there's still time? Is it the not knowing if today is the day that keeps us going? But what if this is the day? What if the hour is here? How do you stand? How do you breathe? How do you go on?
— Steven Rowley, Lily and the Octopus
That night I think we were trying to fight against death, against boredom and banality, against everything that made us cry and stare at our futures full in the face with dread. We drank and played games to be in the now, to be in each moment as hard as we could, because the moment was all that mattered, at the end of it all. I remember I felt intoxicated on life and darkness. I felt powerful. It was the most natural thing in the world. This was why we were alive– to be powerful and free.
— Laure Eve, The Graces
To greet each day ossified
— Like fossil remains forgotten beneath the feet of something more lively.
Today’s living people are much more important than tomorrow’s yet unborn people! We need to help the people of today before helping the people of tomorrow! We cannot make our plans so as to save the people of distant future by ignoring today’s people!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The business of the dead belongs to the living.
— Margaret Stohl, Necklace of Raindrops
Delighted to be lost.
— Polkadot, Enchanted High
You can never get enough of adventure.
— Polkadot, Enchanted High
Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living.
— Robert Charles Wilson, Spin
Most of us haven't begun to tap our own potential
—  we're operating way below capacity. And we'll continue as long as we are looking for someone to give us the key to the kingdom. We must realize that the kingdom is in us
The only thing worse than living with regret, is dying with regret.
— Jewel E. Ann, Scarlet Stone
If you're living completely on your own, break out of solitary confinement. Seek to understand others, and help them understand you.
— Martha Beck
The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had never done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm.
— Han Kang, The Vegetarian
In keeping with your policy of bringing Pollution the latest in death and violence, and in living colour, there’s going to be something entirely different… death without remediation.
— Rebecca McNutt, Mandy and Alecto: The Collected Smog City Book Series
Although complex, life is simple. It is individual.Living is the challenge. It is interactive. It's collective.
— 1 Minuto na Palma da Mão
We have a saying up here. ‘Life is wasted on the living.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
There is no point to be alive if you live like a dead man
— Kevin Bogaert
He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.-- John Williams, 'Stoner
— John Williams
Now I knew that life and truth were one; that life mere and pure is in itself bliss; that where being is not bliss, it is not life, but life-in-death. Every inspiration of the dark wind that blew where it listed went out a sigh of thanksgiving. At last I was! I lived, and nothing could touch my life! My darling walked beside me, and we were on our way home to see the Father!
— George MacDonald, Lilith
When living is too sweet and swanky, it may be very hard to appreciate the simplest things in life. (“Is that all there is?”)
— Erik Pevernagie
If we’re missing life it’s probably because we’re expecting it to reveal itself to us, rather than realizing that life is revealed by us looking for it.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
I feel I'm living in parentheses
— Steven Wilson
The greatest dividends in life are those that we give away.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
I live each day with fullness of thanks.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The worst denial of all is being in denial that we’re in denial in the first place. And I would wonder if that’s not exactly where most of us live out most of our lives.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe we ought to consider that sometimes the most destructive outcomes in our lives are the ones that we’ve created.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
What does the anticipation feel like? The sensation of staring into the void, the awareness of an end’s impending arrival? Burning and being extinguished simultaneously?
— Teo Yi Han
We can fill our lives with ‘stuff,’ but as we do we’re concurrently filling our lives with the obligation to maintain that ‘stuff.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
You're an unemployed bum. Should you live in that Finnish city by the lake with the S-market and K-market? Or how about that other Finnish city by the lake with the S-market and K-market? Finnish cities are all so very different!
— Phil Schwarzmann, How to Marry a Finnish Girl
You're already dead inside. Years of living in Espoo have made you an empty husk of a human being. They don't call their hockey team the "Espoo Blues" for nothing.
— Phil Schwarzmann, How to Marry a Finnish Girl
We’ve yet to comprehend the impervious reality that to gain ‘life’ we have to do the most scandalous thing imaginable, and that is to work ‘against’ the whole of our humanity and give everything away. And yet to give everything away is to work ‘with’ the whole of God’s character.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
We can live out our lives, and in the end realize that we never really ‘lived’ a day in our lives.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
It may be that we’re not seeing the wonder in life because all we’re doing is wondering how we’re going to survive life.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
To live a lie may allow us to avoid the truth, but the real lie lays in believing that we can avoid the truth in the first place.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
The strangest things in life, are often closer to reality, than reality would like to admit.
— Anthony L.S.
To let something go is to participate in a much greater dance that we call life.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Life is not about getting everything right, as much as it’s about working to live right.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Our actions in the present build the staircase to the future. The question is whether that staircase is going up or down.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
You shouldn't be wasting your time worrying about what's going to happen after you die. It's pointless. Think about what's happening now. In your life. That's what's important. So change the subject, will you?
— Clare Furniss, The Year of the Rat
For now the world keeps turning and I keep breathing, in and out, in and out. I breathe in the life that is all around me, in this garden, in this city, in the fields beyond it, in the seas beyond them and the shores on the other side; life that reaches out towards the unreachable, unknowable space that is beyond all of us and the stars that burn there. The world may tip at any moment.But for now that doesn't matter.
— Clare Furniss, The Year of the Rat
Avoid living in new homes and working in new offices due to the high levels of chemical out-gassing that they exhibit during their first year.
— Steven Magee
He put his life on hold as he waited for his life to begin.
— Keith Donohue, Centuries of June
Because despite the undeniable knowledge that I wasn't human—or mostly human, anyway—despite the proof the computer screen had show in the repair room, I still picture my interior just the same as any other sixteen-year-old girl's. Blood and guts and bones. A brain, and a functioning heart. Hopes and dreams, fears and sorrow. They could tell me the truth, but they couldn't force me to accept it.
— Debra Driza, MILA 2.0
Most of us are living at a pace that is not only unsustainable
—  it's also unbiblical.
12. There will come a day, much quicker than your parents would wish, when you will no longer be comfortable living at home. You will want to move out and establish a home of your own. After that time, your mother and father will be more like your friends than your parents. And someday, if they live long enough, you will be more like a parent to them than a son or daughter.
— James C. Dobson, Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future
My chest clenched as I looked down at the oil-stained asphalt. Here but not. Existing but not living. I knew that feeling. Lived it for several years. Some days it felt like I was still wearing that feeling like a heavy jacket buttoned up too tightly.
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, The Problem with Forever
Live your life in such a way that you can say "I love my life" and really mean it.
— TemitOpe Ibrahim
Water is such a lifesaver into which we cannot breathe but without taking it into us we cannot live
— Munia Khan
The global population of Earth are involved in the following corporate government experiments: The long term effects of - 1. Nuclear bomb fallout radiation. 2. Man-made wireless radio frequency (RF) radiation. 3. Exposure to man-made electricity. 4. Eclipsing of the Sun by the International Space Station (ISS), satellites, airplanes and jet aircraft contrails (chemtrails). 5. Eating food forced grown using a variety of toxic industrial chemicals. 6. Adding massive amounts of pollution to the atmosphere and water bodies. 7. Living in metal structures. 8. Exposure to abnormally high solar radiation levels. 9. Relocating to areas that the human has no genetic adaptation to. 10. An indoor lifestyle.
— Steven Magee
As long as you’re breathing, your story’s still going.
— Darren Shan, Slawter
Every time we choose our past over our present, we kill our future.
— TemitOpe Ibrahim
And I am not one of these long-living fictional characters who prays for death as a release from the captivity of eternal life
—  not for me the endless whining and wailing of the undead.
May you begin living beyond.
— Asa Don Brown
Your temperament can drive people away from you and then you live a regrettable life
— Israelmore Ayivor, Become a Better You
Don’t just exist
—  do something meaningful with your life. Discover a problem and fix it.
It's not a homeless life for me,It's just that I'm home lessThan others like to be.
— Akilnathan Logeswaran
Only the living can learn from their mistakes.
— Christina Engela, Fearotica: An Anthology of Erotic Horror
It's better to live as you will want to have lived, rather than spend your time worrying about the end. You are right here in your story. Don't skip ahead
— S.D.   Smith, Ember Falls
Incontinent the void. The zenith. Evening again. When not night it will be evening. Death again of deathless day. On one hand embers. On the other ashes. Day without end won and lost. Unseen.
— Samuel Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said
The whole process of life is a process of deterioration in which everything—and this is the most cruel law—continually gets worse.
— Thomas Bernhard, Gehen
If you are living in the electrified wireless west, then you are living a very abnormal lifestyle that your genetics has no adaptation to.
— Steven Magee
Life is like a guitar and the combination of chords are called moments. Playing them is the called living the moments.
— Vikrmn, 10 Golden Steps of Life
Any given day is a second chance, after yesterday. Make the best of it today.
— Fakeer Ishavardas
We desperately want to believe in something. To simply live out our lives believing in nothing is to live as if this thing we call life is filled with nothing but nothing.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Everyone dies but not everyone truly lives.
— Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit: Finding the Quest That Will Bring Purpose to Your Life
There is nothing more dreadful than having to go walking on one’s own on Monday.
— Thomas Bernhard, Gehen
When we do something, we may not think about why we are doing what we are doing, says Oehler, for then it would suddenly be totally impossible for us to do anything.
— Thomas Bernhard, Gehen
...death is inevitable for all of us. The only thing that really matters in the end is how we choose to live.
— Aimee Carter, Captive
The point to life is not only to live it, but to enjoy it.
— Korey G. Miracle
Death comes for us all, Brother. You cannot hide from it forever. We will die one day, you and I." "And that doesn't frighten you?" Rhy shrugged. "Not nearly as much as the idea of wasting a perfectly good life in fear of it.
— V.E. Schwab, A Gathering of Shadows
But not just alive like I was yesterday and the day before. Alive like I knew I was alive. Like I could feel the breaths coming into my chest. And I knew I was the person inside my own body.
— Matt de la Pena, We Were Here
If I die today, will you remember me tomorrow?The love I'm leaving behind, will you care to borrow? From a snake-shed-skin or from the sky unknownIn all living and the dead I'll dwell to groan
— Munia Khan
But if everything's already decided, then what's the point of living? - Tom, pg 437
— Joseph Delaney, Curse of the Bane
Life is a Curious Thing. Winter turns to spring and Parvaneh passes her driving test. Of teaches Adrian how to change tires. The kid may have bought a Toyota, but that doesn't mean he's entirely beyond help, Ove explains to Sonja when he visits her one Sunday in April. The he shows her some photographs of Parvaneh's little boy. Four months old and as fat as a seal pup. Patrick has tried to force one of those cell phone camera things on Ove, but he doesn't trust them. So he walks around with a thick wad of paper copies inside his wallet instead, held together by a rubber band. Shows everyone he meets. Even the people who work at the florist's,
— Fredrik Backman
What do I aspire to be? Just an ordinary person who values living.
— Marty Rubin