c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
If somebody's getting depressed in life, I would say, "Look at me'. I've got here believing in me. Sometimes, things do not go as you expected and you could feel as if you were ruining everything. But Everything can be only the path to get to the success of your dream. You can not fail until you give up. As long as you keep going, you are on the path for your success.
— Hiroko Sakai
You're mine, Echo, and I'll treasure you forever.
— Nadège Richards, Fleeting Fires
The mercy of forgiveness is brought from the strength to accept any situation given and faced. Spiritual independence and humbleness toward life makes life like a flowing river of release. What happens will happen anyways, and everybody can make mistakes. The important thing is to learn how to make a better future from the mistake.
— Hiroko Sakai
What I always say is that Japanese are like willow. We can be bent easily, but once you try to break us, it would not be so easy.
— Hiroko Sakai
Long as I can spell G-o-d I got somebody along.
— Alice Walker
I can do it, Max. I still have my thoughts. I just can't say them out loud. I still have my friends. I just can't show them. I still have all the things that used to matter. They're inside of me. They can't take that away.
— Catherine Austen, All Good Children
The Islamic revolution in Iran is a positive development.At the same time, the Islamic revolution of Afghanistan, sprung exclusively fromspiritual roots, dealt a heavy blow to the communist regime in the former Soviet Union. In face of that revolution, the red Soviet empire had to concede that it is incapable, in spite of its military superiority, to defeat the Mujaheddin, whose main weapons were their right and their spiritual strength.Another quite new situation appeared as a consequence of the Islamic revolution in Iran, that destroyed the Zionist rule in that country and shook its foundations in that part of the world. Khomeini's letter to Gorbachev, in which he was inviting the latter to convert to Islam, had great symbolic power! What is new again is the movement of Islamic rebirth and the continuous decay of the strength of the colonial government bodies directed from afar by Israel in many Islamic countries.""The Islamic system has remained stable in Iran even after the death of Khomeini and the change in the person of the leader and of the leadership group the only one to remain stable in the entire Islamic world.On the contrary, the demise of the Shah meant at the same time the collapse of hisregime, his artificial form of government, and his army. All that went to the dust-bin ofhistory. The same fate awaits the other regimes that prevail in the muslim world. Israel knows that very well. She tries desperately to cause the wheel of history to stand still. However, any strike against Iran or against the growing Islamic movements, will cause the anger of the muslim masses to grow, and the fire of the Islamic revolution to ignite. Nobody will be able to suppress that revolution.
— Otto Ernst Remer
i want to be stronger, so i can protect what i love more.
— Hiroko Sakai
Fate has carried me'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand--Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breastTo pierce another.
— George Eliot
Fear   Only  Constraints  Undeveloped                       Strength                      where your eyes look to within,                      is what your heart will believe.
— Anthony Liccione
Even from a distance, their eyes conveyed the strength of their souls. And their eyes spoke of death.
— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Apart from my absolute belief in National Socialism and my conviction of Hitler's superhuman heroism, I had always been attracted to Germany.
— Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce), Twilight over England
Tony poured wine into each glass and handed one to Claire. “Do you remember when we had wine at the Red Wing?”Claire closed her eyes, recalling the scene from a lifetime ago, and nodded. “I do.”“I’d been watching you for years. I was so nervous that night. I thought I was planning your acquisition.” He looked into his red liquid. Her stance straightened, “If you’re using business metaphors, may I suggest hostile takeover. It’s more appropriate.
— Aleatha Romig, Truth
And even if you do wear a maid outfit, it doesn't change the fact that you're strong or that you're smart or that you try really hard at everything you do. I think you'd still deserve to walk with your head held high.
— Hiro Fujiwara, Maid-sama! Vol. 01
Hope drowned in shadowsemerges fiercely splendid––boldly angelic.
— Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams
Life has moments that feel as if the sun has blackened to tar and the entire world turned to ice.  It feels as if Hades and his vile demons have risen from the depths of Tartarus solely for the purpose of banding to personally torture you, and that their genuine intent of mental, emotional, and spiritual anguish is tearing you to shreds.  Your heart weighs as heavily as leaden legs which you would drag yourself forward with if not for the quicksand that pulls you down inch by inch, paralyzing your will and threatening oblivion.  And all the while fire and brimstone pour from the sky, pelting only you.  Truly, that is what it feels like. But that feeling is a trial that won't last forever.  Never give up.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
It's not the wound that teaches, but the healing.
— Marty Rubin
Free folk don't follow names, or little cloth animals sewn on a tunic," the King-Beyond-the-Wall had told him. "They won't dance for coins, they don't care how your style yourself or what that chain of office means or who your grandsire was. They follow strength. They follow the man.
— George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
After all that I'd been through, after all that I'd learned and all that I'd been given, I was going to do what I had been doing every day for the last few years now: just show up and do the best that I could do with whatever lay in front of me.
— Michael J. Fox, Lucky Man
One thing I've learned in life is that I can speak for myself, that I can fight my own battles. I don't like anyone telling me how I'm supposed to feel or think or what I'm supposed to say.
— Hope Solo
I can see myself now, she said. And I can see what I want to be, ten years from now. But I don't understand how I'm going to get from here to there.
— Jodi Picoult, The Pact
You know," Marion said, "I met a woman once when I was a teenager. I knew she had gone through a lot but she was so strong, so compassionate. I asked her how she could be the way she was, and you know what she told me?"Hadley shook her head. "She said, 'You can be broken, or broken open. That choice is yours.
— Erica Bauermeister, Joy for Beginners
The goblins of the city may hold committees to divide a single potato, but the strong and the cruel still sit on the hill, and drink vodka, and wear black furs, and slurp borscht by the pail, like blood. Children may wear through their socks marching in righteous parades, but Papa never misses his wine with supper. Therefore, it is better to be strong and cruel than to be fair. At least, one eats better that way. And morality is more dependent on the state of one’s stomach than of one’s nation.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless
You are no ruin sir--no lighting-struck tree: you are green and vigorous. Plants will grow about your roots, whether you ask them or not, because they take delight in your bountiful shadow; and as they grow they will lean towards you, and wind round you, because your strength offers them so safe a prop.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Someone once told me that life wasn't fair...and they were right. But I don't think that life was ever meant to be fair or perfect. It's not the tragedy, it's how we deal with it. It's whether we come out stronger because of it. It's not about blocking out the pain or hiding from it, it's about letting the pain shape you into someone better than you were before.
— Nicole Garber, Coming Apart
Sometimes events that lead us bereft of anything but grief just happen for no reason other than happenstance--a car turns left instead of right, a train is missed, a call comes too late--and the real test of our humanness is whether, in light of that knowledge, we are ever able to recover. When we again find our way despite the inability to manufacture a deeper meaning in our suffering, that I think is when God smiles upon us, proud of the strength of his creation.
— Neil Abramson, Unsaid
Women already come equipped with a core of steel fiber strength, depths of resolve a man cannot comprehend. It’s not the dynamic strength men have, all power and show. It’s a strength of endurance, fortitude. It is the strength that allows women to conceive life and to carry that life until the day it can stand on its own.
— James R. Tuck, Blood and Silver
Thought is creative - Fear attracts like energy - Love is all there is.
— Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1
. . . she tried to weave the strength of her father and the young beauty of her first love with David, the happy oblivion of her teens and her warm protected childhood into a magic cloak.
— Zelda Fitzgerald, The Collected Writings
One who smiles rather than angers is always stronger.
— David Schary
If Stuart is a freak... it is because he has had the superhuman strength not to be defeated by this isolation. It is because he has had the almost unbelievable social adroitness to be able to fit in smoothly with an educated, soft-skinned person like myself and not make me frightened half to death. If Stuart's a freak, I salute freaks.
— Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards
I have to learn to find that inner core of strength that I am definitely made up of and stretch it into areas where I don't always use it.
— Jodie Andrefski
We are designed with a dreaming brain and a hopeful spirit; it is our nature to envision the life of our dreams. And while dreaming comes easy to us, we must never forget that it takes strength, dedication, and courageous action to bring that dream to life
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Play to your strength
—  then you are always strong.
Elena glanced up at him, taking in his words. “If you get rid of your fear? You know, I never look at you as someone who’s afraid.”“That’s because every time you look at me, I’m looking right back, and the only time I’m not afraid, is when I see you. And I do see you, Elena. I see everything you’ve been through, from so young – how you struggled through it; how you never let it destroy your hope and faith – and I’m afraid of nothing."(Karl and Elena)
— Dianna Hardy, The Demon Bride
Lifes like a game of cards, sometimes you get delt a shit hand, Work with what you got, and never show your weaknesses. Keep a poker face no matter what.
— Logan Zane Hessefort
Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it forgoes revenge, and dares forgive an injury.
— Edwin Hubbell Chapin
One example of an uniquely Sethian approach towards initiation is for the initiate to regard his or her own life with the same urgency and need experienced as in a war zone in which every move and action must be weighed yet determined swiftly, as necessity dictates. During battle, situations such as missed opportunity, lingering sentimentality, second or third chances, or excessive contemplation would be fatal; and so it is on the sinister path.
— Zeena Schreck
A general is a specialist insofar as he has master his craft. Beyond that and outside the arbitrary pro and con, he keeps a third possibility intact and in reserve: his own substance. He knows more than what he embodies and teaches, has other skills along with the ones for which he is paid. He keeps all that to himself; it is his property. It is set aside for his leisure, his soliloquies, his nights. At a propitious moment, he will put it into action, tear off his mask. So far, he has been racing well; within sight is the finish line, his final reserves start pouring in. Fate challenges him; he responds. The dream, even in an erotic encounter, comes true. But causally, even here; every goal is a transition for him. The bow should snap rather than aiming the arrow at a finite target.
— Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
Because we are the only women who are mothers of men." Gorgo: when asked by a woman from Attica why Spartan women were the only women in the world who could rule men.
— Gorgos
No truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end andlearn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
and when hecatches meoff guardand says'i love you'i catch himoff guardand say 'i need your help.
— David Levithan, The Realm of Possibility
It’s weird like, you can see the cruelest part of the world. The cruelest part. But then on the other side you see the most beautiful part, do you know? And it’s like you go from one extreme to the next and they’re both worth it, because you wouldn’t see one without the other. But that cruel part, is damn cruel and you’ll never forget it. But that heaven…is heaven.
— Britney Spears
I just want to say one thing. If I ever write a novel again, it's going to be in defense of weak women, inept and codependent women. I'm going to talk about all the great movies and songs and poetry that focus on such women. I'm going to toast Blanche DuBois. I'm going to celebrate women who aren't afraid to show their need and their vulnerabilities. To be honest about how hard it can be to plow your way through a life that offers no guarantees about anything. I'm going to get on my metaphorical knees and thank women who fall apart, who cry and carry on and wail and wring their hands because you know what, Midge? We all need to cry. Thank God for women who can articulate their vulnerabilities and express what probably a lot of other people want to say and feel they can't. Those peoples' stronghold against falling apart themselves is the disdain they feel for women who do it for them. Strong. I'm starting to think that's as much a party line as anything else ever handed to women for their assigned roles. When do we get respect for our differences from men? Our strength is our weakness. Our ability to feel is our humanity. You know what? I'll bet if you talk to a hundred strong women, 99 of them would say 'I'm sick of being strong. I would like to be cared for. I would like someone else to make the goddamn decisions, I'm sick of making decisions.' I know this one woman who's a beacon of strength. A single mother who can do everything - even more than you, Midge. I ran into her not long ago and we went and got a coffee and you know what she told me? She told me that when she goes out to dinner with her guy, she asks him to order everything for her. Every single thing, drink to dessert. Because she just wants to unhitch. All of us dependent, weak women have the courage to do all the time what she can only do in a restaurant.
— Elizabeth Berg, Home Safe
I want to live. I want to live life with all it's emotions, all it's experiences, I don't want to miss anyhting. But I feel like I will.
— M. Leighton
Day followed day, and night followed night, until Dany knew she could not endure a moment longer. She would kill herself rather than go on, she decided one night... Yet when she slept that night, she dreamt the dragon dream again. Viserys was not in it this time. There was only her and the dragon. Its scales were black as night, wet and slick with blood. Her blood, Dany sensed. Its eyes were pools of molten magma and when it opened its mouth, the flame came roaring out in a hot jet. She could hear it singing to her. She opened her arms to the fire, embraced it, let it swallow her whole, let it cleanse her and temper her and scour her clean. She could feel her flesh sear and blacken and slough away, could feel her blood boil and turn to steam, and yet there was no pain. She felt strong and new and fierce. And the next day, strangely, she did not seem to hurt quite as much.
— George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
Mercy is stronger than your sword.
— P.C. Cast, Dragon's Oath
You don't always get stronger on the days that everything comes easily to you.
— Nastia Liukin
I'm not weak, I've just been strong for to long.
— Henry kenny lee
Fathers, your are the head and strength of the family unit. If you are not in place, there is a weakness in the link.
— Anita R. Sneed-Carter
it's not his bodythat changesright away.it's somethinginside. he sayshe wants tobe a littleweaker. i don'tunderstand.i say 'thinner?'and he says'no, i wantto be strongerin a differentway.' notbecause of me,but for me.
— David Levithan, The Realm of Possibility
Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Hast thou given the horse strength? Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?...He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage...
— Robert Olmstead, Coal Black Horse
Then Samson said. With a donkeys jawbone I have made donkeys of them. With a donkey's jawbone I have killed a thousand of them.
— Anonymous
I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun. 
— George Plimpton
I'm done with those
—  regrets are an excuse for people who have failed.
Any idiot can face a crisis
—  it's this day-to-day living that wears you out.
One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.
— Edward Abbey
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
— John Irving, The Cider House Rules
A good motto to live by: 'Always try not to get killed.
— George Carlin
Haven't you learned anything, not even with the approach of death? Stop thinking all the time that you're in the way, that you're bothering the person next to you. If people don't like it, they can complain. And if they don't have the courage to complain, that's their problem
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in.
— Leonard Cohen
Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.
— Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.
— George Eliot
I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.
— Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
As you walk and eat and travel, be where you are. Otherwise you will miss most of your life.
— Gautama Buddha
The greatest wealth is to live content with little.
— Plato
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
— Jack London
The hardest thing in this world, is to live in it.
— Mutant Enemy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
— E.M. Forster
The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero, Philippics
Patience, he thought. So much of this was patience - waiting, and thinking and doing things right. So much of all this, so much of all living was patience and thinking.
— Gary Paulsen, Hatchet
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
— Walt Whitman
Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life
Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
— Mark Twain
No one has it all figured out, especially not the people who are acting like they do and judging you because of it. Pretending to be something you aren't because you're trying to please a bunch of judgmental hypocrites and shitheads is not the way to be happy. Living the life you want to live is. It really is that simple.
— Tucker Max, Assholes Finish First
Everyone thinks I have a death wish, you know? But I don't want to die - dying is easy. No, I want to live, but getting close to death is the only way to feel alive. And once you do, it makes you realize that everything you were actually doing before wasn't actually living. It was just making do. Call me crazy, but I think we do the best living when the stakes are high.
— V.E. Schwab, A Gathering of Shadows
The morning wind spreads its fresh smell. We must get up and take that in, that wind that lets us live. Breathe before it's gone.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
I'm a man of simple tastes. I'm always satisfied with the best.
— Oscar Wilde
Let not our longing slay the appetite of our living.
— Jim Elliot
The clock holds me nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere. There is nothing else but now and the shifting depth of the night. I sit at a table alone smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and listening and surviving. I should not be here or anywhere. I should not be breathing or taking space. I should not have been given this moment or anything else. I should not have this opportunity again to live. I do not deserve it or deserve anything yet it is here and I am here and I Have it all of it still. I won't have it again. This moment or this chance they are the same and they are mine if I choose them and I do. I want them. Now and as long as I can have them they are both precious and fleeting and gone in the blink of an eye don't waste them. A moment and an opportunity and a life, all in the unseen tick of a clock holding me nowhere. My heart is beating. The walls are pale and quiet. I am surviving. 
— James Frey, A Million Little Pieces
If I have gained anything over these months, it is the knowledge there is no starting over- only living with the mistakes you've made.
— Jodi Picoult, Perfect Match
Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating other. Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time that someone else. Hours in which honesty is permitted have become rare, and when they arrive one is tired and does not only want to "let oneself go" but actually wishes to stretch out as long and wide and ungainly as one happens to be... Soon we may well reach the point where people can no longer give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
— Jorge Luis Borges
It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living, or get busy dying.
— Stephen King, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption: A Story from Different Seasons
The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
— Czesław Miłosz, The Issa Valley
There comes a time in your life, when you walk away from all the drama and people who create it. You surround yourself with people who make you laugh. Forget the bad and focus on the good. Love the people who treat you right, pray for the ones who do not. Life is too short to be anything but happy. Falling down is a part of life, getting back up is living.
— José N. Harris
I found myself in a sea in which the waves of joy and sorrow were clashing against each other.
— Naguib Mahfouz
Growing up is never straight forward.There are moments when everything is fine, and other moments where you realize that there are certain memories that you'll never get back, and certain people that are going to change, and the hardest part is knowing thatthere's nothing you can do except watch them.
— Alden Nowlan
Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world.But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.
— Milan Kundera, Immortality
Live well, Ichigo. Live well, age well, go bald well, and die after me. And... if you can, die smiling.(Isshin Kurosaki)
— Tite Kubo
If you are waiting for anything in order to live and love without holding back, then you suffer.
— David Deida, Blue Truth: A Spiritual Guide To Life & Death And Love & Sex
I have to live if I want to be remembered.
— Suzanne Young, A Need So Beautiful
To them I'm simply an object from the past that they wish will disappear Then why do I exist? Why am I alive? When I thought about this I could find no answer. But as you live you need a reason otherwise it's the same as being dead, I then came to this conclusion I exist to kill every human besides myself. Fighting only for yourself living while only loving yourself If you think that everybody else simply exist to allow you to experience that feeling nothing is better then that world. As long as there are people in this world for me to kill and continue to feel that joy of living my existence will not vanish.
— Masashi Kishimoto
To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts
I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered-- about her teeth, for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.
— Willa Cather, My Ántonia
When you stop existing and you start truly living, each moment of the day comes alive with the wonder and synchronicity.
— Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.
— Gloria Steinem
You only live once, buy Picassos whenever possible. 
— James Frey, My Friend Leonard
Living as I do with human beings, the more that I observe them, the more I am forced to conclude that they are selfish.
— Sōseki Natsume, I Am a Cat
The greatest art is to shape the quality of the day. 
— Henry David Thoreau
Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life.
— Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
My dad is dead. And as I type this, by the window, on the rainy day, I am alive, yes. I am living. But sometimes it doesn't feel like I am doing it fast enough, or hard enough, or all the way. And it is times like that when I can understand wanting a cigarette in my hand, then my mouth, then my hand again. Holding the cigarette. Tending to the cigarette. Giving the cigarette what it needs. Tapping it in the ashtray. Sucking on it.Then flicking it in the street, like it meant nothing to me.
— Amy Fusselman
As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death. 
— George Bernard Shaw, Overruled
Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?
— Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
It is better to beg forgiveness, than ask permission.
— Grace Murray Hopper
Step by stepMoment by momentWe live throughAnother day
— Anne McCaffrey, Dragon Harper
Though under earth, and throneless now I beYet while I lived all earth was under me.
— C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair
I LOVE living, I have some problems with my LIFE, but living is the best thing they've come up with so far.
— Neil Simon
But we have to learn to be free. We have to, Nell. Doesn't mean happy all the time, or okay all the time. It’s okay not to be okay. I told you that, but I'm relearning it myself. But not being okay doesn't mean you stop living.
— Jasinda Wilder, Falling into You
Either you came in here a swimmer or you'd better be a really fast learner
— Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire
The best way to die is when your living
— Alice Hoffman
If only I'd known my differentness would be an asset, then my earlier life would have been much easier.
— Bette Midler
Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Be in love with your life. Every minute of it.
— Jack Kerouac
What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature… That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in.
— Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.
— Gary Snyder
Responsibility is a grace you give yourself not an obligation
— Dan Millman
Always rememberYou are lovedYou carry the loveYou spread the loveYou radiate the loveAnd the love is returned to you
— Karen Hackel, The Whisper of Your Soul
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof.
— Shannon L. Alder
It was hard when I knew I was about to be flooded with memories of a life I hadn't lived yet. Really, two lives I hadn't lived yet.
— Kasie West, Pivot Point
It is a mistake to think that moving fast is the same as actually going somewhere.
— Steve Goodier
We born dyin'...But you ask a man an' he talk like he gonna live forevah.
— Walter Mosley, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
Living a good life is like flipping pancakes. If you hesitate, it splatters all over the place.
— Matt Simpson
When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago--and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail--it's disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. It's astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your mind. It's almost like those things didn't happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you don't really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you can't even remember her name.
— Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
To live at all is miracle enough.
— Mervyn Peake, Collected Poems
‎All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
— H. Havelock Ellis
There isn't any such thing as an ordinary life. (92)
— L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs
Surviving is one thing," he said quietly, his voice suddenly calmer, "but you've got to have a reason to do it. There's no point in living if you don't have anything worth living for.
— David Moody, Autumn
I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.
— Albert Camus, The Fall
If your life has no problems, you're not really living it.
— Ryan Higa
Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor futurelessens . . . . Superabundant existencewells in my heart.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
After all this kind of fanfare, and even more, I came to a point where I needed solitude and to just stop the machine of 'thinking' and 'enjoying' what they call 'living,' I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds...
— Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler
And that's how we measure out our real respect for people—by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate—and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.
— Ted Hughes
Living is about clucking your tongue and enjoying the sound.~Slater
— Ted Dekker, Thr3e
Even in the darkest cloudsThere are specks of joyOut of the darknessComes lightJust as dayAlways follows night
— Karen Hackel, The Whisper of Your Soul
How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.
— William S. Burroughs
It stands to reason that anyone who learns to live well will die well. The skills are the same: being present in the moment, and humble, and brave, and keeping a sense of humor. (361)
— Victoria Moran, Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit
I will not die without fighting for a life I am not yet done living.
— Bethany Wiggins, Stung
Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime
— Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
For me, living means I can be responsive to the other person. It means I can show my emotions and my feelings. Talk to them. Feel with them …
— Morrie Schwartz
You're not saving lives, Dad. You can't save lives when no one's living anymore. (Maddie)
— Katie Kacvinsky, Awaken
Its hard to die. Harder to live
— Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion
He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.
— Horace
I’d love to step off this well-trodden straight and boring path. To somehow live differently, think different thoughts, feel different feelings than others. It wouldn’t bother me to be as alone as a tree on the plains. My leaves would be like no other tree’s.
— Gyula Krúdy, Sunflower
Idleness for me is not a giving up on life but a spirited grabbing hold of it.
— Tom Hodgkinson
We all live in the sublime. Where else can we live? That is the only place of life.
— Maurice Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the humble
Real living is living for others.
— Bruce Lee
If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Damned
The fog is clearing
—  life is a matter of taste.
Living is getting knocked down time and again, then standing up time and again, and once more. It's easy to act honorable when things are coming along and all your pastures are green. Plenty difficult when the ground is dried and burned and people have connived to take even that from you. I'll sell this place, or I'll lose it. I'll go on. People who don't have hard times aren't living.
— Nancy E. Turner, Sarah's Quilt
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
It brings me back to the moment, and I want to livethe moment with everything I’ve got.
— Lisa Schroeder, The Day Before
We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.
— Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
Life is for living and working at. If you find anything or anybody a bore, the fault is in yourself.
— Elizabeth I
Actually, years mean nothing. It's what's inside them.
— Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories
The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.
— Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
People long to go backward in their imagination as well as forward. We don't wish simply to exist forever in some future
—  we wish to have existed in some distant past.
It's creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos.What it's going to be, I don't know.Even after all that rushing around, where we've ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.And maybe knowing isn't the point.Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Until we find out who was born this time around, it seems irrelevant to seek earlier identities. I have heard many people speak of who they believe they were in previous incarnations, but they seem to have very little idea of who they are in this one. . . . Let’s take one life at a time. Perhaps the best way to do that is to live as though there were no afterlife or reincarnation. To live as though this moment was all that was allotted. (132)
— Stephen Levine, A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last
Labour-saving devices just make us try to cram more pointless activities into each day, rather than doing the important thing, which is to enjoy our life.
— Tom Hodgkinson
The fact that you are even here, alive, on this planet is a mathematical miracle, and you should not spend the time that you have being busy being miserable.
— Philip DeFranco
Here's to another year and let's hope it's above ground.
— Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
. . . I feel we don’t really need scriptures. The entire life is an open book, a scripture. Read it. Learn while digging a pit or chopping some wood or cooking some food. If you can’t learn from your daily activities, how are you going to understand the scriptures? (233)
— Swami Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras
With a sigh, he grabbed hold of his chair and lifted himself out of it, then wrote on the blackboard: How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? - A.Y.'I'm going to leave that up for the rest of the semester,' he said.'Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I don't want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to understand how people have answered that question and the questions each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
Like go for a walk, say a little prayerTake a deep breath of mountain airPut on my glove and play some catchIt's time that I make time for thatWade the shore and cast a lineLook up a long lost friend of mineSit on the porch and give my girl a kissStart livin', that's the next thing on my list.
— Toby Keith
A conclusion I’ve come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it’s really about making work into something that isn’t drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing.
— Tom Hodgkinson
Living is suffering, Billy. Now give your mom a nice big hug.
— Dash Shaw, BodyWorld
..think about the contradictions and complexities that beset people.
— bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies
It's more interesting to be out in the world. than to see it reflected in the mirror.
— Steve López, The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music
I thought maybe if she could express herself rather than suffer herself, if she had a way to relieve the burden, she lived for nothing more than living, with nothing to get inspired by, to care for, to call her own, she helped out at the store, then came home and sat in her big chair and stared at her magazines, not at them but through them, she let the dust accumulate on her shoulders.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.
— Stendhal, The Red and the Black
It's decidedly bizzare, when the Worst Thing hppens and you find yourself still conscious, still breathing.
— Elisa Albert, The Book of Dahlia
Everywhere I go, it's me and me. Half of me living my life, the other half watching me live it.
— Sandra Cisneros
The life most of us live are lives we are forced to live by immediate needs, influences, and pressures.
— Walter Mosley, Black Genius: African-American Solutions to African-American Problems
Dying isn’t like living
—  it requires no effort at all.
Somehow I had learned from Thoreau, who doubtless learned it from Confucius, that if a man comes to do his own good for you, then must you flee that man and save yourself
— Pearl S. Buck, Fighting Angel
What matters is to live in the present, live now, for every moment is now. It is your thoughts and acts of the moment that create your future. The outline of your future path already exists, for you created its pattern by your past.
— Sai Baba
There just isn’t enough cock in this world to be caught suckin’ and be called anything but a slut for life. The cynic in me would call it a bad habit, but that’d make me a whore in denial and if there’s one thing I am, it’s an honest bitch. Then again, you don’t get famous for being daddy’s little angel, but you can easily fall into the Infamy Bracket by preaching a made-up Bible quote now and again. They say I’m shallow, but I’ve made a living out off diving off the deep end.
— Dave Matthes, Sleepeth Not, the Bastard
My body is the shape I live in and it shapes the way I live.
— Raquel Welch, Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage
We are, always, poets, exploring possibilities of meaning in a world which is also all the time exploring possibilities.
— Margaret J. Wheatley, A Simpler Way
You have to learn how to die if you wanna be alive.
— Jeff Tweedy
Think little goals and expect little achievements. Think big goals and win big success.
— David J. Schwartz
The world is a drama, staged in a dream
— Guru Nanak, Sri Guru Granth Sahib
The idea that property has overcome our personalities is the single reason we'll miss the best part of our lives. It's people, not possessions that make our lives worth living.
— Brian Krans, A Constant Suicide
It's only life. We all get through it.
— Dean Koontz, Odd Hours
You live and then you die, I thought. It's good to have some good times.
— Natalie Goldberg, The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
— George Santayana
Little tree filled his lungs with the white airness of the night, as if he were going to fly. The living voice of his parents. Elisha's eyes. These were reasons enough to set off on another adventure.Reasons to be Toby Lolness again.
— Timothée de Fombelle, Toby Alone
You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
Or one meaning of here is “in this world, in this life, on earth. In this place or position, indicating the presence of,” or in other words, I am here. It also means to hand something to somebody—Here you are. Here, he said to her. Here both recognizes and demands recognition. I see you, or here, he said to her. In order for something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive. We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of.
— Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
What living occasion can,Be just to the absent?
— W.H. Auden, Collected Poems
That's what it means to die, to not be able to stop looking at whatever's in front of you. Some darn thing placed directly there, with nothing you can do about it...
— Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
When you have lived your individual life in your own adventurous way and then look back upon its course, you will find that you have lived a model human life, after all.
— Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
A good half of the art of living is resilience.
— Alain de Botton
Creating means living.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape
We are content with the 'given' in sensation's quest. We have been metamorphosised from a mad body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes staring in the dark.
— Jim Morrison, The Lords and the New Creatures
live to the fullest or die;and die you will anyway, so start living!
— Christopher S. Hyatt
Live your day and live it well. It's yours whether you want it or not.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
The dead weren’t scary. It was the living you had to watch out for.
— Eileen Wilks, Mortal Ties
Then she would wander through fields, over simple, poor land, looking carefully and keenly all round her, still getting used to being alive in the world, and feeling glad that everything in it was right for her — for her body, her heart, and her freedom.
— Andrei Platonov, Happy Moscow
I cannot place the luxury of thought towards tomorrow as I am consumed by living for today.
— Truth Devour, Wantin
How can you live without everything touching you?
— Lauren Bird Horowitz, Shattered Blue
Everyone living is doomed
— Taylor Caldwell
And sometimes we die to prove that we lived.
— Fábio Moon, Daytripper
They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never dissapointed.
— J.G. Ballard, High-Rise