c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden, without the slightest flicker of a doubt, I understood that my life was my own, that it belonged to me and no one else.I’m talking about freedom, Fogg. A sense of despair that becomes so great, so crushing, so catastrophic, that you have no choice but to be liberated by it. That’s the only choice, or else you crawl into a corner and die.
— Paul Auster, Moon Palace
But then, life is a constant withering of possibilities. Some are stolen with the lives of people you love. Others are let go, with regret and reluctance and deep, deep sorrow. But there is compensation for lives unlived in the intoxicating joy of knowing that the life you have - right here, right now - if the one you have chosen. There is power in that, and hope.
— Emily Maguire, Taming the Beast
There are two kinds of secrets. The ones we keep from others and the ones we keep from ourselves.
— Frank Warren
In this lifetime you're nothing more than you appear to be: a stupid, selfish, ignorant, spoiled little girl who thinks the world lives or dies on whether she gets to go out with some good-looking boy at school...I'd still relish this moment...killing you.
— Lauren Kate
Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.
— Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
I had a dream about you last night... you kept meowing at people and licking yourself it was not unlike you normally.
— Nicole McKay, I Had a Dream About You
The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life--or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else's life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window--is that it forces you to rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other people.
— Jojo Moyes, Me Before You
Is everybody in? Is everybody in? Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin. The entertainment for this evening is not new, you've seen this entertainment through and through you have seen your birth, your life, your death....you may recall all the rest. Did you have a good world when you died? -enough to base a movie on??
— Jim Morrison, An American Prayer
Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice. 
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously among extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing?
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Life itself is the proper binge.
— Julia Child
Life is a succesion of lessons which must be lived to be understood.
— Helen Keller
Expect nothing. Live frugallyOn surprise.become a strangerTo need of pityOr, if compassion be freelyGiven outTake only enoughStop short of urge to pleadThen purge away the need.Wish for nothing largerThan your own small heartOr greater than a star;Tame wild disappointmentWith caress unmoved and coldMake of it a parkaFor your soul.Discover the reason whySo tiny human midgetExists at allSo scared unwiseBut expect nothing. Live frugallyOn surprise.
— Alice Walker
when we were kidslaying around the lawnon ourbellieswe often talkedabouthowwe'd like todieandwe allagreed on thesamething
— we'd alllike to diefucking(althoughnone of ushaddone anyfucking)and nowthatwe are hardlykidsany longerwe think moreabouthownot todieandalthoughwe'rereadymost ofuswouldprefer todo italoneunder thesheetsnowthatmost ofushave fuckedour livesaway.
Stop giving your life away to other people.
— Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
Everything that had happened was shockingly beautiful, enough to make you crazy.
— Banana Yoshimoto, NP
The soul is like an uninhabited worldthat comes to life only whenGod lays His headagainst us.
— Thomas Aquinas
My name is Jimmy,but my friends just call methe hideous penguin boy.
— Tim Burton, The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories
I always felt like you had to be important to have enemies.
— John Green, Paper Towns
I do not cling to life sufficiently to fear death.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
Live your life. Be happy as you can be, let go of the things that don't matter, and fight.
— Kiera Cass, The One
If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life; it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth.
— Mitsugi Saotome
Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?
— Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
If you say that you never lie in life,you honestly insult my intelligence.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
Some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up and touch everything. If you never let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you.
— E.L. Konigsburg
Work harder on yourself than you do on your job.
— Jim Rohn
Middle age has been defined as what happens when a person's broad mind and narrow waist change places.
— A.C. Grayling, The Heart of Things: Applying Philosophy to the 21st Century
Let us work without reasoning,' said Martin; 'it is the only way to make life endurable.
— Voltaire, Candide
Simplify your life. You don't grow spiritual, you shrink spiritual.
— Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
Find a voice in a whisper.
— Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait
The truth was, history repeated itself on a daily basis; mistakes were made over and over. People were haunted by what they had done, and by what they hadn't had time to do.
— Jodi Picoult
We are the sum of all people we have ever met
—  you change the tribe and the tribe changes you.
Life is long, and sometimes cruel. Sometimes victims are needed. Someone has to take on that role. And human bodies are fragile, easily damaged. Cut them, and they bleed.
— Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
— William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Love doesn't make the world go 'round
—  love is what makes the ride worthwhile.
Things don't always work out the way we hope. You just have to pick yourself up and find a new direction to go in.
— Joelle Charbonneau, The Testing
It’s too bad if a heart lacks fire,and is deprived of the light of a heart ablaze.The day on which you arewithout passionate loveis the most wasted day of your life.
— Omar Khayyám
There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.
— Maya Angelou
Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born...Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole. - Vida Winter
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.
— Douglas Coupland
The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.
— Jeanette Winterson
having nothing to struggleagainstthey have nothing to strugglefor.
— Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.
— Brian Tracy, Personal Success
It’s a lack of clarity that creates chaos and frustration. Those emotions are poison to any living goal.
— Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
This autumn-why am I growing old?bird disappearing among clouds.
— Bashō Matsuo
The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.
— Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
Stop comparing yourself to others. Always strive to improve yourself to become better today than you were yesterday to serve those around you and the world.
— Roy T. Bennett
You don't win races by wishing, you win them by running faster than everyone else does.
— Philip Pullman, Clockwork
Because you have to just go with the flow. Your life is not your own, with people coming in and out all the time. You get mellow because you have to.
— Sarah Dessen
Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.
— Graham Greene
Whenever I see an ambulance, I like to think there is a baby being born, rather than a death.
— Phil Lester
The thing is, you can’t always have the best of everything. Because for a life to be real, you need it all: good and bad, beach and concrete, the familiar and the unknown, big talkers and small towns.
— Sarah Dessen, The Moon and More
Life may not be pretty but it's always beautiful. We may only see the ugliness on the surface. The shit that only the world chooses to notice. But, if we dig deep, if we get to the heart of life, where there's no pain or fear, where we can just be who we are and love freely without judgement, it's really beautiful.
— S.L. Jennings, Fear of Falling
I know I'm an acquired taste - I'm anchovies. And not everybody wants those hairy little things.
— Tori Amos
at your weakest, you end up showing more strength; at your lowest, you are suddenly lifted higher than you’ve ever been. They all border one another, these opposites and show how quickly we can be altered.
— Cecelia Ahern, Thanks for the Memories
You know, considering your IQ, you're really socially retarded sometimes.
— Shannon Delany, 13 to Life
Everybody was sorry. Sorry was easy. Sorry was for suckers.
— Gretchen McNeil, Possess
All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.
— John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing
Life is just too much for me. I've been confused right from the day I was born... I think the whole trouble is that we're thrown into life too fast... We're not really prepared...""What did you want... A chance to warm up first?
— Charles M. Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, Vol. 5: 1959-1960
I'm dying and all I hear are insults!
— Charles M. Schulz
My life will be the best illustration of all my work.
— Hans Christian Andersen, The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography
The overman...Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life's terrors, he affirms life without resentment. 
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Love changes what is probable and makes unlikely things possible.
— Ally Condie, Crossed
Would you like to know your future?If your answer is yes, think again. Not knowing is the greatest life motivator.So enjoy, endure, survive each moment as it comes to you in its proper sequence -- a surprise.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
I believe life is constantly testing us for our level of commitment, and life's greatest rewards are reserved for those who demonstrate a never-ending commitment to act until they achieve. This level of resolve can move mountains, but it must be constant and consistent. As simplistic as this may sound, it is still the common denominator separating those who live their dreams from those who live in regret.
— Anthony Robbins
In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the "shalt nots" of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. A Wrinkle in Time described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.
— Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life
Love those who hurt you the most, because they are probably the ones closest to you.They, too, are on a path, and just like you they are learning to walk before they can fly. Imagine of everybody you hurt in life turned their backs on you? You would be playing a hell of a lot of solitaire. Love them no matter what.
— Nikki Sixx, This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography, And Life Through The Distorted Lens Of Nikki Sixx
There are only a few notes. Just variations on a theme.
— John Lennon
I will never deny that life isn't fair. It seems as though when a woman leaves a man she is strong and independent, but when a man leaves a woman he is a pig and a jerk.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
I feel very adventurous. There are so many doors to be opened, and I'm not afraid to look behind them.
— Elizabeth   Taylor
Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her; but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.
— Voltaire
It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H's family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, out loved ones' lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you'd call her.
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Still, he figured, sometimes you've got to do what you've got to do, and then sometimes you've just got to run like hell after it's done.
— Derek Landy, Death Bringer
I'm a fountain of blood. In the shape of a girl.
— Björk
Cake is happiness! If you know the way of the cake, you know the way of happiness! If you have a cake in front of you, you should not look any further for joy!
— C. JoyBell C.
Every single desire can lead to dream and every single dream has possibility to become reality.
— Santosh Kalwar, Quote Me Everyday
They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.
— Lorrie Moore, Anagrams
Be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else--that's how you'll get ahead.
— Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
In the year 2025, the best men don't run for president, they run for their lives. . . .
— Stephen King, The Running Man
It seemed to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
In the end things must be as they are and have always been--the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
I don't think the world is the way we like to think it is. I don't think it's one solid world, but many, thousands upon thousands of them--as many as there are people--because each person perceives the world in his or her own way; each lives in his or her own world. Sometimes they connect, for a moment, or more rarely, for a lifetime, but mostly we are alone, each living in our own world, suffering our small deaths.
— Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot
Heaven is an idea constructed by man to help him cope with the fact that life on earth is both brutally short and, paradoxically, far too long.
— Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle
Love is not a relationship, love is a state of being; it has nothing to do with anybody else. One is not "in love", one is love. And of course when one is love, one is in love – but that is an outcome, a by-product, that is not the source. The source is that one is love.
— Osho
Because no one needs to live for ever. I think that sometimes you can outstay your welcome.
— Gemma Malley, The Declaration
We may run, walk, stumble. drive, or fly, but let us never lose sight of the reason for the journey, or miss a chance to see a rainbow on the way.
— Gloria Gaither
Being brave means that knowing when you fail, you won't fail forever.
— Lana Del Rey
A new day: Be open enough to see opportunities. Be wise enough to be grateful. Be courageous enough to be happy.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Life is a slope. As long as you're going up you're always looking towards the top and you feel happy, but when you reach it, suddenly you can see the road going downhill and death at the end of it all. It's slow going up and quick going down.
— Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami
I've screwed everything up royally. I remember you saying that growing up happens when you start having things you look back on and wish you could change.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes
The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn't want to be used by anybody.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., The Sirens of Titan
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
— Oscar Wilde
Timendi causa est nescire - Ignorance is the cause of fear.
— Seneca, Natural Questions
There are no classes in life for beginners: right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
I hate when people say 'I see'. It doesn't mean anything and I think it's hostile. Whenever anyone tells me 'I see' I think they're really saying 'Fuck you'.
— Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
I’ll never second guess the things that I have done. I’ve got too much left to say and too much to become.
— Alex Gaskarth
When someone tells you they’ve just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can immediately assume so many things: that they’re locked into jobs they hate; that they’re broke; that they spend every night watching videos; that they’re fifteen pounds overweight; that they no longer listen to new ideas. It’s profoundly depressing. 
— Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
We never know when our last day on earth will be. So, love with full sincerity, believe with true faith, and hope with all of your might. Better to have lived in truth and discovered life, than to have lived half heartedly and died long before you ever ceased breathing. 
— Cristina Marrero
Focus on making choices to lead your life that aligns with your core values in the most purposeful way possible.
— Roy T. Bennett
No matter how many people believe or don’t believe in you, you must bethe ultimate believer in yourself!
— Pablo
Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context.
— Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides
It’s a secondhand world we’re born into. What is novel to us is only so because we’re newborn, and what we cannot see, that has come before- what our parents have seen and been and done- are the hand-me-downs we begin to wear as swaddling clothes, even as we ourselves are naked. The flaw runs through us, implicating us in its imperfection even as it separates us, delivers us onto opposite sides of a chasm. It is both terribly beautiful and terribly sad, but it is, finally, the fault in the universe that gives birth to us all.
— Katherine Min, Secondhand World
To build up a library is to create a life. It's never just a random collection of books.
— Carlos María Domínguez, The House of Paper
Regret is counterproductive. It's looking back on a past that you can't change. Questioning things as they occur can prevent regret in the future.
— Colleen Hoover, Slammed
We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.
— Gustave Flaubert
That is life... to begin again when everything is lost!
— A.J. Cronin
I look at the Augusteum,and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated. The Augusteum warns me to not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough--but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
I think people would live a bit longer if they didn't know how old they were. Age puts restrictions on things.
— Karl Pilkington
Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it? And as you split the frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God's will and His grace toward you that that is beautiful, and a part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.
— P. Harding
It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Life is dear to every living thing
—  the worm that crawls upon the ground will struggle for it.
Children and dogs are the messengers of God some of us do not deserve them
— Ginnetta Correli
The past is a place of learning, not a place of living.
— Roy T. Bennett
Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., The Sirens of Titan
Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever. 
— Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project
The strong-minded rise to the challenge of their goals and dreams. The weak-minded become haters.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Do I have an original thought in my head? My bald head. Maybe if I were happier, my hair wouldn't be falling out.Life is short. I need to make the most of it. Today is the first day of the rest of my life. I'm a walking cliché.I really need to go to the doctor and have my leg checked. There's something wrong. A bump. The dentist called again. I'm way overdue. If I stop putting things off, I would be happier. All I do is sit on my fat ass. If my ass wasn't fat I would be happier. I wouldn't have to wear these shirts with the tails out all the time. Like that's fooling anyone. Fat ass.I should start jogging again. Five miles a day. Really do it this time. Maybe rock climbing. I need to turn my life around. What do I need to do? I need to fall in love. I need to have a girlfriend. I need to read more, improve myself. What if I learned Russian or something? Or took up an instrument? I could speak Chinese. I'd be the screenwriter who speaks Chinese and plays the oboe. That would be cool.I should get my hair cut short. Stop trying to fool myself and everyone else into thinking I have a full head of hair. How pathetic is that?Just be real. Confident. Isn't that what women are attracted to? Men don't have to be attractive. But that's not true. Especially these days. Almost as much pressure on men as there is on women these days.Why should I be made to feel I have to apologize for my existence? Maybe it's my brain chemistry. Maybe that's what's wrong with me. Bad chemistry. All my problems and anxiety can be reduced to a chemical imbalance or some kind of misfiring synapses. I need to get help for that.But I'll still be ugly though.Nothing's gonna change that. 
— Charlie Kaufman
My father chose my name , and my last name was chosen by my ancestors . That’s enough, I myself choose my way
— Ali Shariati
...happiness does not consist in amusement. In fact, it would be strange if our end were amusement, and if we were to labor and suffer hardships all our life long merely to amuse ourselves.... The happy life is regarded as a life in conformity with virtue. It is a life which involves effort and is not spent in amusement....
— Aristotle
You make mistakes, mistakes don't make you
— Maxwell Maltz
I like to believe that you don't need to reach a certain goal to be happy. I prefer to think that happiness is always there, and that when things don't go the way we might like them to, it's a sign from above that something even better is right around the corner.
— David Archuleta, Chords of Strength: A Memoir of Soul, Song and the Power of Perseverance
Please, touch me, I pray.
— Jess C. Scott, The Intern
Never let fear hold you captive. Never let self-doubt hold you captive. Never let frustration hold you captive.
— Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
Great goals make great people. People cannot hit what they do not aim for.
— Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
Goals are the road maps that guide you to your destination. Cultivate the habit of setting clearly-defined written goals
—  they are the road maps that guide you to your destination.
You said we all want there to be more than this! Well, there's always more than this. There's always something you don't know.
— Patrick Ness, More Than This
The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.
— Elbert Hubbard
It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.
— David Brin
If you would create something,you must be something.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it. It is the same tantalizing sensation when you almost remember a name, but don't quite reach it. I can feel it when I think of human beings, of the hints of evolution suggested by the removal of wisdom teeth, the narrowing of the jaw no longer needed to chew such roughage as it was accustomed to; the gradual disappearance of hair from the human body; the adjustment of the human eye to the fine print, the swift, colored motion of the twentieth century. The feeling comes, vague and nebulous, when I consider the prolonged adolesence of our species; the rites of birth, marriage and death; all the primitive, barbaric ceremonies streamlined to modern times. Almost, I think, the unreasoning, bestial purity was best. Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future.
— John Green, Paper Towns
...When you die, the energy that kept you alive filters into the people you loved. Did you know that? It's like a fire you've tended all your life, and the sparks are all scattered into the wind.... That's why we survive as long as we do, because the people who loved us keep us going.
— Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer
The dead do not hurt you
—  only the living do.
The more you seek security, the less of it you have. But the more you seek opportunity, the more likely it is that you will achieve the security that you desire.
— Brian Tracy
I admire those who do good and expect nothing in return.
— Roy T. Bennett
Life isn’t meant to be lived perfectly…but merely to be LIVED. Boldly, wildly, beautifully, uncertainly, imperfectly, magically LIVED.
— Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
There're things we keep hidden from one another. Things we hide from ourselves. Things that are kept hidden from us. And things no one knows. You always learn the damnedest things at the worst possible times.
— Jim Butcher, Changes
Life is but a memory Happened long ago. Theatre full of sadness For a long forgotten show.
— Nick  Drake
There are some places in life where you can only go alone. Embrace the beauty of your solo journey.
— Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
After listening and getting to know more about you. Also, feeling a deep connection between us that goes beyond physical attraction. I'm beginning to feel for, so much more than the friendship that I waited to grow with you. I'm not going to try and rush things. However, I don't want to wait until it's to late.
— Jonathan Anthony Burkett, Friends 2 Lovers: The Unthinkable
Some of us weren't born for rewards, Froi. We were born for sacrifices.
— Melina Marchetta, Froi of the Exiles
Remember that life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away!
— Vicki Corona, Tahitian Choreographies: Intermediate to Advanced Level Female Instruction
It was a once in a lifetime thing. I hate to think it but I bet it's true. It's too bad for us that our once in a lifetime happened when were too young to handle it.
— Scott Spencer, Endless Love
How unhappy does one have to be before living seems worse than dying?
— Deborah Curtis, Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division
Dustfinger inspected his reddened fingers and felt the taut skin. ‘He might tell me how my story ends,’ he murmured.	Meggie looked at him in astonishment. ‘You mean you don’t know?’	Dustfinger smiled. Meggie still didn’t particularly like his smile. It seemed to appear only to hide something else. ‘What’s so unusual about that, princess?’ he asked quietly. ‘Do you know how your story ends?’	Meggie had no answer for that.
— Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
Mr. Smith yelled at the doctor,What have you done to my boy?He's not flesh and blood,he's aluminum alloy!"The doctor said gently,What I'm going to saywill sound pretty wild.But you're not the father of this strange looking child.You see, there still is some questionabout the child's gender,but we think that its fatheris a microwave blender.
— Tim Burton, The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories
Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way... you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.
— Aristotle
Killers aren't always assassins. Sometimes, they don't even have blood on their hands.
— Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea
In high seas or in low seas,I'm gonna be your friend...I'm gonna be your friend.In high tide or in low tide,I'll be by your side...I'll be by your side.
— Bob Marley
All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest. It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people. What should I talk about, how should I say it? - I don't know.
— Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
Find a purpose to serve, not a lifestyle to live.
— Criss Jami, Venus in Arms
We all have negative thoughts now and then, but we can choose not to dwell there and not to let them control us.
— Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
So since I'm still here livin',I guess I will live on.I could've died for love--But for livin' I was born.
— Langston Hughes, Selected Poems
People leave imprints on our lives, shaping who we become in much the same way that a symbol is pressed into the page of a book to tell you who it comes from. Dogs, however, leave paw prints on our lives and our souls, which are as unique as fingerprints in every way.
— Ashly Lorenzana
Maybe if I forgot things once in a while, we'd all be a little bit happier.
— Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why
If you wish to achieve worthwhile things in your personal and career life, you must become a worthwhile person in your own self-development.
— Brian Tracy
Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
— Michael Cunningham, The Hours
In life, more than in anything else, it isn’t easy to end up alive.
— Roman Payne
What it means to be authentic:- to be more concerned with truth than opinions- to be sincere and not pretend- to be free from hypocrisy: "walk your talk"- to know who you are and to be that person- to not fear others seeing your vulnerabilities- being confident to walk away from situations where you can't be yourself- being awake to your own feelings- being free from others' opinions of you- accepting and loving yourself
— Sue Fitzmaurice
We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.
— Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History
She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?
— Douglas Coupland, All Families are Psychotic
For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people's faces.
— Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
Life is fair. We all get the same nine-month shake in the box, and then the dice roll. Some people get a run of sevens. Some people, unfortunately, get snake-eyes. Its just how the world is.
— Stephen King, Full Dark, No Stars
Learn to drive?""Never," said Quentin. "My mission in life is to be a passenger.
— Diana Wynne Jones, Archer's Goon
What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.
— Don DeLillo
First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
That is the challenge Companion. To take what has happened to you and learn from it. Nothing is quite so destructive as pity, especially self-pity. No event in life is so terrible that one cannot rise above it.
— Robin Hobb, Ship of Destiny
If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals
I look back to where my life had been. It's always risky to think of letting go. That's why this is the perfect ending. Nothing left to reconcile.
— Loretta Ellsworth, In a Heartbeat
Sometimes, love brings you together even as life keeps you apart.
— Mitch Albom, The First Phone Call from Heaven
When you expect nothing from the world - not the light of the sun, the wet of water, nor the air to breathe - everything is a wonder and every moment a gift.
— Michael J. Sullivan, Percepliquis
All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.
— Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project
Be where you are
—  otherwise you will miss your life.
Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going?
— Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.
— Steve Jobs
Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
— Alice Walker, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology
In my life so far, I have discovered that there are really only two kinds of people: those who are for you, and those who are against you. Learn to recognize them, for they are often and easily mistaken for each other.
— Lemmy Kilmister
He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine - not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything.
— Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War
I had a dream about you. You were lost in a daydream, when I walked in and you began screaming. But I know that could never actually happen. In real life I only enter people’s nightmares.
— Bauvard, I Had a Dream About You
You couldn't erase the past. You couldn't even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right.
— Ann Brashares, Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
Do not let another day go by where your dedication to other people's opinions is greater than your dedication to your own emotions!
— Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
Once you leave out all the bullshit they teach you in school, life gets really simple.
— George Carlin, Brain Droppings
There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
People are successful because they think and act like successful people.
— Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
What about the rest of your life?"She shrugged. "What about it?""Aren't you worried about, like, forever?""Forever is composed of nows," she says.
— John Green, Paper Towns
He knew Alec enough by now to know the conflicting impulses that warred in him. He was conscientious, the kind of person who believed that the others around him were so much more important than he was, who already believed he was letting everybody down. And he was honest, the kind of person that was naturally open about all he felt and wanted. Alec's virtues had made a trap for him; these two good qualities had collided painfully. He felt he could not be honest without disappointing everyone he loved. It was a hideous conundrum for him. It was as if the world had been designed to make him unhappy.
— Cassandra Clare, What to Buy the Shadowhunter Who Has Everything
Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.
— Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday
All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.
— Woody Allen
You have to be grateful to existence that it has chosen you to be a passage for a few beautiful children. But you are not to interfere in their growth, in their potential. You are not to impose yourself upon them. They are not going to live in the same times, they are not going to face the same problems. They will be part of another world. Don´t prepare them for this world, this society, this time, because then you will be creating troubles for them. They will find themselves unfit, unqualified.
— Osho
Life isn't a book. There's no guarantee of a happy ending.
— Kristin Cast, Hunted
We all know we're going to die
—  what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.
I don't know the meaning of life. I don't know why we are here. I think life is full of anxieties and fears and tears. It has a lot of grief in it, and it can be very grim. And I do not want to be the one who tries to tell somebody else what life is all about. To me it's a complete mystery.
— Charles M. Schulz, Charles M. Schulz: Conversations
Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it.
— Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
But in that moment I understood what they say about nostalgia, that no matter if you're thinking of something good or bad, it always leaves you a little emptier afterward.
— John Corey Whaley, Noggin
I think being a teenager is such a compelling time period in your life--it gives you some of your worst scars and some of your most exhilarating moments. It's a fascinating place; old enough to feel truly adult, old enough to make decisions that affect the rest of your life, old enough to fall in love, yet, at the same time too young (in most cases) to be free to make a lot of those decisions without someone else's approval.
— Stephenie Meyer, The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide
Sometimes, some lies that spoken with high confidencecould be more receptive than facts that spoken with doubt.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
I don’t know what it means to live.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Hide your craziness behind a beautiful smile. That's all you need.
— Paulo Coelho
It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.
— Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado
Go boldly and honestly through the world. Learn to love the fact that there is nobody else quite like you.
— Daniel Radcliffe
Participate in your dreams today. There are unlimited opportunities available with this new day. Take action on those wonderful dreams you've had in your mind for so long. Remember, success is something you experience when you act accordingly.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Life was a swarm of accidents waiting in the treetops, descending upon any living thing that passed, ready to eat them alive. You swam in a river of chance and coincidence. You clung to the happiest accidents- the rest you let float by.
— David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
I'm told there's no going back. So I'm choosing forward.
— David Levithan, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares
Write it on your heart you are the most beautiful soul of the Universe. Realize it, honor it and celebrate the life.
— Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power
At moments when life is at its worst there are two things you can do: 1.) break down,lose hope and refuse to go on while lying face down on the ground banging your fists and kicking your legs, or 2.) laugh. Bobby and I did the latter.
— Cecelia Ahern
Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued. 
— Socrates
Humanity does not suffer from the disease of wrong beliefs but humanity suffers from the contagious nature of the lack of belief. If you have no magic with you it is not because magic does not exist but it is because you do not believe in it. Even if the sun shines brightly upon your skin every day, if you do not believe in the sunlight, the sunlight for you does not exist.
— C. JoyBell C.
I consider myself a stained-glass window. And this is how I live my life. Closing no doors and covering no windows; I am the multi-colored glass with light filtering through me, in many different shades. Allowing light to shed and fall into many many hues. My job is not to direct anything, but only to filter into many colors. My answer is destiny and my guide is joy. And there you have me.
— C. JoyBell C.
The letter said that they were two feet high, and green, and shaped like plumber's friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts, which were extremely flexible, usually pointed to the sky. At the top of each shaft was a little hand with a green eye in its palm. The creatures were friendly, and they could see in four dimensions. They pitied Earthlings for being able to see only three. They had many wonderful things to teach Earthlings, especially about time. Billy promised to tell what some of those wonderful things were in his next letter.Billy was working on his second letter when the first letter was published. The second letter started out like this:The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "so it goes.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
Life moves very fast. It rushes from Heaven to Hell in a matter of seconds.
— Paulo Coelho
Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
— George Bernard Shaw
Such a simple concept, yet so true: that which we manifest is before us; we are the creators of our own destiny. Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have been brought on by none other than ourselves.
— Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
Things don't matter, people do
— Rosie Thomas
A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?
— Alan Moore, Watchmen
Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.
— Margaret Atwood, The Tent
Happiness has to do with your mindset, not with outside circumstance.
— Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free