Life Quotes

Your hand can seize today, but not tomorrow; and thoughts of your tomorrow are nothing but desire. Don’t waste this breath, if your heart isn’t crazy, since the rest of your life won’t last forever.

~ Omar Khayyám

Through all of living have much joy and laughter, life is to be enjoyed, not just endured.

~ Gordon B. Hinckley

This is our story to tell. You’d think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven’t. I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the story telling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I was in a story, yes, but not like I was the author of it, or like I had any say in its telling whatsoever.

~ Jandy Nelson

Spend the afternoon, you can't take it with you.

~ Annie Dillard

Life is so full of unpredictable beauty and strange surprises. Sometimes that beauty is too much for me to handle. Do you know that feeling? When something is just too beautiful? When someone says something or writes something or plays something that moves you to the point of tears, maybe even changes you.

~ Mark Oliver Everett

Count your blessings. Once you realize how valuable you are and how much you have going for you, the smiles will return, the sun will break out, the music will play, and you will finally be able to move forward the life that God intended for you with grace, strength, courage, and confidence.

~ Og Mandino

A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to set foot in it. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.

~ Edward Abbey

He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.

~ William Golding

Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain.

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Every last minute of my life has been preordained and I'm sick and tired of it.How this feels is I'm just another task in God's daily planner: the Italian Renaissance penciled in for right after the Dark Ages....The Information Age is scheduled immediately after the Industrial Revolution. Then the Postmodern Era, then the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And between the big events, the earthquakes and the tidal waves, God's got me squeezed in for a cameo appearance. Then maybe in thirty years, or maybe next year, God's daily planner has me finished.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

~ Henry David Thoreau

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

Some people appear to be happy, but they simply don't give the matter much thought. Others make plans: I'm going to have a husband, a home, two children, a house in the country. As long as they're busy doing that, they're like bulls looking for the bullfighter: they react instinctively, they blunder on, with no idea where the target is. They get their car, sometimes they even get a Ferrari, and they think that's the meaning of life, and they never question it. Yet their eyes betray the sadness that even they don't know they carry in their soul. Are you happy?

~ Paulo Coelho

Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

~ Arthur Rimbaud

There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, Boy, the food at this place is really terrible. The other one says, Yeah, I know; and such small portions. Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.

~ Woody Allen

Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn't understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn't much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.

~ Albert Camus

You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.

~ Hermann Hesse

Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.

~ Azar Nafisi

Everybody's damaged by something.

~ Emma Donoghue

I think, well, I've had a shit of a life, all things considered. It wasn't fair. Everyone I've ever loved is dead, and my leg hurts all the bloody time... But I think, any God that can do sunsets like that, a different one every night... 'Strewth, well, you've got to respect the old bastard, haven't you?

~ Neil Gaiman

You're always with yourself, so you might as well enjoy the company.

~ Diane Von Furstenberg

I once had a dreams of becoming a beautiful poet, but upon an unfortunate series of events some of those dreams dashed and divided like a million stars in the night sky that I wished on over and over again, sparkling and broken.But I didn't really mind, because I knew that it takes getting everything you ever wanted, and then losing it to know what true freedom is.

~ Lana Del Rey

You are never alone. You are eternally connected with everyone.

~ Amit Ray

I'm going to enjoy every second, and I'm going to know I'm enjoying it while I'm enjoying it. Most people don't live; they just race. They are trying to reach some goal far away on the horizon, and in the heat of the going they get so breathless and panting that they lose sight of the beautiful, tranquil country they are passing through; and then the first thing they know, they are old and worn out, and it doesn't make any difference whether they've reached the goal or not.

~ Jean Webster

My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments—we hear a word that sticks in our mind—or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly—we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed to the mallard ducks in the lagoon; a small child starts a conversation with us in a Dairy Queen—or we have an episode like the one I had with the M&M cars back at the Husky station. And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection—certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether; one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real—this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives.

~ Douglas Coupland

In the short term, it would make me happy to go play outside. In the long term, it would make me happier to do well at school and become successful. But in the VERY long term, I know which will make better memories.

~ Bill Watterson

It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one's germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!

~ Irvin D. Yalom

The friends you make in college are friends you'll have for life, even if you don't talk for years at a time.

~ Jessica Park

If one has no sense of humor, one is in trouble.

~ Betty White

A lot of the conflict you have in your life exists simply because you're not living in alignment, you're not be being true to yourself.

~ Steve Maraboli

And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death--but it's more peaceful.

~ Leo Tolstoy

No matter what your history has been, your destiny is what you create today. What are you going to create?

~ Steve Maraboli

Life is like a play: it's not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.

~ Seneca

Imitation is suicide.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

You'd think, 'What if I make a mistake today, I'll regret it'. I don’t believe in regret, I feel everything leads us to where we are and we have to just jump forward, mean well, commit and just see what happens.

~ Angelina Jolie

Just because life is hard, and always ends in a bad way, doesn't mean that all stories have to, even if that's what they tell us in school and in the New York Times Review. In fact, it's a good thing that stories are as different as we are, one from another.

~ James Patterson

In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans, in one aspect of You are found all the aspects of existence.

~ Kahlil Gibran

But instead of spending our lives running towards our dreams, we are often running away from a fear of failure or a fear of criticism.

~ Eric Wright

If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.

~ Alan W. Watts