Life Quotes

But what is life if you don't live it?

~ James Patterson

Tristan was silent for a few moments, looking at the leaves before them. Life isn't about the past and the future. It's about today. He paused. It's about five minutes from now and two seconds ago. It's moments, you know? Not years. Years aren't what define us.

~ Chelsea Fine

Hurt is a part of life. To be honest, I think hurt is a part of happiness, that our definition of happiness has gotten very narrow lately, very nervous, a little afraid of this brawling, fabulous, unpredictable world.

~ Julian Gough

Whoever said that the past isn't dead had it backward. It's the future that's already dead, already played out.

~ Gayle Forman

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.

~ David Foster Wallace

Life did not stop, and one had to live.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Life is such a glorious trauma, is it not?

~ J.r. Ward

Dancers are the athletes of God.

~ Albert Einstein

Life is a funny thing. We only get so many years to live it, so we have to do everything we can to make sure those years are as full as they can be. We shouldn't waste time on things that might happen someday, or maybe even never.

~ Colleen Hoover

In magic - and in life - there is only the present moment, the now. You can't measure time the way you measure the distance between two points. 'Time' doesn't pass. We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we're always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better, about the consequences of our actions, and about why we didn't act as we should have. Or else we think about the future, about what we're going to do tomorrow, what precautions we should take, what dangers await us around the next corner, how to avoid what we don't want and how to get what we have always dreamed of.

~ Paulo Coelho

Dogs are great. Bad dogs, if you can really call them that, are perhaps the greatest of them all.

~ John Grogan

That woman doesn't have the sense God gave a retarded flea.

~ Nora Roberts

The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.

~ Joseph Campbell

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

~ Truman Capote

Like madness is the glory of this life.

~ William Shakespeare

It's much easier to not know things sometimes. Things change and friends leave. And life doesn't stop for anybody.

~ Stephen Chbosky

Holding this soft, small living creature in my lap this way, though, and seeing how it slept with complete trust in me, I felt a warm rush in my chest. I put my hand on the cat's chest and felt his heart beating. The pulse was faint and fast, but his heart, like mine, was ticking off the time allotted to his small body with all the restless earnestness of my own.

~ Haruki Murakami

Well, sometimes I worry that my whole life will be based about what's comfortable and easy. I'll care too much about what makes me feel good to ever really reach for anything. And then I worry that even if I do, I won't succeed.

~ Julia Hoban

It is beautiful, it is endless, it is full and yet seems empty. It hurts us.

~ Jackson Pearce

The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.

~ Frances E. Willard

Life is not to be taken seriously, as we are really temporary here. We are like a pre-paid card with limited validity. If we are lucky, we may last another 50 years. And 50 years is just 2,500 weekends. Do we really need to get so worked up? It’s ok, bunk a few classes, goof up a few interviews, fall in love. We are people, not programmed devices.

~ Chetan Bhagat

Tried living in the real world instead of a shell, but I was bored before I even began.

~ Morrissey

What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this -- two things: I crave truth. And I lie.

~ Tana French

My formula for life is very simple: in the morning, wake up; at night, go to sleep. In between I try and occupy myself as best I can.

~ Cary Grant

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.

~ Bill Bryson

Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.

~ Ray Bradbury

You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.

~ H.l. Mencken

Bring something incomprehensible into the world!

~ Gilles Deleuze

Sometimes it's better to stop trying to make sense of things. Life isn't clear cut, there are always gray areas.

~ Alexandra Adornetto

I said Somebody should do something about that. Then I realized I am somebody.

~ Lily Tomlin

When someone is seeking,” said Siddartha, “It happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.

~ Hermann Hesse

When people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the big bang, so there is no time for god to make the universe in. It’s like asking directions to the edge of the earth; The Earth is a sphere; it doesn’t have an edge; so looking for it is a futile exercise. We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is; there is no god. No one created our universe,and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization; There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.

~ Stephen Hawking

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.

~ Henry David Thoreau

We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.

~ Brian Cox

I’m not a bad person. I haven’t killed anyone. I (rarely) lie. I don’t kick little puppies. So why do people look at me as if the world would be a better place without me?

~ Gena Showalter

How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think than in all other time. I'd like to be an old man to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Like gravity, karma is so basic we often don't even notice it.

~ Sakyong Mipham

What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common....

~ Stephen King

Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.

~ Mario Puzo