Living Quotes

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

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

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

The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.

~ Czesław Miłosz

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

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

I have to live if I want to be remembered.

~ Suzanne Young

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

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

When you stop existing and you start truly living, each moment of the day comes alive with the wonder and synchronicity.

~ Steve Maraboli

Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.

~ Gloria Steinem

You only live once, buy Picassos whenever possible.

~ James Frey

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

Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life.

~ Anne Michaels

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

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