Living Quotes

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

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

If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The fog is clearing, life is a matter of taste.

~ Frank Wedekind

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

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

It brings me back to the moment, and I want to livethe moment with everything I’ve got.

~ Lisa Schroeder

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

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

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

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.

~ Gloria Whelan

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

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

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

. . . 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

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

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

..think about the contradictions and complexities that beset people.

~ Bell Hooks

It's more interesting to be out in the world. than to see it reflected in the mirror.

~ Steve López

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

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

It's decidedly bizzare, when the Worst Thing hppens and you find yourself still conscious, still breathing.

~ Elisa Albert

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

Dying isn’t like living, it requires no effort at all.

~ Ann Aguirre

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

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

My body is the shape I live in and it shapes the way I live.

~ Raquel Welch

We are, always, poets, exploring possibilities of meaning in a world which is also all the time exploring possibilities.

~ Margaret J. Wheatley

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

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

It's only life. We all get through it.

~ Dean Koontz