Living Quotes

If life is worth living for so is it worth dying.

~ Santosh Kalwar

Live life while you have it; the fact that you have it is highly improbable, the fact that you will lose it is guaranteed.

~ Philip Defranco

Life is short only if you are not living your purpose.

~ T.f. Hodge

The first law of nature is self-preservation. Cut off that which may harm you. But if it is worth preserving, and is meaningful, nourish it and have no regrets. Ultimately, this is true living and love of self...from within.

~ T.f. Hodge

She knew there were only small joys in life--the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through--and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off.

~ Lorrie Moore

Your life experience is a moving picture, of which you are writer, director, performer, producer and critic.

~ T.f. Hodge

Life, for the living, is a gift of opportunity; an exercise of the will to choose.

~ T.f. Hodge

I find that love is confusing, lust is always definitive.

~ Carl R White

Wake up. If your eyes are sleeping then wipe them gently. You need to be awake for this. It is a matter of life and death. Wake up! If your mind is sleeping then shake it quickly. You need to be awake for this. It is a matter of life and death. Wake up, I said! If your heart is sleeping then beat your chest! You need to be awake for life! You need to be awake for love! It is a matter of living and being alive.

~ Kamand Kojouri

This life is quite a rave- few heartaches, some long waits, altering faiths & breaking cliches!

~ Jasleen Kaur Gumber

Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.

~ David Fleming

Live not for Battles Won.Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.

~ Gwendolyn Brooks

Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

~ Andrew Marvell

You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

To the Virgins, To Make much of TimeGather ye rose-buds while ye may,Old Time is still a-flying;And this same flower that smiles today, Tomorrow will be dying.The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, The higher he’s a-getting,The sooner will his race be run, And nearer he is to setting.That age is best which is the first, When youth and blood are warmer;But being spent, the worse, and worst Times still succeed the former.Then be not coy, but use your time, And while you may, go marry;For having lost but once your prime, You may for ever tarry.

~ Robert Herrick

So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing,and put your lips to the world.And live your life.

~ Mary Oliver

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.And be it gash or gold it will not comeAgain in this identical disguise.

~ Gwendolyn Brooks

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!As tho’ to breathe were life!

~ Alfred Tennyson

This cruel age has deflected me,like a river from this course.Strayed from its familiar shores,my changeling life has flowedinto a sister channel.How many spectacles I've missed:the curtain rising without me,and falling too. How many friendsI never had the chance to meet.

~ Anna Akhmatova

I wanted the past to go away, I wantedto leave it, like another country; I wantedmy life to close, and openlike a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the songwhere it fallsdown over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;I wantedto hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,whoever I was, I wasalivefor a little while.

~ Mary Oliver

What makes us leave what we love best?What is it inside us that keeps erasing itselfWhen we need it most,That sends us into uncertainty for its own sakeAnd holds us flush there until we begin to love itAnd have to begin again?What is it within our own lives we decline to liveWhenever we find it, making our days unendurable,And nights almost visionless?I still don't know yet, but I do it.

~ Charles Wright

I am not a finished poem, and I am not the song you’ve turned me into. I am a detached human being, making my way in a world that is constantly trying to push me aside, and you who send me letters and emails and beautiful gifts wouldn’t even recognise me if you saw me walking down the street where I live tomorrowfor I am not a poem. I am tired and worn out and the eyes you would see would not be painted or inspiredbut empty and weary from drinking too much at all timesand I am not the life of your party who sings and has glorious words to speakfor I don’t speak muchat alland my voice is raspy and unsteady from unhealthy living and not much sleep and I only use it when I sing and I always sing too muchor not at alland never when people are around because they expect poems and symphonies and I am nota poembut an elegyat my bestbut unedited and uncut and not a lot of people want to work with me because there’s only so much you can do with an audio take, with the plug-ins and EQs and I was born distorted, disordered, and I’m pretty fine with that,but others are not.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

Ye are better than all the balladsThat ever were sung or said;For ye are living poems,And all the rest are dead.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

whatever you dobe gentle with yourself.you don’t just livein this worldor your homeor your skin.you also livein someone’s eyes.

~ Sanober Khan

Don't sign your namebetween worlds,surmountthe manifold of meanings,trust the tearstain,learn to live.

~ Paul Celan

Had we but world enough, and time

~ Andrew Marvell

And all at once the heavy nightFell from my eyes and I could see, --A drenched and dripping apple-tree,A last long line of silver rain,A sky grown clear and blue again.And as I looked a quickening gustOf wind blew up to me and thrustInto my face a miracleOf orchard-breath, and with the smell, --I know not how such things can be! --I breathed my soul back into me.Ah! Up then from the ground sprang IAnd hailed the earth with such a cryAs is not heard save from a manWho has been dead, and lives again.About the trees my arms I wound;Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;I raised my quivering arms on high;I laughed and laughed into the sky

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

Did I live the spring I’d sought?It’s true in joy, I walked along,took part in dance, and sang the song.and never tried to bind an hourto my borrowed garden bower;nor did I once entreata day to slumber at my feet.Yet days aren’t lulled by lyric song,like morning birds they pass along,o’er crests of trees, to none belong;o’er crests of trees of drying dew,their larking flight, my hands, eschewThus I’ll say it once and true…From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered,I learned that time cannot be spent,It only can be squandered.

~ Roman Payne

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,Old Time is still a-flying;And this same flower that smiles today, Tomorrow will be dying.

~ Robert Herrick

Had we but world enough, and time...

~ Andrew Marvell

Living is the opposite of poetry. Poetry is the recollection of living, or, more often than not, the lament of having not lived. Or worse yet, merely the contemplation of living. My advice to you, Ms. Harper, is this: Live. And keep living. And never stop to look back to write about what you have lived and observed and overcome, lest you turn into a pillar of salt. This desert life is already full of such monoliths.

~ P.s. Baber

He was weary of himself, of cold ideas and brain dreams. Life a poem? Not when you went about forever poetizing about your own life instead of living it. How innocuous it all was, and empty, empty, empty! This chasing after yourself, craftily observing your own tracks--in a circle, of course.This sham diving into the stream of life while all the time you sat angling after yourself, fishing yourself up in one curious disguise or another! If he could only be overwhelmed by something--life, love, passion--so that he could no longer shape it into poems, but had to let it shape him!

~ Jens Peter Jacobsen

Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpiresAt every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapt power.

~ Andrew Marvell

Persistence. Perfection. Patience. Power. Prioritize your passion. It keeps you sane.

~ Criss Jami

As Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard says, To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.

~ Madeleine L'engle

We need faith and the mind of the Lord Jesus to recognize something of lasting value in even our most ordinary tasks.

~ Philip Yancey

Grace saved my life, it can revolutionize yours.

~ Jay Bakker

If you are still alive, time is now, reject sin, seek righteousness.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Why consult the dead on behalf of the living?

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

If today is all you have to live, what will you do?

~ Lailah Gifty Akita