Quotations from many of the world’s notables about living a life, especially one that is meaningful, comforting, and emotionally rewarding. Living a life is about more than physical existence, it is about how well one’s needs are met, how well one is able to live by one’s values.
Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.
And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.
Life on the planet is born of woman.
The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
Living gives you a better understanding of life. I would hope that my characters have become deeper and more rounded personalities. Wider travels have given me considerably greater insight into how cultural differences affect not only people, but politics and art.
Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive; survival — going on living — thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it; because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on.
This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.
The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.
Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.
Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life and that to destroy, harm, or to hinder life is evil. Affirmation of the world — that is affirmation of the will to live, which appears in phenomenal forms all around me — is only possible for me in that I give myself out for other life.
Ethics cannot be based upon our obligations toward [people], but they are complete and natural only when we feel this Reverence for Life and the desire to have compassion for and to help all creatures insofar as it is in our power. I think that this ethic will become more and more recognized because of its great naturalness and because it is the foundation of a true humanism toward which we must strive if our culture is to become truly ethical.
Learn to live well, or fairly make your will;
You’ve play’d, and lov’d, and ate, and drank your fill;
Walk sober off, before a sprightlier age
Comes titt’ring on, and shoves you from the stage.
There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state to another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.
The style of life is a unity because it has grown out of the difficulties of early life and out of the striving for a goal.
There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.
I have a simple philosophy: Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full. Scratch where it itches.
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it’s a good place that we’re all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of it.
One doesn’t have to be religious to lead a moral life or attain wisdom.
Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.
Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.
Life is not always perfect. Like a road, it has many bends, ups and down, but that’s its beauty.
The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back: a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.
