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.
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.
I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.
I have very strong feelings about how you lead your life. You always look ahead, you never look back.
There is a lot more to life than just struggling to make money.
Slowly … the truth is dawning upon women, and still more slowly upon men, that woman is no stepchild of nature, no Cinderella of fate to be dowered only by fairies and the Prince; but that for her and in her, as truly as for and in man, life has wrought its great experiences, its master attainments, its supreme human revelations of the stuff of which worlds are made.
Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you’re going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.
The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.
We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.
Life is a process. We are a process. The universe is a process.
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
What if Life simply wants us to emerge into the awareness that we are already enough?
One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.
Ethics should precede economics… We know this because we’ve seen the results of capitalism without conscience: the pollution of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat; the endangerment of workers; and the sale of dangerous products — from cars to toys to drugs. All in pursuit of greater and greater profits.
Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence
Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.
Art is not living. It is the use of living.
Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
Once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy.
In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.
No one is in control of your happiness but you; therefore, you have the power to change anything about yourself or your life that you want to change.
I live one day at a time. Each day I look for a kernel of excitement. In the morning, I say: ‘What is my exciting thing for today?’ Then, I do the day. Don’t ask me about tomorrow.
In my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work — that goes on, it adds up.
Happy people have two things in common. They know exactly what they want and they feel they’re moving toward getting it. That’s what makes life feel good: when it has direction, when you are heading straight for what you love.
The ordinary surroundings of life which are esteemed by men (as their actions testify) to be the highest good, may be classed under the three heads — Riches, Fame, and the Pleasures of Sense: with these three the mind is so absorbed that it has little power to reflect on any different good.
Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.
Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.
