How Life Is Quotes

1. "Existence is not itself a good thing, that we should spend a lifetime securing its necessaries: a life spent, however victoriously, in securing the necessaries of life is no more than an elaborate furnishing and decoration of apartments for the reception of a guest who is never to come. Our business here is not to live, but to live happily."
Author: A.E. Housman

2. "Hema thought of Shiva, her personal deity, and how the only sensible response to the madness of life . . . was to cultivate a kind of madness within, to perform the mad dance of Shiva, . . . to rock and sway and flap six arms and six legs to an inner tune. Hema moved gently . . . she danced as if her minimalist gestures were shorthand for a much larger, fuller, reckless dance, one that held the whole world together, kept it from extinction."
Author: Abraham Verghese

3. "Isn't that how it is when you must decide with your heart? You are not just choosing one thing over another. You are choosing what you want. And you are also choosing what somebody else does not want, and all the consequences that follow. You can tell yourself, That's not my problem, but those words do not wash the trouble away. Maybe it is no longer a problem in your life. But it is always a problem in your heart."
Author: Amy Tan

4. "From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life."
Author: Anaïs Nin

5. "This is what I'm saying: you hate your life. But you don't know what life is. Life is too huge for you to possibly hate. If you hate life, you haven't seen enough of it. If you hate your life, it's because your life is too small and doesn't fit you. However big you think your life is, it's nothing compared to what's out there."
Author: Augusten Burroughs

6. "The thing about learning how to fight is that— some of us are not born with that desire. They say some are born fighters; but they don't usually point out that others just aren't. Some of us are forced by life to take up arms and fight. Many of us are. The art lies in knowing when to wield those arms and when to put them down. I don't think it's a matter of pretending to be ideally unharmed by life and untouched by darkness; because that is hypocrisy. Rather, I think it is a matter of being true to your truth and learning when to fight and learning when to be soft. Hopefully, our soft moments in life will largely outweigh, outrank, and outrun our fighting."
Author: C. JoyBell C.

7. "To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place.In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable."
Author: Dag Hammarskjöld

8. "It was a generation growing in its disillusionment about the deepening recession and the backroom handshakes and greedy deals for private little pots of gold that created the largest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. As heirs to the throne, we all knew, of course, how bad the economy was, and our dreams, the ones we were told were all right to dream, were teetering gradually toward disintegration. However, on that night, everyone seemed physically at ease and exempt from life's worries with final exams over and bar class a distant dream with a week before the first lecture, and as I looked around at the jubilant faces and loud voices, if you listened carefully enough you could almost hear the culmination of three years in the breath of the night gasp in an exultant sigh as if to say, "Law school was over at last!"
Author: Daniel Amory

9. "Beyond the biological, psychological, and social aspects our lives, we are also spiritual beings. So to fully heal and recover, we must recognize that we are more than just our bodies, minds, and social connections, and we must ask ourselves deep spiritual questions, such as the following: What does my life mean? What is my purpose? Why am I here? What are my values? Do I believe in God or a Higher Power? How does that manifest in my life? What is my connection to past generations, future generations, and the planet?"
Author: Daniel G. Amen

10. "Whenever a Taker couple talk about how wonderful it would be to have a big family, they're reenacting this scene behind the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They're saying to themselves, 'Of course it's our right to apportion life on this planet as we please. Why stop of four kids or six? We can have fifteen if we like. All we have to do is plow under another few hundres acres of rain forest -- and who cares if a dozen other species disappear as a result?"
Author: Daniel Quinn

11. "Getting a handle on why wolves do what they do has never been an easy proposition. Not only are there tremendous differences in both individual and pack personalities, but each displays a surprising range of behaviors depending on what's going on around them at any given time. No sooner will a young researcher thing, 'That's it, I've finally got a handle on how wolves respond in a particular situation,' than they'll do something to prove him at least partially wrong. Those of us who've been in this business for very long have come to accept a professional life full of wrong turns and surprises. Clearly, this is an animal less likely to offer scientists irrefutable facts than to lure us on a long and crooked journey of constant learning."
Author: Douglas W. Smith

12. "Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth."
Author: Fernando Pessoa

13. "Anything can hurt you, Harper. Even things you're supposed to be able to count on can hurt you.""These things you speak of, do they include how we're supposed to rely on mothers and fathers never to die or leave us alone?""Exactly, but that's life, Harper. Nothing is guaranteed.""You're right.""But I can promise you that I would never intentionally hurt you and, although a promise is not a guarantee, it is still a promise and you can ask anyone I know, I'm good on my word.""I don't know why but I believe you."
Author: Fisher Amelie

14. "And without you is how I disappear,And live my life alone forever now.And without you is how I disappear,And live my life alone forever now.Who walks among the famous living dead,Drowns all the boys and girls inside your bed.And if you could talk to me,Tell me if it's so,That all the good girls go to heaven.Well, heaven knowsThat without you is how I disappear,And live my life alone forever now.And without you is how I disappear,And live my life alone forever now.Can you hear me cry out to you?Words I thought I'd choke on figure out.I'm really not so with you anymore.I'm just a ghost, So I can't hurt you anymore,And now, you wanna see how far down I can sink?Let me go, fuck!So, you can, well now so, you canI'm so far away from you.Well now so, you can.And without you is how I disappear,And without you is how I disappear,Whoa whoa... (And without you is how I disappear)Whoa whoa... (And without you... is how, is how, is how...)Forever, forever now!"
Author: Gerard Way

15. "Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release. The problem of recidivism ought to have shown young men like John Greenaway just what sort of a notion security is, but there is no indication that he would understand it. Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life. Human beings are better equipped to cope with disaster and hardship than they are with unvarying security, but as long as security is the highest value in a community they can have little opportunity to decide this for themselves."
Author: Germaine Greer

16. "Nurturing words show that you believe in the other party's capacity to learn, change and grow. One's mind is like a computer. Every message you send goes into one of two files: discounting or nurturing. The file with the most data will direct how one sees and feels about himself or herself. Messages that nurture are based on unconditional love which must be worked at, especially if you come from a discounting family. You will need to rely on Jesus to fill the void in your life with His presence and help you learn how to love unconditionall like He loves us."
Author: H. Norman Wright

17. "Those are life-and-death-type experiences he goes through in the mines. Eventually he gets out and goes back to his old life. But nothing in the novel shows he learned anything from these experiences, that his life changed, that he thought deeply now about the meaning of life or started questioning society or anything. You don't get any sense, either, that he's matured. You have a strange feeling after you finish the book. It's like you wonder what Soseki was trying to say. It's like not really knowing what he's getting at is the part that stays with you."
Author: Haruki Murakami

18. "I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

19. "The Wolf trots to and fro,The world lies deep in snow,The raven from the birch tree flies,But nowhere a hare, nowhere a roe,The roe -she is so dear, so sweet -If such a thing I might surpriseIn my embrace, my teeth would meet,What else is there beneath the skies?The lovely creature I would so treasure,And feast myself deep on her tender thigh,I would drink of her red blood full measure,Then howl till the night went by.Even a hare I would not despise;Sweet enough its warm flesh in the night.Is everything to be deniedThat could make life a little bright?The hair on my brush is getting grey.The sight is failing from my eyes.Years ago my dear mate died.And now I trot and dream of a roe.I trot and dream of a hare.I hear the wind of midnight howl.I cool with the snow my burning jowl,And on to the devil my wretched soul I bear."
Author: Hermann Hesse

20. "Seldon, Hari—It is customary to think of Hari Seldon only in connection with psychohistory, to see him only as Mathematics and as social change personified. There is no doubt that he himselfEncouraged this for at no time in his formal writings did he give any hint as to how he came to solve the various problems ofPsychohistory. His leaps of thought might have all been plucked FromAir, for all he tells us. Nor does he tell us of the blind alleysInto which he crept or the wrong turnings he may have made.…As for his private life, it is a blank. Concerning his parent and Siblings,We know a handful of factors, nor more. His only son,Raych Seldon, is known to have been adopted, but how thatCame about is not known. Concerning his wife, we onlyKnow that she existed. Clearly, Seldon wanted to a cipherExcept where psychohistory was concerned. It is as though he felt--Or wanted it to be felt—that he did not live, he merely psychohistorified."
Author: Isaac Asimov

21. "Yeah, she shows signs of life if you do this," said Ron, and with his tongue he made soft clip-flopping noises. Umbridge sat bolt upright, looking wildly around."
Author: J.K. Rowling

22. "Surely I write not for the hopeful young, Or those who deem their happiness of worth, Or such as pasture and grow fat among The shows of life and feel nor doubt nor dearth,Or pious spirits with a God above themTo sanctify and glorify and love them, Or sages who foresee a heaven on earth.For none of these I write, and none of these Could read the writing if they deigned to try;So may they flourish, in their due degrees, On our sweet earth and in their unplaced sky.If any cares for the weak words here written,It must be someone desolate, fate-smitten, Whose hope and faith are dead, and who would die."
Author: James Thomson

23. "On this upward and sometimes hazardous journey, each of us meets our share of daily challenges. If we are not careful, as we peer through the narrow lens of self-interest, we may feel that life is bringing us more than our fair share of trials--that somehow others seem to be getting off more lightly.But the tests of life are tailored for our own best interests, and all will face the burdens best suited to their own mortal experience. In the end we will realize that God is merciful as well as just and that all the rules are fair. We can be reassured that our challenges will be the ones we needed, and conquering them will bring blessings we could have received in no other way."
Author: Jeffrey R. Holland

24. "The Christian message has a moral challenge. If the message is true, the moral challenge has to be accepted. So God is not a fit object for man's detached scrutiny. You cannot fix God at the end of a telescope or a microscope and say "How interesting!" God is not interesting. He is deeply upsetting. The same is true of Jesus Christ … We know that to find God and to accept Jesus Christ would be a very inconvenient experience. It would involve the rethinking of our whole outlook on life and the readjustment of our whole manner of life. And it is a combination of intellectual and moral cowardice which makes us hesitate. We do not find because we do not seek. We do not seek because we do not want to find, and we know that the way to be certain of not finding is not to seek … Christ's promise is plain: "Seek and you will find."
Author: John R.W. Stott

25. "My mother would always ask us if anyone wanted to learn how to cook or to sew or to iron clothes. I always ran to her—"Me! Me! Me!" So, my mom would teach me. I secretly feared that I might be condemning myself to a life of sissyhood. One day she said it was good that I learned these things because I was never going to be strong or handsome or smart or popular like my older brother, Jesús. He was "el molde" (the mold) I would never be a good copy of him. She said that I might never find a girlfriend or get married—so it was good that I was learning to take care of myself. It freaked me out. I wanted to be strong, handsome, smart, and popular like my brother, Jesús. I never felt like I was. I was just a bad copy..."
Author: José N. Harris

26. "My queen," he breathed, one hand reaching up to frame my cheek, making my stomach jump and twirl. "I belong to you. No matter what Mab says, no matter how long I've been in Tir Na Nog, my life is yours. Nothing will ever make me leave your side."
Author: Julie Kagawa

27. "And now you ask in your heart, ‘How shall we distinguish that which is good in pleasure from that which is not good?'Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower,But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life,And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love,And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.*People of Orphalese, be in your pleasures like the flowers and the bees."
Author: Kahlil Gibran

28. "Ian!" she cried, afraid to believe it. "I don't want you to ever regret that you married me."He smiled, and his fingertips caressed her cheeks. "Regret it? How could I?" You are my passionateItalian wife. You are the woman who is going to give me children and whose bed I intend to sleep inevery night. You're the reason I'll wake up every morning with a smile on my face. I love you, I will be inlove with you every day of my life, and the only day I'm leaving you is the day they put me in the ground."
Author: Laura Lee Guhrke

29. "He bared thick teeth. ‘I am Zacchariah. My price will be right. You show me now?'In that moment, ten generations of horse-traders counted for more than half a lifetime in the legions. I was my father made young again, itching to make a sale. Abandoning the Eagle – I was a horse-trader, what did I care for a gold bird on a stick, however venerated by the Hebrews? – I gathered Pantera and Horgias about me, and trekked back to the inn of the Cedar Tree.Along the way, we collected Zacchariah's well-muscled younger relatives, three other, unrelated, horse merchants who gazed at him with undisguised venom, a woman who claimed she could more accurately assess the sex of the foal our pregnant mare carried, a bone-setter who set to arguing with Horgias but gave up when his poor Greek met Horgias' worse Greek – and Nicodemus and his seven zealots who stood about as we conducted our business, obviously waiting for a chance to inflict violence upon us."
Author: M.C. Scott

30. "How long your closet held a whiff of you,Long after hangers hung austere and bare.I would walk in and suddenly the trueSharp sweet sweat scent controlled the airAnd life was in that small still living breath.Where are you? since so much of you is here,Your unique odour quite ignoring death.My hands reach out to touch, to hold what's dearAnd vital in my longing empty arms.But other clothes fill up the space, your space,And scent on scent send out strange false alarms.Not of your odour there is not a trace.But something unexpected still breaks throughThe goneness to the presentness of you."
Author: Madeleine L'Engle

31. "The Full Monty, ah, it's superb. The Full Monty showed how life really is in certain cities of England."
Author: Mark Roberts

32. "That black, maddening firmament; that vast cosmic ocean, endlessly deep in every direction, both Heaven and Pandemonium at once; mystical Zodiac, speckled flesh of Tiamat; all that is chaos, infinite and eternal. And yet, it's somehow the bringing to order of this chaos which perhaps has always disturbed me most. The constellations, in their way, almost bring into sharper focus the immensity and insanity of it all - monsters and giants brought to life in all their gigantic monstrosity; Orion and Hercules striding across the sky, limbs reaching for lightyears, only to be dwarfed by the likes of Draco, Pegasus, or Ursa Major. Then bigger still - Cetus, Eridanus, Ophiuchus, and Hydra, spanning nearly the whole of a hemisphere, sunk below the equator in that weird underworld of obscure southern formations. You try to take them in - the neck cranes, the eyes roll, and the mind boggles until this debilitating sense of inverted vertigo overcomes you..."
Author: Mark X.

33. "Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced."
Author: Markus Zusak

34. "How very much horrible would it be, if achieving everything was so easy! We bear life because there is struggle!"
Author: Mehmet Murat Ildan

35. "It is that the Spirit is the outbreathing of God, His inmost life going forth in a personal form to quicken. When we receive the Holy Spirit, we receive the inmost life of God Himself to dwell in a personal way in us. When we really grasp this thought, it is overwhelming in its solemnity. Just stop and think what it means to have the inmost life of that infinite and eternal Being whom we call God, dwelling in a personal way in you. How solemn and how awful and yet unspeakably glorious life becomes when we realize this."
Author: R.A. Torrey

36. "Days Pass By SomehowBut Nights Now Are Wagon Of PainInjuries May Heal With TimeBut Marks Will Always RemainRestless On My Comfortable BedI Toss And Turn And Try To sleep But Thoughts Are Walking My HeadAnd Formed A Huge HeapThe Past Is Flashing Its Scorching Light BeamsTearing Me Apart, Breaking Me At The SeamsThe Darkness Of My Life Is More Visible In The Dark !!"
Author: Ravinder Singh

37. "How we eat is connected to how we care for the planetwhich is connected to how we use our resourceswhich is connected to how many people in the world go to bed hungry every nightwhich is connected to how food is distributedwhich is connected to the massive inequalities in our world between those who have and those who don'twhich is connected to how our justice system treats people who use their power and position to make hundreds of millions of dollars while others struggle just to buy grocerieswhich is connected to how we treat those who don't have what we havewhich is connected to the sanctity and holiness and mystery of our human life and their human life and his little human lifewhich is why we hold up that baby's hand and say to the parents, 'it's just so small."
Author: Rob Bell

38. "O the sad frugality of the middle-income mind. O the humorless neatness of an intellectuality which buys mass-produced candlesticks and carefully puts one at each end of every philosophical mantlepiece! How far it lies from the playfulness of Him who composed such odd and needless variations on the themes of leaf and backbone, eye and nose! A thousand praises that it has only lately managed to lay its cold hand on the wines, the sauces, and the cheeses of the world! A hymn of thanksgiving that it could not reach into the depths of the sea to clamp its grim simplicities over the creatures that swim luminously in the dark! A shout of rejoicing for the fish who wears his eyeballs at the ends of long stalks, and for the jubilant laughter of the God who holds him in life with a daily bravo at the bravura of his being!"
Author: Robert Farrar Capon

39. "I think kids should have a mentor and a role model, but that they shouldn't take one person's opinion to be what we call final assessment or judgment about how life is supposed to be."
Author: Sean Paul

40. "We need to appreciate how precious life is."
Author: Shelley Fabares

41. "How many truths pass wrecking through the Illusion of Life, but none of them is an absolute truth therefore the real truth!"
Author: Sorin Cerin

42. "=> When life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile.=> Never tell your problems to anyone...20% don't care and the other 80% are glad you have them.=> It's true that we don't know what we've got until we loseit, but it's also true that we don't know what we've beenmissing until it arrives."
Author: Stephenie Meyer

43. "Some things don't matter much. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart--now, that matters. The whole problem with people is...they know what matters, but they don't choose it...The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters."
Author: Sue Monk Kidd

44. "I remember it so well. Dying. It was the most painful thing I've ever experienced. I couldn't scream because my lungs were torn apart or full of blood. I don't know. I just had to lie there, trying to breathe, hoping to drop dead as quickly as possible. And the whole time, the whole time I kept thinking about how I'd spent my entire life being a coward, and how it got me nowhere. And I knew that if I had the chance to do it all again, I'd do it differently. I promised myself I'd finally stop being afraid."
Author: Tahereh Mafi

45. "So Buck can enjoy sitting in a cell contemplating how he blew up his life. Thatdickwad hurt two people sitting at this table. And you're worried about who'll look bad if they tell? Screw that. Dean and D.J. and Kennedy andevery frat boy on this campus can all go fuck themselves. Are we sisters or not?"
Author: Tammara Webber

46. "They understood, as few have understood before or since, how fleeting life is and how pointless to try to hold on to things or people. They pursued the wondrous deed, the heroic gesture: fighting, fucking, drinking, art - poetry for intense emotion, the music that accompanied the heroic drinking with which each day ended, bewitching ornament for one's person and possessions."
Author: Thomas Cahill

47. "It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a matter the life of the obscure dairy had become to him. And though new love was to be held partly responsible for this it was not solely so. Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king. Looking at it thus he found that life was to be seen of the same magnitude here as elsewhere."
Author: Thomas Hardy

48. "For many feverish years he was burdened with the sensation, an ancient one to be sure, that the incredible sprawl of human history was no more than a pathetically partial record of an infinitely vast and shadowed chronicle of universal metamorphoses. How much greater, then, was the feeling that his own pathetic history formed a practically invisible fragment of what itself was merely an obscure splinter of the infinite. Somehow he needed to excarcerate himself from the claustral dungeon cell of his life. In the end, however, he broke beneath the weight of his aspiration. And as the years passed, the only mystery which seemed worthy of his interest, and his amazement, was that unknown day which would inaugurate his personal eternity, that incredible day on which the sun simply would not rise, and forever would begin."
Author: Thomas Ligotti

49. "Of course, that's how life is. A turn of events may seem very small at the time it's happening, but you never really know, do you? How can you?"
Author: Tom Xavier

50. "When we spoke about attempts to give a man in camp mental courage, we said that he had to be shown something to look forward to in the future. He had to be reminded that life still waited for him, that a human being waited for his return. But after liberation? There were some men who found that no one awaited them. Woe to him who found that the person whose memory alone had given him courage in camp did not exist any more! Woe to him who, when the day of his dreams finally came, found it so different from all he had longed for! Perhaps he boarded a trolley, traveled out to the home which he had seen for years in his mind, and only in his mind, and pressed the bell, just as he has longed to do in thousands of dreams, only to find that the person who should open the door was not there, and would never be there again."
Author: Viktor E. Frankl

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