How To Live Your Life Quotes

1. "Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can't help being one. You can't deny that. And it's best to be a rebel so as to show 'em it don't pay to try to do you down. Factories and labour exchanges and insurance offices keep us alive and kicking - so they say - but they're booby-traps and will suck you under like sinking-sands if you're not careful. Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax offices milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you're still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the army calls you up and you get shot to death. And if you're clever enough to stay out of the army you get bombed to death. Ay, by God, it's a hard life if you don't weaken, if you don't stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain't much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-eyed clocks to bits."
Author: Alan Sillitoe

2. "I found power in accepting the truth of who I am. It may not be a truth that others can accept, but I cannot live any other way. How would it be to live a lie every minute of your life."
Author: Alison Goodman

3. "I know how it is to live your life like a dream. To listen and watch, to wake up and try to understand what has already happened. You do not need a psychiatrist to do this. A psychiatrist does not want you to wake up. He tells you to dream some more, to find the pond and pour more tears into it. And really, he is just another bird drinking from your misery. My mother, she suffered. She lost her face and tried to hind it. She found only greater misery and finally could not hide that. There is nothing more to understand. that was China. That was what people did back then. They had no choice. they could not speak up. they could not run away. That was their fate."
Author: Amy Tan

4. "Here's a question every angry man and woman needs to consider: How long are you going to allow people you don't even like — people who are no longer in your life, maybe even people who aren't even alive anymore — to control your life? How long?"
Author: Andy Stanley

5. "That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world. William Carlos Williams said, "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." You can't eat a book, right, but books have saved my life more often than sandwiches. And they've saved your life... But we don't say, oh, Maya Angelou should have silenced herself because other people have other destinies. It's interesting, because artists are always encouraged to feel guilty about their work. Why? Why don't we ask predatory bankers how they alleviate their guilt?"
Author: Ariel Gore

6. "How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light."
Author: Barry López

7. "Kid's don't care how many sermons you preach to them. The only sermon they'll hear is how you live your life in front of them."
Author: Bruce Van Horn

8. "To my son Dylan.I've written this book for you.It's a guide for how not to live your life.I'm sending it out into the world in the hopesthat someday it will find you.Even if I never do.All my love,Dad"
Author: Carolee Dean

9. "Worrying about how you'll be remembered is pointless. Better to try to live your life in such a way that people will respect you while you're still alive."
Author: Charles Cumming

10. "But the one thing my illness did make me realize is how necessary it is to ignore the dangers of living in order to live. And how much trouble you can get into if you can't. We all have to get up every morning and go outside and pretend we aren't going to die... We concentrate on having little thoughts so we don't have BIG THOUGHTS. It's like those days when you've got a really bad pimple but you still have to go to school. You've got to convince yourself it's not so bad just so you can leave the house and actually talk to people face to face. You've got to ignore the one big truth -- life is fatal."
Author: Deb Caletti

11. "People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave. A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master..."
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

12. "Watching him, I understood for the first time how you could really live music, how you could listen to it completely and make it come alive, so that it was part of your life."
Author: Eric Clapton

13. "Our instructors do not understand how it is. To be bound to someone in such a way. They are too old, too out of touch with their emotions. They no longer remember what it is to live and breathe within the world. They think it simple to pit any two people against each other. It is never simple. The other person becomes how you define your life, how you define yourself. They become as necessary as breathing. Then they expect the victor to continue on without that. It would be like pulling the Murray twins apart and expecting them to be the same. They would be whole but not complete."
Author: Erin Morgenstern

14. "If Epicurus were speaking to you at this moment, he would urge you to simplify life. Here's how he might put it if he were standing here today : " Lads,your needs are few, they are easily attained, and any necessary suffering can be easily tolerated. Don't complicate your life with such trivial goals as riches and fame: they are the enemy of ATARAXIA. Fame,for example,consist of the opinions ofothers and requires that we must live our life as other wish. To achieve and maintain fame, we must like what others like and shun whatever it is that they shun. Hence, a life of fame or a life in politics? Flee from it. And wealth? Avoid it! It is a trap. The more we acquire the more we crave, and the deeper our sadness when our yearning is not satisfied. Lads, listen to me: If you crave happiness, do not waste your life struggling for that which you really do not need."
Author: Irvin D. Yalom

15. "How are you going to spend your day today? The key word being spend. Our time is one of the most precious gifts in our lives. Once today is over, that's it. Think about how you really want to spend your day. Tomorrow, today will be history. It's your life, your history. How do you want to write the history of your life today…?"
Author: James A. Murphy

16. "It was like that Talking Head song. „And you may ask yourself, 'How did I get here?' … And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful house. And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful wife' ". As he responded to the essay questions, Mitchell kept bending his answers toward their practical applications. He wanted to know why he was here, and how to live. It was perfect way to end your college career. Education had finally led Mitchell out into life."
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides

17. "Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is going to determine how you're going to live your life."
Author: Joel Osteen

18. "Yeah,Livie?""How do you figure out the right way to live your life?" There's a long pause. So long that I check the screen of my cell phone to see if the call is still connected."Trial and error, Livie. That's the only way that I know of."
Author: K.A. Tucker

19. "I'd learned balance is internal; that there really wasn't one set formula for how to live your life nor how to handle the wife-mother-businesswoman juggling act. Maybe it was just being tuned in to every role and knowing when one or the other needed to be the focus."
Author: Kaira Rouda

20. "That goes for old wounds, too, you know. I really wish we'd had the chance to talk before this," he says, cracking the window so the smoke can escape. "There's a Longfellow quote I have stuck on my bulletin board at the church office- 'There is no grief like the grief that does not speak'- and it's true. I've found that keeping pain inside doesn't give it a chance to heal, but bringing it out into the light, holding it right there in your hands and trusting that you're strong enough to make it through, not hating the pain, not loving it, just seeing it for what it really is can change how you go on from there. Time alone doesn't heal emotional wounds, Sayre, and you don't want to live the rest of your life bottled up with anger and guilt and bitterness. That's how people self-destruct."
Author: Laura Wiess

21. "I'd forgotten it's an important thing to give thought to your morality and how you intend to live your life."
Author: Lee Pace

22. "You aimin' to go the full circle now? How long before I have to come get you up from the sidewalks? You got hurt and pain in you? Well, I used to know a man who knew how to live with his pain and make his hurt work for him. Your daddy died with dignity; there wasn't no bum in him. And he known some hurts in this life you ain't never even heard of!"
Author: Lorraine Hansberry

23. "There are hurdles to overcome in sport and in life. Sport is a very valuable learning ground for how to live your life in the best possible way."
Author: Lynn Davies

24. "We stayed all day long. We closed our eyes and paryed, which we had not doen together in a long time. The nurse came in and out of the room. Everything felt awful and I wondered why the whole world didn't seem to notice how bad things really were. I thought of how I'd gotten used to awful, how after my dad died the planets kept on spinning and I got up and ate breakfast every morning and kept going to school. Something happens and it's terrible and you think you can't live another day, but then your mother gets used to it and you get used to it and you both keep on living, and you're not sure if that getting-used-to-things is good or the way life should be."
Author: Margaret McMullan

25. "Real life often ends badly, like our marriage did, Pat. And literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for people to endure nobly. It sounds like you have endured very nobly since you returned to New Jersey, and I want you to know I admire that. I hope you are able to reinvent yourself and live out the rest of your life with a quiet sense of satisfaction, which is what I have been trying to do since we parted."
Author: Matthew Quick

26. "How do you get the happy ending? John Irving ought to know. One of my favorite authors, Irving writes these multigenerational epics of fiction that somehow work out in the end. How does he do it? He says, 'I always begin with the last sentence ; then I work my way backwards, through the plot, to where the story should begin.' Thst sounds like a lot of work, especially compared to the fantasy that great writers sit down and just go where the story takes them. Irving lets us know that good stories and happy endings are more intentional than that. Most 20 something's can't write the last sentence of their lives. But when pressed, they usually can identify things they want in their 30s or 40s or 60s -or things they don't want- and work backward from there. This is how you have your own multigenerational epic with a happy ending. This is how you live your life in real time."
Author: Meg Jay

27. "What marriage doesn't involve uncountable accretions, a language of gestures, a sense of recognition sharp as a toothache? Unhappy, sure. What couple isn't unhappy, at least part of the time? But how can the divorce rate be, as they say, skyrocketing? How miserable would you have to get to be able to bear the actual separation, to go off and live your life so utterly unrecognized?"
Author: Michael Cunningham

28. "I often laughed, and you often gave me a dissatisfied look, till you pressed me to unfold my past before you as if it were a roll of pictures. It was then I felt respect for you. Because you unreservedly showed me your resolution to catch something alive in my being, and to sip the warm blood running in my body, by cutting my heart. At that time, I was still living, and did not want to die. So I rejected your request, promising to satisfy you some day. Now I am going to destroy my heart myself, and pour my blood into your veins. I shall be happy if a new life can enter into your bosom, when my heart has stopped beating."
Author: Natsume Sōseki

29. "How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you."
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

30. "Yeah, okay. But, Nico, you do choose how to live your life. You want to trust somebody? Maybe take a risk that I'm really your friend and I'll accept you. It's better than hiding."
Author: Rick Riordan

31. "Waiting to live life is not worth it. Waiting for someone to figure out how to live with you is not worth waiting for. When you start living your own life, life brings you someone worth being with..."
Author: Sadiqua Hamdan

32. "Student: I don't feel like living anymore. Teacher: If you don't feel like doing something then don't do. This means that in finding many ways how not to live your life, you have the possibility to discover how to live your life."
Author: Santosh Kalwar

33. "Life can be long or short, it all depends on how you choose to live it. it's like forever, always changing. for any of us our forever could end in an hour, or a hundred years from now. you can never know for sure, so you'd better make every second count. what you have to decide is how you want your life to be. if your forever was ending tomorrow, is this how you'd want to have spent it?"
Author: Sarah Dessen

34. "Wrong Question: How to love?Right Question: Why am I afraid to love?Wrong Question: Why do you love me?Right Question: Do I love myself as much as you do?Wrong Question: Why does love hurt?Right Question: Why do I live in fantasies and expect so much without really giving anything back?Wrong Question: What will you do for me?Right Question: Am I capable of making your life more beautiful?Wrong interpretation: Let's be practical.Right interpretation: Let's be wild and unconditional in our love without pretending.Wrong Confession: I want love in life.Right Confession: I am lonely and I will start by being friendly with myself first.Wrong Advice: Mind and ThoughtsRight Advice: Heart"
Author: Saurabh Sharma

35. "Stop living within the confines of how others define you! You weren't created to live their life; you were created to live yours - so LIVE it! You can reignite that fire within and bring the passion back into your goals, dreams, ambitions, careers, and relationships by reclaiming control of your own life. Be unapologetically YOU!"
Author: Steve Maraboli

36. "I am not this big celebrity, but it gets really crazy. You have to go through the nuts of blowing up, in a sense, and then figuring out how to live your life with that."
Author: Vanessa Carlton

37. "I wish you would stop being so negative.I'm not being negative; I'm just facing the truth. The truth is you have a lot to learn about how God wants us to live, and unless you allow Him to fill your heart with joy and love, I'm afraid you'll be living less of a life than my crippled granddaughter."
Author: Wanda E. Brunstetter

38. "How do you go to your own house when something has gone bad on the inside, when it doesn't seem like your place to live anymore, when you almost cannot recall living there although it was the place you mostly ate and slept for all your grown-up life? Try to remember two or three things about living there. Try to remember cooking one meal."
Author: William Kittredge

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