Life Lived Well Quotes

1. "And I could go the rest of my life like this, don't get me wrong. This was reality and I'd certainly learned to adapt to that reality. I didn't love it, I'd never love it, but I lived with it pretty well."
Author: Beth Harbison

2. "A life well-lived or a life lived well? The placement of words really does change the connotation."
Author: Carol Morgan

3. "I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well."
Author: Diane Ackerman

4. "Alma's existence at once felt bigger and much, much smaller — but a pleasant sort of smaller. The world had scaled itself down into endless inches of possibility. Her life could be lived in generous miniature…She would probably die of old age before she understood even half of what was occurring in this one single boulder field. Well, huzzah to that! It meant that Alma had work stretched ahead of her for the rest of her life. She need not be idle. She need not be unhappy. Perhaps she need not even be lonely. She had a task."
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

5. "[Happiness is] a ghost, it's a shadow. You can't really chase it. It's a by-product, a very pleasant side effect to a life lived well."
Author: Eric Weiner

6. "Demetrious was studying Law on the Open University and was, in all ways, a ray of sunshine into her life: warm and glorious, achingly temporary. He lived just off the high street with his boyfriend Rob, who worked in the City, doing something neither Demi nor Sukie pretended to understand. "All the cute guys are gay," Sukie had laughed, that first day, holding her coffee mug high to her face to hide her genuine disappointment. Demi had just tilted his head and looked at her playfully, an expression she would get to know well."I'm not gay," he had clarified, matter-of-factly."Living with a boyfriend called Rob doesn't sound very straight!" Sukie had pointed out."Labels!" Demi had scorned, with one of his characteristic and very Greek hand gestures. "I fall in love with the person, not the gender."
Author: Erin Lawless

7. "The greatest weight.-- What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?"
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

8. "He had thrown himself away, he had lost interest in everything, and life, falling in with his feelings, had demanded nothing of him. He had lived as an outsider, an idler and onlooker, well liked in his young manhood, alone in his illness and advancing years. Seized with weariness, he sat down on the wall, and the river murmured darkly in his thoughts."
Author: Hermann Hesse

9. "My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania Street, taught me something very important. He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to NOTICE it. He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery; or fishing, and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door. Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: "If this isn't nice, what is?"
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

10. "Only the passionate were immortal, it seemed. If you fought, screwed, screamed, laughed, or otherwise experienced life intensely, for better or worse, you left a record. Those who lived a quiet, well-behaved, well-tempered life? Gone without a trace."
Author: Magnus Flyte

11. "And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. Don't just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead or the unborn couldn't do it any better. If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well."
Author: Martin Luther King Jr.

12. "And I need you, my love," he said. "I need you so much that I panic when I think that perhaps I will not be able to persuade you to come back with me to Enfield. I need you so much that I cannot quite contemplate the rest of my life if it must be lived without you. I need you so much that—Well, the words speak for themselves. I need you.""To look after Augusta?" she said. She dared not hear what he was surely saying. She dared not hope. "To look after Enfield? To provide you with an heir?""Yes," he said, and her heart sank like a stone to be squashed somewhere between her slippers and the parlor carpet."And to be my friend and my confidant and my comfort. And to be my lover."
Author: Mary Balogh

13. "Time flies, knells call, life passes, so hear my prayer. Birth is nothing but death begun, so hear my prayer.Death is speechless, so hear my speech.This is Jake, who served his ka and his tet. Say true.May the forgiving glance of S'mana heal his heart. Say please.May the arms of Gan raise him from the darkness of this earth. Say please.Surround him, Gan , with light.Fill him, Chloe, with strength.If he is thirsty, give him water in the clearing.If he is hungry, give him food in the clearing.May his life on this earth and the pain of his passing become as a dream to his waking soul, and let his eyes fall upon every lovely sight; let him find the friends that were lost to him, and let every one whose name he calls call his in return.This is Jake, who lived well, loved his own, and died as ka would have it.Each man owes a death. This is Jake. Give him peace."
Author: Stephen King

14. "Cemeteries are full of unfulfilled dreams... countless echoes of 'could have' and 'should have'… countless books unwritten… countless songs unsung... I want to live my life in such a way that when my body is laid to rest, it will be a well needed rest from a life well lived, a song well sung, a book well written, opportunities well explored, and a love well expressed."
Author: Steve Maraboli

15. "But no life was without it's strain & strife, not if it was fully lived. Opening up to experience, even the good ones like trust & love, was to open yourself up to the pain. I suppose the key was to not compound matters by making the rest of it unnecessarily hard. My need for control had certainly done that in the past. So I made a promise to myself in that moment. I would make a concerted effort to reach for what was soft & good in this world. I'd find a place to settle into, and hold still so that this world's good and soft could reach back & touch me as well."
Author: Vicki Pettersson

16. "Francis began the actual illumination of the lambskin. The intricacies of scrollwork and the excruciating delicacy of the gold-inlay work would, because of the brevity of his spare-project time, make it a labor of many years; but in a dark sea of centuries wherein nothing seemed to flow, a lifetime was only brief eddy, even for the man who lived it. There was a tedium of repeated days and repeated seasons; then there were aches and pains, finally Extreme Unction, and a moment of blackness at the end-or at the beginning, rather. For then the small shivering soul who had endured the tedium, endured it badly or well, would find itself in a place of light, find itself absorbed in the burning gaze of infinitely compassionate eyes as it stood before the Just One. And then the King would say: "Come," or the King would say: "Go," and only for that moment had the tedium of years existed. It would be hard to believe differently during such an age as Francis knew."
Author: Walter M. Miller Jr.

Life Lived Well Quotes Pictures