Quotes on Encouragement--Good Sayings

Abraham Lincoln:

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away."

Alexander Graham Bell:

When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.

Anatole France:

Nine tenths of education is encouragement.

George Matthew Adams:

There are high spots in all of our lives and most of them have come about through encouragement from someone else. I don't care how great, how famous or successful a man or woman may be, each hungers for applause.

George Matthew Adams:

There are high spots in all of our lives and most of them have come about through encouragement from someone else. I don't care how great, how famous or successful a man or woman may be, each hungers for applause.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

Correction does much, but encouragement does more.

John O'Donohue:

One of the most beautiful gifts in the world is the gift of encouragement. When someone encourages you, that person helps you over a threshold you might otherwise never have crossed on your own.

William Arthur Ward:

Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you. Love me and I may be forced to love you.

Quotes on Honesty--Good Sayings

Albert Camus:

Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

Arthur Dobrin:

There is always a way to be honest without being brutal.

Clarence Darrow:

With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in men, than any other association of men.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

Freeman Thomas:

Good design begins with honesty, asks tough questions, comes from collaboration and from trusting your intuition.

G. William Domhoff:

There is more to American politics than fat cats and their political friends. There are serious-minded liberals who fight the good fight on many issues, ecologically oriented politicians who remain true to their cause, and honest people of every political stripe who are not beholden to any wealthy people. But there are not enough of them, and they are often worn down by the constant pressure from lobbyists, lawyers and conventional politicians.

John Gardner:

The citizen can bring our political and governmental institutions back to life, make them responsive and accountable, and keep them honest. No one else can.

Maimonides:

Anticipate charity by preventing poverty; assist the reduced fellow man, either by a considerable gift or a sum of money or by teaching him a trade or by putting him in the way of business so that he may earn an honest livelihood and not be forced to the dreadful alternative of holding out his hand for charity. This is the highest step and summit of charity's golden ladder.

Marie de Beausacq:

Of all the feats of skill, the most difficult is that of being honest.

Robert Louis Stevenson:

We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.

Thomas Jefferson:

Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, -- entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns, and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies; the preservation of the general government in its whole constitutional vigour, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; -- freedom of religion; freedom of the press; freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus; and trial by juries impartially selected, -- these principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.

Quotes on Quatations--Good Sayings

Anna Garlin Spencer :

It is an old error of man to forget to put quotation marks where he borrows from a woman's brain!

Christopher Buckley:

Reading any collection of a man's quotations is like eating the ingredients that go into a stew instead of cooking them together in the pot. You eat all the carrots, then all the potatoes, then the meat. You won't go away hungry, but it's not quite satisfying. Only a biography, or autobiography, gives you the hot meal.

George Bernard Shaw:

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

George Santayana:

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

Groucho Marx:

Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.

Isaac D'Israeli:

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotations.

Joseph Roux:

A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit, and a pebble in the hand of a fool.

Lama Surya Das:

Our lack of compassion stems from our inability to see deeply into the nature of things.

Louise Guiney:

Quotations (such as have point and lack triteness) from the great old authors are an act of reverence on the part of the quoter, and a blessing to a public grown superficial and external.

Marlene Dietrich:

I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognizably wiser than oneself.

Marlene Dietrich:

I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.

Mary Pettibone Poole:

The next best thing to being clever is being able to quote someone who is.

Michel de Montaigne:

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know. Journals, 1843

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The next thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.

Robert Burns:

I pick my favourite quotations and store them in my mind as ready armour, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence.

Sophocles:

A short saying often contains much wisdom.

Talmud:

A quotation at the right moment is like bread to the famished.

Virginia Woolf:

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Voltaire:

A witty saying proves nothing.

W. Somerset Maugham:

She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.

W. Somerset Maugham:

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

Winston Churchill:

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

Yossi Klein Halevi:

But theological change happens though selective quoting. Every religious person does it: You quote those verses that resonate with your own religious insights and ignore or reinterpret those that undermine your certainties. Selective quoting isn't just legitimate, but essential: Religions evolve through shifts in selective quoting.

Quotes on Suffering-- Good Sayings

Abraham Joshua Heschel:

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair. [New York Journal-American, April 5, 1963]

Albert Camus:

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was within me an invincible summer.

Aldous Huxley:

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh:

I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable.

Benjamin Disraeli:

How fair is a garden amid the toils and passions of existence.

Corita Kent:

Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed.

David Halverstam:

Bart Giamatti did not grow up (as he had dreamed) to play second base for the Red Sox. He became a professor at Yale, and then, in time . . . president of the National Baseball League. He never lost his love for the Boston Red Sox. It was as a Red Sox fan, he later realized that human beings are fallen, and that life is filled with disappointment. The path to comprehending Calvinism in modern America, he decided, begins at Fenway Park.

Elie Wiesel:

I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

Emily Dickinson:

Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need of hell.

Emily Dickinson:

My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

Ernest Becker:

I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?

Felix Adler:

We stand, as it were, on the shore, and see multitudes of our fellow beings struggling in the water, stretching forth their arms, sinking, drowning, and we are powerless to assist them.

Fritz Williams:

Suffering and joy teach us, if we allow them, how to make the leap of empathy, which transports us into the soul and heart of another person. ln those transparent moments we know other people's joys and sorrows, and we care about their concerns as if they were our own.

George Eliot:

Deep unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

H.H. the Dalai Lama:

The basic thing is that everyone wants happiness, no one wants suffering. And happiness mainly comes from our own attitude, rather than from external factors. If your own mental attitude is correct, even if you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you feel happy.

Harriet Beecher Stowe:

When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.

Helen Keller:

The world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it.

Helen Keller:

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

Hermann Hesse:

You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.

James Baldwin:

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

James Russell Lowell:

Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.

Jane Austen:

One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it unless it has all been suffering, nothing but suffering.

Joanna Macy:

Compassion literally means to feel with, to suffer with. Everyone is capable of compassion, and yet everyone tends to avoid it because it's uncomfortable. And the avoidance produces psychic numbing -- resistance to experiencing our pain for the world and other beings.

John Milton:

The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.

Louise Bogan:

I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!

Marcel Proust:

We are healed of a suffering only by expressing it to the full.

Marcel Proust:

In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual, delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted, atrocious.

Marcus Aurelius:

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

Marshall Rosenberg:

All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished.

Naomi Wolf:

Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.

Paulo Coelho:

But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for.

Peter Singer:

All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.

Rabindranath Tagore:

Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims.

Samuel Johnson:

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

Simone Weil:

The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.

Sogyal Rinpoche:

...when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.

Spanish proverb:

Where there is love, there is pain.

Victor Frankl:

We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by doing a deed; (2) by experiencing a value; and (3) by suffering.

Victor Frankl:

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

Wallace Stegner:

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

Quotes on Women-Good Sayings

Abigail Adams:

If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

Adrienne Rich:

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

Adrienne Rich:

Life on the planet is born of woman.

Amy Johnson:

Had I been a man, I might have explored the Poles or climbed Mount Everest, but as it was, my spirit found outlet in the air.

aviator

Angela Carter:

The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.

Anna Garlin Spencer:

The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement in a manner that would be amusingly absurd were it not so monstrously unjust and socially harmful.

Woman's Share in Social Culture, 1912

Anna Garlin Spencer:

The friendship between a man and a woman which does not lead to marriage or desire for marriage may be a life long experience of the greatest value to themselves and to all their circle of acquaintance and of activity; but for this type of friendship both a rare man and a rare woman are needed. Perhaps it should be added that either the man or the woman thus deeply bound in lifelong friendship who seeks marriage must find a still rarer man or woman to wed, to make such a three cornered comradeship a permanent success.

Anna Garlin Spencer:

A successful woman preacher was once asked "what special obstacles have you met as a woman in the ministry?" "Not one," she answered, "except the lack of a minister's wife."

Anna Garlin Spencer:

No book has yet been written in praise of a woman who let her husband and children starve or suffer while she invented even the most useful things, or wrote books, or expressed herself in art, or evolved philosophic systems.

Woman's Share in Social Culture, 1912

Anna Garlin Spencer :

It is an old error of man to forget to put quotation marks where he borrows from a woman's brain!

Anna Quindlen:

Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken, and inconveniently willful? "Keep her," I replied.... The suffragettes refused to be polite in demanding what they wanted or grateful for getting what they deserved. Works for me.

Barack Obama:

Most people who meet my wife quickly conclude that she is remarkable. They are right about this. She is smart, funny and thoroughly charming. Often, after hearing her speak at some function or working with her on a project, people will approach me and say something to the effect of, you know, I think the world of you, Barack, but your wife, wow!

Barack Obama:

She was the cornerstone of our family and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength and humility. She was the person who encouraged and allowed us to take chances. [with his sister, on the death of his grandmother Madelyn Dunham just before the November 2008 election]

Barbara Jordan:

I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He's just incapable of it.

Bernice Johnson Reagon:

Today whenever women gather together it is not necessarily nurturing. It is coalition building. And if you feel the strain, you may be doing some good work.

Booth Tarkington:

An ideal wife is any woman who has an ideal husband.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

"A house does not need a wife any more than it needs a husband."

(on the term "housewife")

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

The original necessity for the ceaseless presence of the woman to maintain the altar fire -- and it was an altar fire in very truth at one period -- has passed with the means of prompt ignition; the matchbox has freed the housewife from that incessant service, but the feeling that women should stay at home is with us yet.

Charlotte Whitton:

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.

Clare Boothe Luce:

Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, "She doesn't have what it takes." They will say, "Women don't have what it takes."

Claudette Colbert:

It matters more what's in a woman's face than what's on it.

Coco Chanel:

A woman has the age she deserves.

Dennis Prager:

Men need rule books. Women want men to intuit what they want. And only about 2% of men can do that, and most of them are not heterosexual.

Dorothy Thompson:

A little more matriarchy is what the world needs, and I know it. Period. Paragraph.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

Campaign behavior for wives: Always be on time. Do as little talking as humanly possible. Lean back in the parade car so everybody can see the president.

Elizabeth Dole:

Women share with men the need for personal success, even the taste of power, and no longer are we willing to satisfy those needs through the achievements of surrogates, whether husbands, children, or merely role models.

Emma Goldman:

Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.

Erma Bombeck:

We've got a generation now who were born with semiequality. They don't know how it was before, so they think, this isn't too bad. We're working. We have our attache' cases and our three piece suits. I get very disgusted with the younger generation of women. We had a torch to pass, and they are just sitting there. They don't realize it can be taken away. Things are going to have to get worse before they join in fighting the battle.

Evelyn Cunningham:

Women are the only oppressed group in our society that lives in intimate association with their opressors.

Faith Whittlesey:

Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels.

Farrah Fawcett:

God made man stronger but not necessarily more intelligent. He gave women intuition and femininity. And, used properly, that combination easily jumbles the brain of any man I've ever met.

G. K. Chesterton:

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

George Bernard Shaw:

All young women begin by believing they can change and reform the men they marry. They can't.

George Carlin:

Here's all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.

George Jean Nathan:

What passes for woman's intuition is often nothing more than man's transparency.

George Santayana:

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.

Persons and Places: The Middle Span, 1945

George Santayana:

The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.

The Life of Reason, 1905-1906

Gloria Steinem:

Someone asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do, and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don't have as much money. That was a true and incomplete answer. In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.

Life Quotes..Good Sayings

A. Powell Davies:

Life is just a chance to grow a soul.

Abraham Lincoln:

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

Adrienne Rich:

Life on the planet is born of woman.

Alan Bennett:

Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.

Alan Dean Foster :

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.

Albert Camus:

All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out.

Albert Einstein:

True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness.

Albert Einstein:

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

Albert Schweitzer:

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

Albert Schweitzer:

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.

Albert Schweitzer:

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.

Civilization and Ethics, 1949

Albert Schweitzer:

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.

Alice Walker:

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.

Alice Walker:

Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.

Amelia Burr:

Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.

Anais Nin:

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.

Anais Nin:

People living deeply have no fear of death.

Anais Nin:

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

Anais Nin:

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

André Gide:

The most decisive actions of our life ... are most often unconsidered actions.

Anne Wilson Schaef:

Life is a process. We are a process. The universe is a process.

Annie Dillard:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Arthur Rubinstein:

Love life and life will love you back. Love people and they will love you back.

Barbara De Angelis:

They're basically moments in which you're in touch with the meaning of life, when your relationship to the rest of the universe makes sense.

Barbara Kingsolver:

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.

Barry Lopez:

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.

Arctic Dreams

Baruch Spinoza:

What everyone wants from life is continuous and genuine happiness.

Ben Jonson:

A good life is a main argument.

Benjamin Disraeli:

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Benjamin Franklin:

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that the stuff life is made of.

Bernice Johnson Reagon:

Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.

Bertrand Russell:

Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].
I have wished to know why the stars shine.

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.

This has been my life; I found it worth living.

adapted

Bertrand Russell:

The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Brother David Steindl-Rast :

Gratefulness is the key to a happy life that we hold in our hands, because if we are not grateful, then no matter how much we have we will not be happy -- because we will always want to have something else or something more.

Buckminster Fuller:

Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

Buddha:

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard:

Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish each moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived.

played by Patrick Stewart, from the film "Star Trek: Generations"

Carl Jung:

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Carl Sandburg:

Our lives are like a candle in the wind.

Carl Sandburg:

Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

Charles Schulz:

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?

Charlotte Bronte:

Life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.

Chinese proverb:

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.

Colette:

I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.

Colette:

Life is nothing but a series of crosses for us mothers.

Corita Kent:

Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed.

Corita Kent:

Life is a succession of moments. To live each one is to succeed.

Dorothy Thompson:

Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.

Dorothy Thompson:

Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.

E. B. White:

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.

Charlotte, "Charlotte's Web"

Edith Wharton:

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

Edna St. Vincent Millay:

My candle burns at both its ends;
It will not last the night;
But oh, my foes, and oh, my friends --
It gives a lovely light.

Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Life is a quest and love a quarrel ...

Elbert Hubbard:

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Elbert Hubbard:

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived. Curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

I think somehow we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

Elie Wiesel:

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.

(Oct. 1986)

Elizabeth Drew:

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

Emily Dickinson:

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain.
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Emily Dickinson:

Love -- is anterior to Life --
Posterior -- to Death --
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth --

Emily Dickinson:

That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.

Emily Dickinson:

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

Erik H. Erikson:

Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired.

Ernest Becker:

The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

Ernest Becker:

[W]e now know that the human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of life and the fear of death... Heidegger brought these fears to the center of his existential philosophy. He argued that the basic anxiety of [humanity] is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world. That is, both fear of death and fear of life, of experience and individuation.

Ernest Becker:

I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?

Ernest Dowson:

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses;
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

F. Forrester Church:

Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.

Fran Lebowitz:

Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep.

Franklin P. Jones:

Love doesn't make the world go 'round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.

Frederick Buechner:

The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.

Frederick F. Flack:

Most people can look back over the years and identify a time and place at which their lives changed significantly. Whether by accident or design, these are the moments when, because of a readiness within us and a collaboration with events occurring around us, we are forced to seriously reappraise ourselves and the conditions under which we live and to make certain choices that will affect the rest of our lives.

Friedrich Nietzsche:

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Gary Smalley:

Life is relationships; the rest is just details.

George Bernard Shaw:

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

George Eliot:

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?

George Sand:

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

George Santayana:

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

George Washington Carver:

How far you go in life depends on you being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.

Germaine Greer:

Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life.

Goethe:

A useless life is an early death.

H.H. the Dalai Lama:

What is the meaning of life? To be happy and useful.

Harry Emerson Fosdick:

Nothing else matters much -- not wealth, nor learning, nor even health -- without this gift: the spiritual capacity to keep zest in living. This is the creed of creeds, the final deposit and distillation of all important faiths: that you should be able to believe in life.

Helen Keller:

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

Henri Frederick Amiel:

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

Henry David Thoreau:

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

Henry James:

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

Henry Van Dyke:

Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love, to work, to play, and to look up at the stars.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
and things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art; to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Immanuel Kant:

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Isaac Asimov:

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.

Isadora Duncan:

People do not live nowadays - they get about ten percent out of life.

James F. Bymes:

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem to be more afraid of life than death

Jean-Paul Sartre:

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Joan Baez:

You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.

John C. Maxwell:

Everything you now do is something you have chosen to do. Some people don't want to believe that. But if you're over age twenty-one, your life is what you're making of it. To change your life, you need to change your priorities.

John Dewey:

Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

John Dewey:

Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.

John Dewey:

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

John Lennon:

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

Joni Mitchell:

I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all.

Kalidasa:

Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And To-morrow is only a Vision;
But To-day well lived makes
Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness,
And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!

Katharine Hepburn:

Without discipline, there's no life at all.

Leo Buscaglia:

What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.

Lord Byron:

The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.

Lynn Davies:

Sport and life is about losing. It's about understanding how to lose.

Madame de Stael:

The mystery of existence is the connection between our faults and our misfortunes.

Marcus Aurelius:

The universe is transformation; our life is what our thoughts make it.

Marcus Aurelius:

Remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses.

Marcus Aurelius:

And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.

Marcus Aurelius:

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid.

Margaret Fuller:

Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.

Maria Mitchell:

Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow.

Marian Wright Edelman:

Service is what life is all about.

Marie Curie:

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Mark Twain:

What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. Who was it who said, "Blessed is the man who has found his work"? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work--not somebody else's work. The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man's work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.

Mark Twain:

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Mark Twain:

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy and a tragedy.

Mark Twain:

Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

Mark Twain:

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Mark Twain:

The exercise of an extraordinary gift is the supremest pleasure in life.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

Mary Oliver:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver:

To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. Blackwater Woods

Matthew Arnold:

Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy'd the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done...

May Sarton:

A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

Where there is love there is life.

Mortimer Adler:

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Nadine Stair (attributed, probably erroneously):

If I had my life to live over, I'd dare to make more mistakes next time. I'd relax; I'd limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I'd have fewer imaginary ones.

You see, I'm one of those people who lived sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I had my moments, and if I had to do it over again, I'd have more of them. In fact, I'd try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after the other, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I've been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat, and a parachute. If I had it to do over again, I would travel lighter than I have.

If I had my life to live over again, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dance; I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies.

The story behind this quotation

Norbert Capek:

It is worthwhile to live
and fight courageously
for sacred ideals.

This entry continued ...

Norman MacEwan:

Happiness is not so much in having as sharing. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Norman Vincent Peale:

Live your life and forget your age.

Oliver Wendell Holmes:

It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

Oliver Wendell Holmes:

Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.

Oliver Wendell Holmes:

A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.

Omar N. Bradley:

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.

Oscar Wilde:

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.

Oscar Wilde:

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Paul Anka:

And now the end is near
And so I face the final curtain,
My friends, I'll say it clear,
I'll state my case of which I'm certain.
I've lived a life that's full, I've travelled each and evr'y highway
And more, much more than this, I did it my way.

Paul Beattie:

When My Mind is Still

When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I remember things too easily forgotten:
The purity of early love,
The maturity of unselfish love that asks --
desires -- nothing but another's good,
The idealism that has persisted through all the tempest of life.

When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I can find a quiet assurance, an inner peace, in the core of my being.
It can face the doubt, the loneliness, the anxiety,
Can accept these harsh realities and can even grow
Because of these challenges to my essential being.

When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I can sense my basic humanity,
And then I know that all men and women are my brothers and sisters.
Nothing but my own fear and distrust can separate me from the love of friends.
If I can trust others, accept them, enjoy them,
Then my life shall surely be richer and more full.
If I can accept others, this will help them to be more truly themselves,
And they will be more able to accept me.

When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I know how much life has given me:
The history of the race, friends and family,
The opportunity to work, the chance to build myself.
Then wells within me the urge to live more abundantly,
With greater trust and joy,
With more profound seriousness and earnest service,
And yet more calmly at the heart of life.

Paul Beattie was a Unitarian Universalist minister, serving in congregations including in Kansas City, Missouri, and last at the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh, PA. He was also president of the Fellowship of Religious Humanists, among his many involvements.

Paul Bowles:

... we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

Pearl S. Buck:

The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.

Pearl S. Buck:

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

Rabindranath Tagore:

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

from Gitanjali

Ralph Ellison:

Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

We as for long life, but 'tis deep life, or noble moments that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Life is a succession of lessons, which must be lived to be understood.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Life is a progress, and not a station.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.:

Life is short, but there is always time enough for courtesy.

Ray Bradbury:

Life is "trying things to see if they work."

Raymond Charles Barker:

The principle of life is that life responds by corresponding; your life becomes the thing you have decided it shall be.

Richard Dawkins:

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked -- as I am surprisingly often -- why I bother to get up in the mornings.

Robert Byrne:

The purpose of life is a life of purpose.

Robert Frost:

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

Robert Frost:

What is this talked-of mystery of birth
But being mounted bareback on the earth?

Robert Louis Stevenson:

The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.

Robert Louis Stevenson:

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

Rosa Parks:

Each person must live their life as a model for others.

Roy H. Williams:

Lives, like money, are spent. What are you buying with yours?

Sarah Ban Breathnach:

An authentic life is the most personal form of worship. Everyday life has become my prayer.

Sarah Bernhardt:

Life begets life. Energy becomes energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.

Sean O'Casey:

I have found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active, and sometime terrifying experience, and I've enjoyed it completely. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other.

Seneca:

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

Sharon Welch:

Injustice can be eliminated, but human conflicts and natural limitations cannot be removed. The conflicts of social life and the limitations of nature cannot be controlled or transcended. They can, however, be endured and survived. It is possible for there to be a dance with life, a creative response to its intrinsic limits and challenges ... [A Feminist Ethic of Risk]

Sigmund Freud:

What good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?

Sophia Lyon Fahs:

Life becomes religious whenever we make it so: when some new light is seen, when some deeper appreciation is felt, when some larger outlook is gained, when some nobler purpose is formed, when some task is well done.

Soren Kierkegaard:

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Stephen Covey:

Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power.

Theodore Rubin:

There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.

Thich Nhat Hanh:

Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.

Thomas F. Healey:

Don't strew me with roses after I'm dead.
When Death claims the light of my brow,
No flowers of life will cheer me: instead
You may give me my roses now!

Thomas Jefferson:

It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.

Tom Lehrer:

Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

Toni Morrison:

Birth, life, and death -- each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.

Unknown:

Life would be much easier if I had the source code.

Ursula K. LeGuin:

If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.

Victor Frankl:

If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So, if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life.

Victor Frankl:

A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."

Victor Frankl:

We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by doing a deed; (2) by experiencing a value; and (3) by suffering.

Victor Hugo:

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

Virginia Satir:

Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understand, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not.

Wallace Stegner:

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

Will Rogers:

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

William Blake:

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.

William James:

Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.

The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902

William James:

These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create that fact.

Is Life Worth Living?

Winston Churchill:

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Zeno:

The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.

Zig Ziglar:

You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.