Quotes About Life

Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint on it you can.
-- Danny Kaye

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
-- Anais Nin

Only a life lived for others is worth living.
-- Albert Einstein

A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.
-- Albert Einstein

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
-- Albert Einstein

The most beautiful experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe is as good as dead. His eyes are closed.
-- Albert Einstein

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that canbe counted counts.
-- Albert Einstein

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
-- Albert Einstein

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
-- Albert Einstein

Relativity teaches us the connection between the different descriptions of one and the same reality.
-- Albert Einstein

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
-- Albert Einstein

What is required is sight and insight -- then you might add one more: excite.
-- Robert Frost

Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
-- Victor Borge

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
-- T. S. Eliot, "Four Quartets"

We can try to avoid making choices by doing nothing, but even that is a decision.
-- Gary Collins

When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.
-- Sigmund Freud

I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.
-- Carl Sandburg

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
-- Albert Camus

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
-- Winston Churchill

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
-- Francis Bacon

The life that is unexamined is not worth living.
-- Plato

The road to hell is paved with good intentions
-- Samuel Johnson

Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.
-- Fran Lebowitz

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

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.
-- William Shakespeare

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
-- Oscar Wilde

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.
-- George Bernard Shaw

You see things and say 'Why?' but I dream things that never were and I say 'Why not?'
-- George Bernard Shaw

Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right.
-- Henry Ford

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
-- Sigmund Freud

Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves.
-- Henry David Thoreau

The only thing to fear is fear itself.
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear -- not absence of fear.
-- Mark Twain

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of humankind.
-- Bertrand Russell

Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so.
-- Bertrand Russell

The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.
-- Jean Jacques Rosseau

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you have lost your true self forever.
-- Eugene O'Neill

The secret of man's being is not only to live, but to have something to live for.
-- Fedor Dostoevsky

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great people must, I think, have great sadness on Earth.
-- Fedor Dostoevsky

Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.
-- Hippocrates

Gather ye rose--buds while ye may,
Old time is still aflying.
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.
-- Robert Herrick

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
-- Carl Jung

There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.
-- Carl Jung

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt

One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
-- Andre Gide

Strength is born in the deep silence of long--suffering hearts; not amid joy.
-- Felicia Hemans

In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
-- Eric Hoffer

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.
-- André Gide

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.
-- Voltaire

This above all: to thine own self be true.
-- William Shakespeare

It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.
-- John Andrew Holmes

A mighty flame followeth a tiny spark.
-- Dante

We work in the dark,
We do what we can,
We give what we have,
Our doubt is our passion,
And our passion is our task,
The rest is the madness of art.
-- Henry James

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

To share often and much; to leave the world a little better; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. That is to have succeeded.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.
-- William Faulkner

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.
--Henry Ford

Whenever I draw a circle, I immediately want to step out of it.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel (experience) -- but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling (experiencing). Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel (experience). Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel (experience), you're nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all the others.
-- Winston Churchill

You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.
-- Samuel Butler

Love not what you are, but what you may become.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

For what purpose humanity is there should not even concern us: why you are there, that you should ask yourself: and if you have no ready answer, then set for yourself goals, high and noble goals, and perish in pursuit of them! I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year--what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor Fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes--sayer.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Battle not with monsters lest you become one. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Never mistake motion for action.
-- Ernest Hemingway

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
-- Douglas Adams

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
-- Immanuel Kant

We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves. The consciousness of wrong--doing makes us irritable, and our heart, in its cunning, quarrels with what is outside it, in order that it may deafen the clamor within.
-- Henri-Frederic Amiel

If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?
-- Dr. Robert Anthony

Sometimes it seems like we're all living in some kind of prison, and the crime is how much we hate ourselves. It's good to get really dressed up once in a while and admit the truth -- that when you look really closely, people are so strange and so complicated that they're actually beautiful. Possibly even me.
-- Henry Miller

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing.
-- Jack Kerouac

The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human.
-- John Naisbitt/Patricia Aburdence

Seek not the things that are too hard for thee, neither search the things that are beyond thy strength.
-- Apocrypha

Resolve to find thyself; and to know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
-- Matthew Arnold

I am quick to laugh at everything, so as not to have to cry.
-- De Beaumarchais

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

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
-- William Hazlett

The feeble tremble before opinion, the foolish defy it, the wise judge it, the skillful direct it.
-- Mme. Jeanne Roland French Girondist

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
-- Jean Giraudoux

Say Yes to the seedlings and a giant forest cleaves the sky.
Say Yes to the universe and the planets become your neighbors.
Say Yes to dreams of love and freedom.
It is the password to utopia.
-- Brooks Atkinson

Patience is the art of hoping.
-- Vauvenargus

The most intractable of our experiences is our experience of Time - the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing.
-- Aldous Huxley

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
-- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.
-- Oscar Wilde

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
-- Oscar Wilde

Kindness and intelligence don't always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to takethe danger out of human relationships.
-- Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

The distance doesn't matter, it is only the first step that is difficult.
-- Marie de Vichy-Chamrond

Living is a thing you do now or never...which do you?
--Piet Hein

Let go of your attachment to being right, and suddenly your mind is more open. You're able to benefit from the unique viewpoints of others,without being crippled by your own judgment.
-- Ralph Marston

It is never too late to be what you might have been.
-- George Eliot

It's not what you are but what you don't become that hurts.
-- Oscar Levant

Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.
-- Phillip Brooks

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured and far away.
-- Henry David Thoreau

In times of stress, our impatience surfaces. We may say things we don'treally mean or intend to say things we don't really mean or intend to say -all out of proportion to reality. Or we may become sullen, communicatingthrough emotion and attitude rather than words, eloquent messages ofcriticism, jugdement, and rejection. We then harvest hurt feelings andstrained relationships. Patience is the practical expression of faith, hope,wisdom, and love. It is a very active emotion. It is not indifference,sullen endurance, or resignation. Patience is emotional diligence. Itaccepts the reality of step-by-step processes and natural growth cycles.Life provides abundant chances to practice patience - to stretch theemotional fibre - from waiting for a late person or plane to listeningquietly to your child's feelings and experiences when other things are pressing.
-- Stephen R. Covey

Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.
-- Martin Luther King Jr.

I'm utterly convinced that we are all here for one another and that every experience that everyone is having is relevant. It all counts. The Universe is so extraordinarily well designed that it needs all those experiences.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart ... Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
-- Carl Jung

Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow delightful conditions, all heavenly environment; of these if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built.
-- James Allen

Humans may be defined as the animal that can say I, that can be aware of themselves as a separate entity.
-- Erich Fromm

When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either.
-- Leo Burnett

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
-- Theodore Roosevelt

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.
-- Oscar Wilde

I'm not trying to counsel any of you to do anything really special except to dare to think and to dare to go with the truth and to dare to really love completely.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller