Good Quotes by Famous People

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.

* 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, 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

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.

Annie Dillard:

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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:

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

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:

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

HH the Dalai Lama:

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

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 James

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.

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 Dewey:

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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