Life Is A Quotes

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Keyword: Life Is A

Quotes: 433 total. 2 Misattributed. 1 Disputed. 17 About.

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Date (year)1832-600 - 2005
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Life is a comedy.
Life
• Horace Walpole, letter to Sir Horace Mann, Dec. 31, 1769. In a letter to same, March 5, 1772. "This world is a comedy, not Life".
• Source: Wikiquote: "Life" (Anonymous, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 440-55.)
"Last night I saw you in my dreams/Now I can't wait to go to sleep/And this life is all a dream/So my real life starts when I go to sleep."
"No life is a waste," the Blue Man said. "The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone."
Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.
"Life is a shiver that flies away / it's all a balance on madness" (from Sally, 1996)
Life is a long lesson in humility.
Life
• J. M. Barrie, Little Minister, Chapter III.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Life" (Anonymous, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 440-55.)
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Langston Hughes
• "Dreams," from the anthology Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers, ed. Arna Bontemps (1941).
• Source: Wikiquote: "Langston Hughes" (Quotes)
Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.
Dreams
• Langston Hughes, in "Dreams" in the anthology Golden Slippers : An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers (1941), edited by Arna Bontemps.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Dreams" (Quotes)
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.
If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?
"Echoes" on Meddle (Pink Floyd, 1971) "The memories of a man in his old age Are the deeds of a man in his prime. You shuffle in gloom of the sickroom And talk to yourself as you die. Life is a short, warm moment And death is a long cold rest. You get your chance to try in the twinkling of an eye: Eighty years, with luck, or even less."
Roger Waters
• Source: Wikiquote: "Roger Waters" (, Song Lyrics: "Witness the man who raves at the wall Making the shape of his question to Heaven Whether the sun will fall in the evening Will he remember the lesson of giving Set the controls for the heart of the sun")
Life is about relationships
A useless life is an early death.
Every man's life is a fairy-tale written by God's fingers.
Life
• Hans Christian Andersen, Preface to Works.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Life" (Anonymous, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 440-55.)
Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale, Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.
The way of life is above to the wise, that he may depart from hell beneath.
Proverbs 15:24
• King James Version of the Bible originally published in 1611. Full KJV Authorized Book Name: The Proverbs; Common Book Name: Proverbs; Chapter: 15; Verse: 24.
• The data for the years individual books were written is according to Dating the Bible on Wikipedia.
Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.
Misattributed to Laozi
• This quotation's origin is actually unknown, however it is not found in the Dao De Jing.
 • 生命是一连串的自发的自然变化。逆流而动只会徒增伤悲。接受现实,万物自然循着规律发展。
• Source: Wikiquote: "Laozi" (Misattributed)
Life is a terminal disease.
Life is an adventure in forgiveness.
Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us.
Life
• Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Chapter V.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Life" (Anonymous, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 440-55.)
The people who believe that, as a result of industrial development, life is about to become a hell, or may be one already, are guilty, at least, of sloppy pronouncements. On page 8 of Earth in the Balance, Al Gore claims that his study of the arms race gave him "a deeper appreciation for the most horrifying fact in all our lives: civilization is now capable of destroying itself." In the first place, the most horrifying fact in many of our lives is that our ex-spouse has gotten ahold of our ATM card. And civilization has always been able to destroy itself. The Greeks of ancient Athens, who had a civilization remarkable for lack of technological progress during its period of greatest knowledge and power, managed to destroy them fine.
P. J. O'Rourke
• Source: Wikiquote: "P. J. O'Rourke" (Quotes, All the Trouble in the World (1994): All the Trouble in the World. The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague and Poverty.)
Life is a zoo in a jungle.
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
"I do know without fear of contradiction what the definition of life is and it is 12 words long. 'Life is defined by how much you improve the lives of others.' "
A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
They die in youth, and their life is among the unclean.
Job 36:14
• King James Version of the Bible originally published in 1611. Full KJV Authorized Book Name: The Book of Job; Common Book Name: Job; Chapter: 36; Verse: 14.
• The data for the years individual books were written is according to Dating the Bible on Wikipedia.
To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
Yann Martel
• Chapter 7, p. 31
• Source: Wikiquote: "Yann Martel" (Quotes, Life of Pi (2001): Unless otherwise noted, page numbers refer to the 2002 edition from Toronto: Vintage Canada. ISBN 0-676-97377-9)
Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.
Youth
• Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., associate justice, supreme court of Massachusetts, address before John Sedgwick Post No. 4, Grand Army of the Republic, Keene, New Hampshire, May 30, 1884.—Speeches of Oliver Wendell Holmes, p. 11 (1934).
• Source: Wikiquote: "Youth" (Quotes, Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989))
Life is a four-letter word
Life is a jest; and all things show it. I thought so once; and now I know it.
John Gay
My Own Epitaph, inscribed on Gay’s monument in Westminster Abbey; also quoted as "I thought so once; but now I know it".
• Source: Wikiquote: "John Gay" (Quotes)
That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.
I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes.
Life is an incurable disease.
Life is a horizontal fall.
Generosity during life is a very different thing from generosity in the hour of death; one proceeds from genuine liberality and benevolence, the other from pride or fear.
Horace Mann
• As quoted in Gems of Thought : Being a Collection of More Than a Thousand Choice Selections, Or Aphorisms, from Nearly Four Hundred and Fifty Different Authors, and on One Hundred and Forty Different Subjects (1888) edited by Charles Northend
• Source: Wikiquote: "Horace Mann" (Quotes)
Life is an echo. What you send out comes back. What you sow, you reap. What you give, you get. What you see in others, exists in you.
Life is a shuttle.
Life is a jest, and all things show it, I thought so once, but now I know it.
About Epitaphs
• John Gay, My Own Epitaph; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 231.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Epitaphs" (Quotes about epitaphs, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 229-35.)
I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
I bargained with Life for a penny, And Life would pay no more, However I begged at evening When I counted my scanty store; For Life is a just employer, He gives you what you ask, But once you have set the wages, Why, you must bear the task. I worked for a menial's hire, Only to learn, dismayed, That any wage I had asked of Life, Life would have paid.
Life is a game and true love is a trophy.
Hope for the best. Expect the worst.
Life is a play. We're unrehearsed.
This life is a hard fact; work your way through it boldly, though it may be adamantine; no matter, the soul is stronger.
Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.
In my opinion, the existence of life is a highly overrated phenomenon.
Life
• Doctor Manhattan Watchmen volume XII, written by Alan Moore
• Source: Wikiquote: "Life" (Anonymous, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 440-55.)
Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.
Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart.
Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH…
A good life is a main argument.
Life is a gift horse in my opinion.
Whose life is a bubble, and in length a span.
William Browne
Britannia’s Pastorals (1613), Book i. Song 2. Compare: "Who then to frail mortality shall trust/ But limns on water, or but writes in dust", Francis Bacon, The World.
• Source: Wikiquote: "William Browne" (Quotes)
Life is a drink and you get drunk when you're young.
Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.
Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding.
Life is a well of delight; but where the rabble also drink, there all fountains are poisoned.
Life is a tapestry: We are the warp; angels, the weft; God, the weaver. Only the Weaver sees the whole design.
Angels
• Eileen Elias Freeman in The Angels' Little Instruction Book : Learning from God's Heavenly Messengers (1994).
• Source: Wikiquote: "Angels" (F)
The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.
Success
• F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), American author. 'Early Success', an essay first published in American Cavalcade (Oct. 1937), The Crack-Up, edited by Edmund Wilson (1945).
• Source: Wikiquote: "Success" (Quotes)
Life is a waste of time. Time is a waste of life. Get wasted all the time and you'll have the time of your life.
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.
Photography
• Dorothea Lange, as quoted in Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life (1994) by Elizabeth Partridge
• Source: Wikiquote: "Photography" (Quotes)
Life is a waste of wearisome hours, Which seldom the rose of enjoyment adorns, And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers, Is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.
Life
• Thomas Moore, Oh! Think not My Spirits are always as Light.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Life" (Anonymous, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 440-55.)
"Eh, gentlemen, let us reckon upon accidents! Life is a chaplet of little miseries which the philosopher counts with a smile. Be philosophers, as I am, gentlemen; sit down at the table and let us drink. Nothing makes the future look so bright as surveying it through a glass of chambertin."
"I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open..."
All of life is a foreign country.
Jack Kerouac
• Letter to John Clellon Holmes (24 June 1949), published in The Beat Vision: A Primary Sourcebook (1987) edited by Arthur Knight and Kit Knight, page 93.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Jack Kerouac" (Quotes)
Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.
Every life is a march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice.
The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me.
My point is, life is about balance. The good and the bad. The highs and the lows. The pina and the colada.
O soldier and hero of God, where for thee is sorrow or shame or suffering? For thy life is a glory, thy deeds a consecration, victory thy apotheosis, defeat thy triumph.
Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.
Life is a smoke that curls— Curls in a flickering skein, That winds and whisks and whirls, A figment thin and vain, Into the vast inane. One end for hut and hall.
Life
• William Ernest Henley, Of the Nothingness of Things.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Life" (Anonymous, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 440-55.)
Life is a mission. Every other definition of life is false, and leads all who accept it astray. Religion, science, philosophy, though still at variance upon many points, all agree in this, that every existence is an aim.
Life
• Mazzini, Life and Writings, Chapter V.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Life" (Anonymous, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 440-55.)
You want my opinion? We're all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness — and call it love — true love.
Misattributed to Dr. Seuss
• Robert Fulghum in True Love (1998). Versions attributed to Dr. Seuss usually run "mutual weirdness".
• Source: Wikiquote: "Dr. Seuss" (Misattributed)
There is no need to carry me to another prison. My life is already ebbing away. I suggest that you nail me to a cross and burn me alive. My flaming body will be a torch to light my people on their path to freedom.
It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death. (1 April 1939)
People who think of themselves as tough-minded and realistic, among them influential political leaders and businessmen as well as go-getters and hustlers of smaller caliber, tend to take it for granted that human nature is selfish and that life is a struggle in which only the fittest may survive. According to this philosophy, the basic law by which man must live, in spite of his surface veneer of civilization, is the law of the jungle. The "fittest" are those who can bring to the struggle superior force, superior cunning, and superior ruthlessness.
The real damage is done by those millions who want to "survive." The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don't want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won't take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don't like to make waves — or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honor, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It's the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you'll keep it under control. If you don't make any noise, the bogeyman won't find you. But it's all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.
Disputed quote by Sophie Scholl
• As quoted in O2 : Breathing New Life Into Faith (2008) by Richard Dahlstrom, Ch. 4 : Artisans of Hope: Stepping into God's Kingdom Story, p. 63; this source is disputed as it does not cite an original document for the quote.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Sophie Scholl" (Disputed)
Life is a verb not a noun.
Life is a tragedy full of joy.
Atqui vivere, militare est. But life is a warfare.
Life
• Seneca the Younger, Epistolæ Ad Lucilium, XCVI.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Life" (Anonymous, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 440-55.)
A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.
Ma vie est un combat. My life is a struggle.
Life
• Voltaire, Le Fanatisme, II. 4.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Life" (Anonymous, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 440-55.)
The Doctor's life is a open wound. And an open wound can be entered.
Ein unnütz Leben ist ein früher Tod. A useless life is an early death.
Life
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Iphigenia auf Tauris, I, 2, 63.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Life" (Anonymous, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 440-55.)
They are the only honest hypocrites. Their life is a voluntary dream; a studied madness.
Our life is all grounded and rooted in love, and without love we may not live.
Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules. - Mr. Spencer
J. D. Salinger
• Chapter 2
• Source: Wikiquote: "J. D. Salinger" (Quotes, The Catcher in the Rye (1951):
All quotes are statements of Holden Caulfield unless otherwise noted. This is just a sample, for more from this work see: The Catcher in the Rye)
Life is a wave, which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles.
Life is a wave which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles.
Chaque instant de la vie est un pas vers la mort. Every moment of life is a step toward the grave.
Life
• Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, Tite et Bérénice, I, 5.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Life" (Anonymous, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 440-55.)
[In Bali] life is a rhythmic, patterned unreality of pleasant, significant movement, centered in one's own body to which all emotions long ago withdrew.
Margaret Mead
• p. 48
• Source: Wikiquote: "Margaret Mead" (Quotes, 1940s, Balinese Character, 1942: Source: Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead (1942) Balinese Character. )
The science of life is a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen.
Claude Bernard
• Source: Wikiquote: "Claude Bernard" (Sourced, Introduction à l'Étude de la Médecine Expérimentale (1865): (An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine))
The death clock is ticking slowly in our breast, and each drop of blood measures its time, and our life is a lingering fever.
Public life is a situation of power and energy; he trespasses against his duty who sleeps upon his watch, as well as he that goes over to the enemy.
Spiritual unfoldment cannot take place merely because of an intellectual appreciation of the theory of perfection. Evolution takes place only when a corresponding change in the subjective life is accomplished.
Life is a balanced system of learning and evolution. Whether pleasure or pain; every situation in your life serves a purpose. It is up to us to recognize what that purpose could be.”
One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it, and then it's gone. But to surrender what you are, and live without belief - that's more terrible than dying - more terrible than dying young.
The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.
But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of Bravery, in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.
Your life is a collection of body parts that could be used to save many people. And you’re not doing anything. What are you doing with your life that’s so important? Come on, let’s dissemble and discombobulate you for the greatest good for the greatest number.
I suppose the story of my life is a search for love, but more than that, I have been looking for a way to repair myself from the damages I suffered early on and to define my obligation, if I had any, to myself and my species.
The realization that life is absurd and cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.
Absurdity
• Albert Camus, critiquing Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, as quoted in Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd (2002) by Avi Sagi, p. 43.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Absurdity" (Quotes: Alphabetized by author )
Il torre altrui la vita È facoltà commune Al più vil della terra; il darla è solo De' Numi, e de' Regnanti. To take away life is a power which the vilest of the earth have in common; to give it belongs to gods and kings alone.
Life
• Metastasio, La Clemenza di Tito, III. 7.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Life" (Anonymous, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 440-55.)
Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy.
I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter. With the laugh comes the tears and in developing motion pictures or television shows, you must combine all the facts of life — drama, pathos and humor.
Walt Disney
• Ch. 1 : It All Started with a Boy, p. 16
• Source: Wikiquote: "Walt Disney" (Quotes, How to Be Like Walt : Capturing the Magic Every Day of Your Life (2004): How to Be Like Walt : Capturing the Magic Every Day of Your Life (2004) by Pat Williams )
It's an amazing feeling to know that life is actually growing inside your body. The first time you see the ultrasound and you see the little bones and you realise that it's part of you and it's in your care is life changing and this sort of protective instinct has taken over.
When they lay down beside me I made my confession to them.
They touched both my eyes and I touched the dew on their hem.
If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn,
They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.
From Plato: the man who has an elevated mind and takes a view of all time and of all substance, dost thou suppose it possible for him to think that human life is anything great? It is not possible, he said. Such a man then will think that death also is no evil.
Marcus Aurelius
• VII, 35
• Source: Wikiquote: "Marcus Aurelius" (Quotes, Meditations (c. 161–180 CE): These were writings of Aurelius as reminders to himself of ideas to bear in mind. There are many different translations of these, often with different nuances of interpretation (and sometimes different arrangements)., Book VII)
Just as he who gives his life to serve a great idea is admirable, he who avails himself of a great idea to serve his personal hopes of glory and power is abominable, even if he too risks his life. To give one's life is a right only when one gives it unselfishly.
Nobody's life is a bed of roses. We all have crosses to bear, and we all just do our best. I would never claim to have the worst situation. There are many widows, and many people dying of AIDS, many people killed in Lebanon, people starving all over the planet. So we have to count our lucky stars.
To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.
Daily life is a comprimised blend of posturing for the sake of role-playing and of varying degrees of self-revelation. Under stressful conditions even the "true" self cannot be precisely defined, as Erving Goffman observes. ...Little wonder that the identity crisis is a major source of modern neuroticism, and that the urban middle class aches for a return to a simpler existence.
A harmonious relationship between religion and public life is all the more important at a time when some people have come to consider religion a cause of division rather than a force for unity. In a world threatened by sinister and indiscriminate forms of violence, the unified voice of religious people urges nations and communities to resolve conflicts through peaceful means and with full regard for human dignity.
Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species — if separate species we be — for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.
H. P. Lovecraft
• "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" - written 1920; first published in The Wolverine, No. 9 (March 1921).
• Source: Wikiquote: "H. P. Lovecraft" (Quotes, Fiction)
There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man's whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment.
Everyone lets the present moment slip by, then looks for it as though he thought it were somewhere else.
Life is a game of whist. From unseen sources The cards are shuffled, and the hands are dealt. Blind are our efforts to control the forces That, though unseen, are no less strongly felt. I do not like the way the cards are shuffled, But still I like the game and want to play; And through the long, long night will I, unruffled, Play what I get, until the break of day.
Life
• Eugene F. Ware, Whist.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Life" (Anonymous, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 440-55.)
Your heart is as fresh as your face; and that is well. The useless men are those who never change with the years. Many views that I held to in my youth and long afterwards are a pain to me now, and I am carrying away from Thrums memories of errors into which I fell at every stage of my ministry. When you are older you will know that life is a long lesson in humility.
A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection — unless you lie — in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.
We suffer a lot in our society from loneliness. So much of our life is an attempt to not be lonely: 'Let's talk to each other; let's do things together so we won't be lonely.' And yet inevitably, we are really alone in these human forms. We can pretend; we can entertain each other; but that's about the best we can do. When it comes to the actual experience of life, we're very much alone; and to expect anyone else to take away our loneliness is asking too much.
Let pessimism once take hold of the mind, and life is all topsy-turvy, all vanity and vexation of spirit. There is no cure for individual or social disorder, except in forgetfulness and annihilation. "Let us eat, drink and be merry," says the pessimist, "for to-morrow we die." If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone. I should seek in vain for the light that does not visit my eyes and the music that does not ring in my ears. I should beg night and day and never be satisfied. I should sit apart in awful solitude, a prey to fear and despair. But since I consider it a duty to myself and to others to be happy, I escape a misery worse than any physical deprivation.
"Every man is a suffering-machine and a happiness-machine combined. The two functions work together harmoniously, with a fine and delicate precision, on the give-and-take principle. For every happiness turned out in the one department the other stands ready to modify it with a sorrow or a pain - maybe a dozen. In most cases the man's life is about equally divided between happiness and unhappiness. When this is not the case the unhappiness predominates - always; never the other. Sometimes a man's make and disposition are such that his misery-machine is able to do nearly all the business. Such a man goes through life almost ignorant of what happiness is. Everything he touches, everything he does, brings a misfortune upon him. You have seen such people? To that kind of a person life is not an advantage, is it? It is only a disaster. Sometimes for an hour's happiness a man's machinery makes him pay years of misery. Don't you know that? It happens every now and then. I will give you a case or two presently. Now the people of your village are nothing to me - you know that, don't you?"
About Satan
• Source: Wikiquote: "Satan" (Fiction, ''The Mysterious Stranger (1916): The Satan In Twain's story claims he is only an angel of the Satan family, and not The Satan who famously has fallen from heaven. He remarks: "It is a good family - ours," said Satan; "there is not a better. He is the only member of it that has ever sinned." When asked about The Satan who has fallen he replies: "Yes - he is my uncle.")
Life is a bitch, (various endings follow).
Life is a joke, (various endings follow).
Life is a sexually contracted terminal disease.
Family life is an encroachment on private life.
Karl Kraus
• Source: Wikiquote: "Karl Kraus" (Quotes, Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976): Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths: Selected Aphorisms (1990) as translated by Harry Zohn)
A perfect life is a contradiction in terms.
You're life is a print-out of your thoughts.
Life is about everything, but without love it's nothing.
Life is a compromise between fate and free will.
Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.
Karl Kraus
• Source: Wikiquote: "Karl Kraus" (Quotes, Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976): Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths: Selected Aphorisms (1990) as translated by Harry Zohn)
A man's life is an appendix to his heart.
Life is an ulcer on the body of universe.
Life
• Jerzy Vetulani, Starość okiem przyrodnika, „Psychogeriatria polska”, 2007; 4(3), pages 109–138.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Life" (V)
Life is a business that does not cover the costs.
Life is an urge of the Universe to understand itself.
Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.
Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix.
Life is a risk; so is writing. You have to love it.
Social and political life is a Society for the Diffusion of Mendacity.
Sanity is madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
Life is a dream from which we wake only when we meet death.
Yes! Life is a banquet, and most poor sons-of-bitches are starving to death! Live!
Life
• Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, Auntie Mame, act II, scene vi (1957). Auntie Mame is speaking. Based on the novel of the same title by Patrick Dennis.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Life" (L)
What I do for a living is talk. What I do for life is action.
To this man life is already as earnest and awful, and beautiful and terrible, as death.
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk.
Cyril Connolly
• Part I: Ecce Gubernator (p. 23)
• Source: Wikiquote: "Cyril Connolly" (Quotes, The Unquiet Grave (1944): Persea Books, 1981, ISBN 0-89255-058-9)
But life is a cheap thing beside a man's work. The only thing is that you need it.
Life is a disease of the spirit; a working incited by Passion. Rest is peculiar to the spirit.
Novalis
• Source: Wikiquote: "Novalis" (Quotes, Novalis (1829): Statements of Novalis as quoted in the essay "Novalis" by Thomas Carlyle)
Life is a partial, continuous, progressive, multiform and conditionally interactive self-realization of the potentialities of atomic electron states.
The whole life is a succession of dreams. My ambition is to be a conscious dreamer, that is all.
Dreams
• Swami Vivekananda, in a letter from New York to Mary Hale (10 February 1896), in Complete Works, 5.100.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Dreams" (Quotes)
The highest life is a broken column; the fairest life, a tar nished gem; the richest life, an unripened fruit.
Life
• John Humpstone, p. 385.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Life" (Anonymous, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895): Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).)
The basis of life is absolute freedom. The objective of life is absolute joy. The result of life is absolute growth.
I too complain ceaselessly in my heart and in my words too. My very life is a protest. Against government, for instance.
Dorothy Day
• 8 August 1974
• Source: Wikiquote: "Dorothy Day" (Quotes, The Duty of Delight (2011): The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day (2011))
The meaning of life is anything you want it to be, because if something hasn't got an answer how can you answer be wrong?
That judges of important causes should hold office for life is a disputable thing, for the mind grows old as well as the body.
I have very strongly this feeling... that our everyday life is at one and the same time banal, overfamiliar, platitudinous and yet mysterious and extraordinary.
Life is arched with changing skies: Rarely are they what they seem: Children we of smiles and sighs— Much we know, but more we dream.
Change
• William Winter, Light and Shadow. in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 93-96.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Change" (Sourced, W)
With a mind not diseased, a holy life is a life of hope; and at the end of it, death is a great act of hope.
William Mountford
• P. 328.
• Source: Wikiquote: "William Mountford" (Sourced, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895): Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).)
With a mind not diseased, a holy life is a life of hope, and at the end of it, death is a great act of hope.
Hope
• William Mountford, Euthanasy (4th ed., 1852), Ch. 11
• Source: Wikiquote: "Hope" (Quotes: Sorted alphabetically by author or source)
It is never right to consider that a man has been made happy by fate, until his life is absolutely finished, and he has ended his existence.
Hope
• Sophocles, Frag, Tyndarus.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Hope" (Quotes: Sorted alphabetically by author or source, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 375-78.)
Ye children of man! whose life is a span Protracted with sorrow from day to day, Naked and featherless, feeble and querulous, Sickly, calamitous creatures of clay.
Man
• Aristophanes, Birds; translation by John Hookham Frere
• Source: Wikiquote: "Man" (Quotes, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 487-93.)
Life is action, the use of one's powers. As to use them to their height is our joy and duty, so it is the one end that justifies itself.
From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.
If our Bodily Life is a burning, our Spiritual Life is a being burnt, a Combustion (or, is precisely the inverse the case?); Death, therefore, perhaps a Change of Capacity.
Novalis
• Source: Wikiquote: "Novalis" (Quotes, Novalis (1829): Statements of Novalis as quoted in the essay "Novalis" by Thomas Carlyle)
Dexter: You're the only one I've ever wanted to set free. You're the one who needs setting free, little brother. Your life is a lie. You'll never be what you-
Fictional last words in live-action television series
• Who: Brian Moser (aka Rudy Cooper), the Ice Truck Killer. Said before his brother Dexter, a vigilante serial killer of murderers like Brian, slashes his throat and makes it look like a suicide. Beforehand, both brothers had expressed a desire to set each other free of thier homicidal urges, but it hadn't worked out. Brian was also referring to Dexter's ability to disguise his homicidal urges around his friends, and do good for them.
• Source: Episode 1x12 "Born Free"
• Source: Wikiquote: "Fictional last words in live-action television series" (A-L, Dexter)
The act of freezing a dead body and storing it indefinitely on the chance that some future generation may restore it to life is an act of faith, not science.
Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.
They proved that if you quit smoking, it will prolong your life. What they haven't proved is that a prolonged life is a good thing. I haven't seen the stats on that yet.
Life lives; and in the living flow, no questions are raised. The reason is that life is a living now! So, in order to live life whole-heartedly, the answer is life simply is.
Bruce Lee
• p. 3
• Source: Wikiquote: "Bruce Lee" (Quotes: Note: Many of Bruce Lee's statements are derived from his own studies of various schools of philosophy and the martial arts, and are sometimes paraphrases of previous expressions by others which he wrote down for his own instruction., Striking Thoughts (2000))
The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways. The metaphysical is antientropic, methodically marshalling energy. Life is antientropic. It is spontaneously inquisitive. It sorts out and endeavors to understand.
Chorus [leader]: Ye Children of Man! whose life is a span, / Protracted with sorrow from day to day, / Naked and featherless, feeble and querulous, / Sickly, calamitous creatures of clay!
(heavily rewritten tr. Frere 1839, p. <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=Bk8JAAAAQAAJ&q=%22Sickly%2C+calamitous+creatures+of+clay%22" target="_blank">38a>)
Aristophanes
• Source: Wikiquote: "Aristophanes" (Sourced: Each quote is often given in multiple versions: always the translation at Perseus (usually reliable literal translation with hypertext original Greek available) and often another, more oft-quoted translation. For identical translations, the earliest translator found is given. Character names may vary between editions (from different transliteration, translation, or attribution) and are thus always given on the same line as each translation., Birds (414 BC))
Nothing is so self-sabotaging as having your actions not reflect your goals. Your life is always just waiting for permission to go where you want it to go ... to be shaped how you want it to be shaped.
Life is a great big beautiful three-ring circus. There are those on the floor making their lives among the heads of lions and hoops of fire, and those in the stands, complacent and wowed, their mouths stuffed with popcorn.
Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don’t know, and we don’t really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.
Life is a jest; Take the delight of it. Laughter is best; Sing through the night of it. Swiftly the tear And the hurt and the ache of it Find us down here; Life must be what we make of it.
Life is a game of common sense. You can know all the data that the encyclopedia holds, but if you can't apply it to social situations and day to day events, you're on the same rank as someone with no data at all.
I believe life is about balance. My mom was brilliant, yet manipulative. Beautiful, but had more voices in her head than the Wu-Tang Clan. Loves her kids, killed her last husband. I say "last husband" because you don't get another one after that.
The day before is what we bring to the day we're actually living through, life is a matter of carrying along all those days-before just as someone might carry stones, and when we can no longer cope with the load, the work is done.
José Saramago
• Page 61, 2002 (Harvest Hardcover edition)
• Source: Wikiquote: "José Saramago" (Quotes, The Cave (2001): (Portuguese: A Caverna (2001); tr. Margaret Jull Costa, Vintage, 2003; Harvest, 2002, ISBN 0151004145))
Day by day there's a man in a suit / Who's gonna make you pay For the thoughts that you think and the words / They won't let you say I don't believe in magic / Life is automatic And I don't mind being on my own.
Hereafter we all have to be redeemed. The world is pulling with a thousand strings. We sin because of indifference and negligence and heap new guilt on the old original one. Our life is a chain of sin and expiation controlled by a destiny that can not be understood.
Joseph Goebbels
Wir müssen alle einmal erlöst werden. Die Welt zieht uns mit tausend Banden. Wir fehlen aus Gleichgültigkeit und Nachsicht und häufen neue eigene Schuld auf alte ererbte. Unser Leben ist eine Kette aus Schuld und Sühne, darüber ein nach unerforschlichen Gesetzen wirkendes Schicksal waltet.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Joseph Goebbels" (Quotes, Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926): Michael: ein Deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblättern, Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Franz Eher Nachf., Munich, 7th edition, 1935)
So many faces in and out of my life Some will last Some will be just now and then. Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes I'm afraid it's time for goodbye again. Say goodbye to Hollywood Say goodbye my baby Say goodbye to Hollywood Say goodbye my baby.
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. 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 only what lies in its focus.
Life is a difficult game. You can win it only by retaining your birthright to be a person. And to retain this right, you will have to be willing to take the social or external risks involved in ignoring pressures to do things the way others say they should be done.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
• p. 176.
• Source: Wikiquote: "A. P. J. Abdul Kalam" (Sourced, Wings of Fire: 'Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, Aruṇ Tivāri (1999) Wings of Fire: An Autobiography of APJ Abdul Kalam ISBN 8173711461.)
They say that life is a highway and its milestones are the years,
And now and then there's a toll-gate where you buy your way with tears.
It's a rough road and a steep road and it stretches broad and far,
But at last it leads to a golden Town where golden Houses are.
A man who has made up his mind on a given subject twenty-five years ago and continues to hold his political opinions after he has been proved to be wrong is a man of principle; while he who from time to time adapts his opinions to the changing circumstances of life is an opportunist.
Living, just by itself - what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and '''Boredom''''s the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting - or he'll come along and nibble your brain.[32]
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
• Source: Wikiquote: "Louis-Ferdinand Céline" (Sourced, Journey to the End of the Night (1932): Voyage au bout de la nuit, éd. Gallimard (1972) ISBN 2070360288; Journey to the End of the Night, tr. John H. P. Marks (1934); Journey to the End of the Night, tr. Manheim, Ralph (2006), New York: New Directions. ISBN 9780811216548.)
Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think. It is vital to mourn the victims of this government, but not at the expense of losing our sense of humor. Our ability to laugh directly coincides with our ability to fight. If we make fun of it, we can transcend it.
Life is a creative endeavor. It is active, not passive. We are the yeast that leavens our lives into rich, fully baked loaves. When we experience our lives as flat and lackluster, it is our consciousness that is at fault. We hold the inner key that turns our lives from thankless to fruitful. That key is "Blessing."
Julia Cameron
• Source: Wikiquote: "Julia Cameron" (Quotes, Blessings (1998): Blessings: Prayers and Declarations for a Heartful Life (Tarcher, 1998; ISBN 0-87477-906-5))
American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost before he can speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension, cheery self-confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so it seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
Painting is not what my life is about, but it is very important to me, and I am very lucky to be able to give some time to it. The time that I devote to painting is not a lot of time, but I do it 100 percent while I am working, and then there's nothing else that counts.
The idea that this world is a playground instead of a battleground has now been accepted in practice by the vast majority of Christians. They are facing Christ and the world. ...The ‘worship’ growing out of such a view of life is as far off center as the view itself—a sort of sanctified nightclub without the champagne and the dressed-up drunks."
Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story, but music sometimes, just music itself, can turn into more of a maths problem. I guess everything in life is a math problem, but it can be more about an empirical route to getting the symmetry that you want, and this vibe, sonically.
Our life is a constant journey, from birth to death. The landscape changes, the people change, our needs change, but the train keeps moving. Life is the train, not the station. And what you’re doing now isn’t traveling, it’s just changing countries, which is completely different Understand what is going on inside you and you will understand what is going on inside everyone else.
This is a mathematical universe. We are surrounded by equations and summations. Your life: the current state of your life and life itself is a direct summation of the equation you have created. Your life is a reflection of many choices you have made at the innumerable amount of choice-points you've crossed. Great endeavors are the summation of a great and deliberate equation.
Life is a roar of bargain and battle, but in the very heart of it there rises a mystic spiritual tone that gives meaning to the whole. It transmutes the dull details into romance. It reminds us that our only but wholly adequate significance is as parts of the unimaginable whole. It suggests that even while living we are living to ends outside ourselves
Life is a beautiful, magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish. … The trouble is you won't fight. You've given up. But there's something just as inevitable as death. And that's life. Think of the power of the universe — turning the Earth, growing the trees. That's the same power within you — if you'll only have the courage and the will to use it.
I recall what you said to me once, that words have the power to change us. Your words have changed me, Tess; they have made me a better man than I would have been otherwise. Life is a book, and there are a thousand pages I have not yet read. I would read them together with you, as many as I can, before I die.
It is perilous to separate thinking rightly from acting rightly. He is already half false who speculates on truth and does not do it. Truth is given, not to be contemplated, but to be done. Life is an action — not a thought. And the penalty paid by him who speculates on truth, is that by degrees the very truth he holds becomes a falsehood.
Frederick William Robertson
• P. 606.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Frederick William Robertson" (Sourced, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895): Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).)
What can the Christian confessor say to those who more and more must make all out of the privacy of their thought, calling up perpetual images of their desire, for he cannot say "Cease to be artist, cease to be poet," where the whole life is art and poetry, nor can he bid men leave the world, who suffer from the terrors that pass before shut-eyes.
Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud — and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word. But in the night of Death Hope sees a star and listening Love can hear the rustling of a wing.
Full and free exercise of this right by the citizen is ordinarily also his duty; for its exercise is more important to the nation than it is to himself. Like the course of the heavenly bodies, harmony in national life is a resultant of the struggle between contending forces. In frank expression of conflicting opinion lies the greatest promise of wisdom in governmental action; and in suppression lies ordinarily the greatest peril.
The deeper we look into nature, the more we recognize that it is full of life, and the more profoundly we know that all life is a secret and that we are united with all life that is in nature. Man can no longer live for himself alone. We realize that all life is valuable, and that we are united to all this life. From this knowledge comes our spiritual relationship to the universe.
Albert Schweitzer
• Source: Wikiquote: "Albert Schweitzer" (Quotes, The Spiritual Life (1947): The Spiritual Life :Selected Writings Of Albert Schweitzer, originally published as Albert Schweitzer: An Anthology )
Her life is almost a perfect blending of the Comic and the Terrible, which two things may be opposite sides of the same coin. In my own experience, everything funny I have ever written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny. Well Simone Weil's is the most comical life I have ever read about, and the most truly tragic and terrible.
About Simone Weil
Flannery O'Connor, in a letter to "A" (24 September 1955), published in The Habit of Being : Letters of Flannery O'Connor (1979) edited by Sally Fitzgerald, p. 105
• Source: Wikiquote: "Simone Weil" (Quotes about Weil: Alphabetized by author )
Life is a crusade in the service of God. Whether we wished to or not, we set out as crusaders to free — not the Holy Sepulchre — but that God buried in matter and in our souls.
Every body, every soul is a Holy Sepulcher. Every seed of grain is a Holy Sepulchre; let us free it! The brain is a Holy Sepulchre, God sprawls within it and battles with death; let us run to his assistance!
Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
Milan Kundera
• Interview with Christian Salmon (Fall 1983), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven [Viking, 1988, ISBN 0-14-008500-9], pp. 217-218
• Source: Wikiquote: "Milan Kundera" (Quotes)
When the light of the sun shines through a prism it is broken into beautiful colours, and when the prism is shattered, still the light remains. So does the life of life shine resplendent in the forms of our friends, and so, when their forms are broken, still their life remains; and in that life we are united with them; for the life of their life is also our life, and we are one with them by ties indissoluble.
It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home. No father and mother can hope to escape sorrow and anxiety, and there are dreadful moments when death comes very near those we love, even if for the time being it passes by. But life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living. Ch. IX : Outdoors and Indoors.
Life is also busy transporting and overturning the soils of earth, the stones, and the minerals. The miles-long drifts of sea kelp that float along our coasts may carry hundreds of tons of volcanic boulders held in their roots. I have followed these streams of life over 300 km, and seen them strand on granite beaches, throwing their boulders up on a 9,000 year old pile of basalt, all the hundreds of tons of which were carried there by kelp.
Bill Mollison
• chapter 8.20
• Source: Wikiquote: "Bill Mollison" (Sourced: Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) Course, 1983 "So whats the point of a fiscal economy? The point is, that it's really an invention that feeds upon distrust, for the benefit of stupidity. And if you don't tell me that greed is not stupidity, you're not thinking... 'Cause in any area where you have a finite resource, and here we are... all sitting in a finite resource, it doesn't make sense to be greedy. It makes sense to increase the procreative resource so that greed becomes obsolete. Thats what makes sense, that's what's intelligent. Stupidity is to grab what you can. Intelligence is to grow so much, there is no need to grab anything. That is intelligence. Stupidity is greed. On a broad enough scale it becomes evil. If you ever wondered what evil is, it is stupidity on a large scale.", Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988))
What greatness do I have that I have to tell anyone about? I live just like millions of people in this country; I am ordinary. My life is also ordinary. I am a poor school teacher suffering family travails. During my whole lifetime, I have been grinding away with the hope that I could become free of my sufferings. But I have not been able to free myself from suffering. What is so special about this life that needs to be told to anybody?
I know that life is a doorway to eternity, and yet my heart so often gets lost in petty anxieties. It forgets the great way home that lies before it. Unprepared, given over to childish trivialities, it could be taken by surprise when the great hour comes and find that, for the sake of piffling pleasures, the one great joy has been missed. I am aware of this, but my heart is not. It seems unteachable; it continues its dreaming … always wavering between joy and depression.
Every human being is tried this way in the active service of expectancy. Now comes the fulfillment and relieves him, but soon he is again placed on reconnaissance for expectancy; then he is again relieved, but as long as there is any future for him, he has not yet finished his service. And while human life goes on this way in very diverse expectancy, expecting very different things according to different times and occasions and in different frames of mind, all life is again one nightwatch of expectancy.
Søren Kierkegaard
Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses: "Patience in Expectancy" (1844)
• Source: Wikiquote: "Søren Kierkegaard" (Quotes: Quotes are arranged in chronological order, 1840s, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses)
The utilitarian behaves sensibly in all that is required for preservation but never takes account of the fact that he must die. He does everything reasonable to put off the day of his death—providing for defense, peace, order, health and wealth —but actively suppresses the fact that the day must come. His whole life is absorbed in avoiding death, which is inevitable, and therefore he might be thought to be the most irrational of men, if rationality has anything to do with understanding ends or comprehending the human situation as such.
Let me recall to your minds an incident related of that best of men and wisest of rulers, Antoninus Pius, who, as he lay dying, in his home at Loriam in Etruria, summed up the philosophy of life in the watchword, Aequanimitas. … Natural temperament has much to do with its development, but a clear knowledge of our relation to our fellow-creatures and to the work of life is also indispensable. One of the first essentials in securing a good-natured equanimity is not to expect too much of the people amongst whom you dwell.
People who like to think of themselves as tough-minded and realistic,among them influential political leaders and businessmen as well as go-getters and hustlers of smaller caliber, tend to take it for granted that human nature is "selfish" and that life is a struggle in which only the fittest may survive. According to this view, the basic law by which people must live, in spite of his surface veneer of civilization, is the law of the jungle. The "fittest" are those people who can bring to the struggle superior force, superior cunning, and superior ruthlessness.
Life is a pageant that passes very quickly, going hastily from one darkness to another darkness with only ignes fatui to guide; and there is no sense in it. I learned that, Kerin, without moiling over books. But life is a fine ardent spectacle; and I have loved the actors in it: and I have loved their youth and high-heartedness, and their ungrounded faiths, and their queer dreams, my Kerin, about their own importance and about the greatness of the destiny that awaited them, — while you were piddling after, of all things, the truth!
James Branch Cabell
• Saraïde, in Book Seven : What Saraïde Wanted, Ch. XLVII : Economics of Saraïde
• Source: Wikiquote: "James Branch Cabell" (Quotes, The Silver Stallion (1926): The Silver Stallion : A Comedy of Redemption)
The thing is that this life is a big car, and inside the car there is a big engine. And in the engine there is a carburetor, which is hooked up to a fuel line. In some cars, before the fuel line hits the carburetor, there is a thing called a filter that makes sure the fuel going into the carburetor is pure. So in this life, the filter for our minds is the Knowledge, and if we are not being filtered properly, many dirty particles enter our minds and eventually the whole engine is destroyed.
Millennium '73
• From a satsang by Guru Maharaj Ji
• Levine, Richard (March 14, 1974), "Rock me Maharaji – The Little Guru Without A Prayer", Rolling Stone Magazine: 36–50 Also in Dahl, Shawn; Kahn, Ashley; George-Warren, Holly (1998), Rolling stone: the seventies, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, pp. 102–105, ISBN 0-316-75914-7
• Source: Wikiquote: "Millennium '73" (Sourced quotes)
The Diary of Vaslav Nijinjsky reaches a limit of sincerity beyond any of the documents that we have referred to on this study. There are other modern works that express the same sense that civilized life is a form of living death; notably the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the novels of Franz Kafka; but there is an element of prophetic denunciation in both, the attitude of healthy men rebuking their sick neighbors. We possess no other record of the Outsider's problems that was written by a man about to be defeated and permanently smashed by those problems.
The immeasurable beauty of life is a very fine thing to write about, and there are, indeed, some who resign themselves to accept it and accept it as it is, and even some who would persuade us that there is no problem in the "trap." But it has been said by Calderón that "to seek to persuade a man that the misfortunes which he suffers are not misfortunes, does not console him for them, but it is another misfortune in addition." And furthermore, "only the heart can speak to the heart," as Fray Diego de Estella said (Vanidad del Mundo, cap. xxi.)
"As long as you think you have something to renounce, you are lost. Not to think of money and the necessities of life is an illness. It is a perversion to deny yourself the basic needs of life. You think that through a self-imposed asceticism you will increase your awareness and then be able to use that awareness to be happy. No chance. You will be peaceful when all your ideas about awareness are dropped and you begin to function like a computer. You must be a machine, function automatically in this world, never questioning your actions before, during, or after they occur."
"What does peace mean in a world in which the combined wealth of the world's 587 billionaires exceeds the combined gross domestic product of the world's 135 poorest countries? Or when rich countries that pay farm subsidies of a billion dollars a day, try and force poor countries to drop their subsidies? What does peace mean to people in occupied Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir, Tibet and Chechnya? Or to the aboriginal people of Australia? Or the Ogoni of Nigeria? Or the Kurds in Turkey? Or the Dalits and Adivasis of India?What does peace mean to non-muslims in Islamic countries, or to women in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan? What does it mean to the millions who are being uprooted from their lands by dams and development projects? What does peace mean to the poor who are being actively robbed of their resources and for whom everyday life is a grim battle for water, shelter, survival and, above all, some semblance of dignity? For them, peace is war." ''
Arundhati Roy
• A selection from a speech entitled "Peace'' given on November 7, 2004 while accepting the Sydney Peace Prize.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Arundhati Roy" (Quotes, Speeches)
Life is a love affair. There is a romance with every beauty of nature. I have no hesitation in saving that my most passionate love affair, my most thrilling romance has been with the people. There is an indissoluble marriage between politics and the people. That is why "Man is a political animal" and the state a political theatre. I have been on this stage of the masters for over twenty tumultuous years. I believe I still have a role to play. I believe the people still want me on this stage, but if I have to bow out, I give you the gift of my feelings. You will fight the fight better than me. Your speeches will be more eloquent than my speeches. Your commitment equally total. There will be more youth and vitality in your struggle. Your deeds ill be more daring. I transmit to you the blessing to the most blessed mission. This is the only present I can give you on your birthdays.
And here one may note a curious comparison which can be made between this [ascidian] life-history and that of many a respectable pinnacle and gargoyle on the social fabric. Every respectable citizen of the professional classes passes through a period of activity and imagination, of "liveliness and eccentricity," of "Sturm und Drang." He shocks his aunts. Presently, however, he realizes the sober aspect of things. He becomes dull; he enters a profession; suckers appear on his head; and he studies. Finally, by virtue of these he settles down—he marries. All his wild ambitions and subtle æsthetic perceptions atrophy as needless in the presence of calm domesticity. He secretes a house, or "establishment," round himself, of inorganic and servile material. His Bohemian tail is discarded. Henceforth his life is a passive receptivity to what chance and the drift of his profession bring along; he lives an almost entirely vegetative excrescence on the side of a street, and in the tranquillity of his calling finds that colourless contentment that replaces happiness.
Life is a Game (GCN)
Nintendo
• Source: Wikiquote: "Nintendo" (Slogans: Here are the slogans on Nintendo (Slogans that Nintendo has used other than in English are also included):)
Art is Life, Life is Art.
Wolf Vostell
• Original: Kunst ist Leben, Leben ist Kunst.
• Wolf Vostell (1961), cited in: Cultures, Vol. 5. (1978), p. 142
• Source: Wikiquote: "Wolf Vostell" (Quotes)
Life is a thread that someone entangled.
A planned life is a dead life.
Lauren Bacall
• Source: Wikiquote: "Lauren Bacall" (Quotes, Private Screenings interview (2005): An interview for Private Screenings on TCM with Robert Osborne (August 2005))
Life is a constant... of the Universe...
Life is a dream a little less inconstant. 386
My life is as if you've hit me with it.
Life is about learning; when you stop learning, you die.
Tom Clancy
• As quoted in The Appraiser's Handbook : A Guide for Doctors (2007) by Nick Lyons, Susanne Caesar, Abayomi McEwen, p. 11.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Tom Clancy" (Quotes)
Life is a game, where either you lose or you learn.
Life is a slow suicide, and it is happening to every intellectual.
I began to realize that life is a growth stage I'm going through.
La vie est un jeu (The life is a game) (GameCube, France 2002)
Nintendo
• Source: Wikiquote: "Nintendo" (Slogans: Here are the slogans on Nintendo (Slogans that Nintendo has used other than in English are also included):)
A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory. (p. 40)
Life is a chain of small sorrows that lead to a great joy.
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep.
If life is a loom, the pattern you weave is not so easily unraveled.
If the Christian life is a book, coming to Christ is only chapter 1.
Don't be so condescending. Our village life is a hotbed of intrigue and drama.
The real problem is, people think life is a ladder, and it’s really a wheel.
Charles de Lint
• “The Forest is Crying”, p. 44 (quoting Pat Cadigan)
• Source: Wikiquote: "Charles de Lint" (Quotes, The Ivory and the Horn (1996): All page numbers from the mass market edition published by Tor Books )
"Foolish: It's all foolish. Life is a farce— a stupid, sickening farce played out by fools."
Life is a journey, you know; and a lot of journeys, you go out, you come back.
The doctrine of the utter vanity of life is a doctrine of despair, and life is hope.
[Henry] Life is a kind of exile and we all long to go home. Who said that?
The creation of economic “stories” from real life is an ongoing process—because new stories appear every day.
Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season.
We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.
Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.
Fernando Pessoa
• Original: Entre mim e a vida há um vidro ténue. por mais nitidamente que eu veja e compreenda a vida, eu não lhe posso tocar.
Ibid., p. 100
• Source: Wikiquote: "Fernando Pessoa" (Quotes, The Book of Disquiet)
“All life is a rhythm,” she said as I sat up. “All death is rhythm suspended, a syncopation before life resumes.”
Every thing in life is a uniform; the only time our bodies are truly in civilian dress is when we’re naked.
José Saramago
• p. 92 (Vintage 2003)
• Source: Wikiquote: "José Saramago" (Quotes, The Cave (2001): (Portuguese: A Caverna (2001); tr. Margaret Jull Costa, Vintage, 2003; Harvest, 2002, ISBN 0151004145))
All life is a struggle for existence. Why should it cease to be a struggle if it spreads among the stars?
Trying to avoid clichés helps life become fresh again, helps us remember what life is about in the first place. -Fingerprint
Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster towards a finishing line that is merely the start of the next race.
Life is a hot day, perhaps death is a cool night. Life is a shallow bay, perhaps death is a clear, deep sea.
Life is art. Art is life. I never separate it. I don’t feel that much anger. I equally have a lot of joy.
In Manipur, dancing is charged with faith, the devotional fervour of bhakthi . To a Manipuri, one whole life is a dance offering.
Life is a mystery as deep as ever death can be; Yet oh, how dear it is to us, this life we live and see!
For me, life is about enjoying yourself because you only live once. We should try to make the most of things and follow our dreams.
Luck is for the poor. For the rich, money flows to its natural source. ...You know, it’s true what they say. Life is a beach!
I've learned much, Father, and this above all: that no station in life is above any other, if it’s occupied by someone with a good heart.
Every manifestation of life is accompanied by noise. Noise is therefore familiar to our ears and has the power of immediately reminding us of life itself.
Alliteration the mind - Temple, life is a honeymoon vernal song on the humble bee's lips, Alcoholic realized in the mustard flower, as like friend .
If I think about what life is, I believe life is a miracle. And if I think about what a miracle is, I don’t believe in it.
This Life is a fleeting breath, And whither and how shall I go, When I wander away with Death By a path that I do not know?
mOh, life is a glorious cycle of song, A medley of extemporanea, And love is a thing that can never go wrong And I am Marie of Roumania.
But from now on act the part. You will be amazed at the number of people you fool. Don't share your doubts! Life is a game, Scaler. Play it like that.
Living our best life is about learning to love well. We may blame our past, our parents, or our ex, but the key to our future lies with us, not them.
Tim Clinton
• p. 129
• Source: Wikiquote: "Tim Clinton" (Sourced, Break Through: When to Give In, How to Push Back…The Moment That Changes Everything with Pat Springle (Worthy))
He would agree that life is a little worth living — or worth living a little; but would remark that, unfortunately, to live little enough, we have to live a great deal.
I now know that anything sweet, really sweet, that I have was nothing that I planned. If you don't have kids and animals, you don't truly know what real life is about.
Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end, life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
It seems that in every culture, however tough life is and however impossible the conditions, there are some resilient human beings who find their way through, who survive and make something of themselves.
When a life is at stake and it's your child, you become fearless in a lot of ways. I mean, you jut become fanatic. Nothing ever gets done unless it's done by a fanatic.
Martin Sheen
• Source: Wikiquote: "Martin Sheen" (Quotes, 2000s, AARP magazine interview (2008): "The Completely Outrageous Passion of Martin Sheen" by Nancy Perry Graham in AARP The Magazine (July & August 2008))
I am one of the last of a small tribe of troubadours, who still believe that life is a beautiful and exciting journey with a purpose and grace which are well worth singing about.
Yip Harburg
• As quoted in "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", by Scott Jacobs, in The Week Behind (23 September 2009).
• Source: Wikiquote: "Yip Harburg" (Quotes)
When a life is at stake and it's your child, you become fearless in a lot of ways. I mean, you just become fanatic. Nothing ever gets done unless it's done by a fanatic.
Fanaticism
• Martin Sheen, as quoted in "The Completely Outrageous Passion of Martin Sheen" by Nancy Perry Graham in AARP The Magazine (July & August 2008), p. 76
• Source: Wikiquote: "Fanaticism" (Quotes: Alphabetized by author )
If life is a journey, time should pull over at a rest stop sometimes - we should all be given a chance to get off and stretch our legs, collect our thoughts and reorganize.
The probity in a public life is a must for improvement of country’s economy vis-à-vis the living conditions of common man. To mould the perceptions of students he wrote biographies of three great men.
LIFE IS A SNOWFLAKE DELICATE AND COMPLICATED- AND ONCE YOU ARE MELTED YOU ARE IN THE OCEAN BEFORE YOU KNOW IT AND IT TAKES A CROWD`S LIFETIME OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS BEFORE YOU ARE THAT SNOWFLAKE AGAIN
Life is a beautiful struggle People search through the rubble for a suitable hussle Some people using their noodle Some people using their muscle Some people put it all together make it fit like a puzzle
Life is a frail and transitory thing, but it has been given a higher purpose and dignity through the revelation of God's Teaching to Israel, and the resulting dedication of an entire people to God's service.
Do you know what a good life is? A good life is a life in which you never have to think about yourself again. You know why? Because you can't think about yourself without producing fear.
Only by pursuing the extremes in one's nature, with all its contradictions, appetites, aversions, rages, can one hope to understand a little — oh, I admit only a very little — of what life is about.
I've learned some things from having lived:
If you're alive, experience largely, merge with rivers, heavens, cosmos
For what we call living is a gift given to life
And life is a gift bestowed upon us
Ataol Behramoğlu
Yaşadıklarımdan Öğrendiğim Bir Şey Var (1977), as translated in I've Learned Some Things by Walter G. Andrews
• Source: Wikiquote: "Ataol Behramoğlu" (Sourced)
'What's it really like to always be the prettiest person in a room? Dos it mean you're always acting as if in a play, because no one stops looking at you?' 'Life is a play, isn't it?”
My life is an unfinished product, but instead of just saying, 'How do I top what I've accomplished,' I decided I wanted to move forward, express my growth and take a big step into the next chapter."
Life is a voyage. The winds of life come strong From every point; yet each will speed thy course along, If thou with steady hand when tempests blow Canst keep thy course aright and never once let go.
Nowadays woman is continually characterized in the highest terms, in the most flattering phrases, up to, indeed, far beyond the fantastic. Everything that is great in life is ascribed to her; on this point poetry and gallantry agree.
Life is a transforming flood that fills up empty containers and then spills out of them on its way to fill up more. The shape and number of vessels submerged by the flood doesn't make a bit of difference.
Dost thou wish me to complete the catalogue by thy death? Thy life is a worthless thing. Tempt me no more. I am but a man, and thy presence may awaken a fury which may spurn my control. Begone!
Life is a stage, and when the curtain falls upon an act, it is finished and forgotten. The emptiness of such a life is beyond imagination. I have emphasiszed the incongruence or opposition of self and image in the narcissist.
Life is a b movie. It's stupid and it's strange, A directionless story, And the dialogue is lame. But in the he said, she said, Sometimes there's some poetry, If you turn your back long enough, And let it happen naturally.
Every day, you know, you learn something new about someone. I think that's what life is about, it's about learning something new every day. A partner for me that will be lifetime. She's just a great individual and incredibly powerful woman.
Life is a campus: in a Greenwich Village bookstore, looking for a New Yorker collection, I asked of an earnest-looking assistant where I might find the humour section. Peering over her granny glasses, she enquired, "Humour studies would that be, sir?"
All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.
Felix Frankfurter
• Reply to counsel who said a challenge from the bench was “just a matter of semantics,” Reader’s Digest (June 1964).
• Source: Wikiquote: "Felix Frankfurter" (Sourced, Other writings)
'Makes no sense to me,' said Huntsekker. 'You don't know who is at your door, but you know the thoughts of a man twenty miles away.' ‘Life is a mystery,’ said Powdermill, with a gold-toothed grin. 'It is that, right enough,' agreed Huntsekker.
How can you hope to win against goddamn time travelers? It's like playing blackjack when the dealer is God. … Come to think of it, all of life is a blackjack game with God as the dealer, isn't it? So this is no worse.
For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.
Clokey says he underwent "a marvelous, life-changing experience" by taking LSD in supervised doses in the late 1960s. "It opened my awareness to what life is all about," he says. [...] — There's a master's thesis for someone who wants to hunt for the psychedelic influence in the shows.
About Art Clokey
• Mike Antonucci (Knight Ridder), "Gumby's creator formed a spirit in clay", The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 1 January 1998, p. 6E
• Source: Wikiquote: "Art Clokey" (Quotes about Art Clokey)
St. Paul earned his living most of the time by hard labor and constantly reminded his converts that they must not defraud each other, but love one another and work with their own hands. The same rule of life is applied by the laws governing the early monastic orders.
A novel, or indeed any work of art, is not intended to be a literal transcription from Nature. … Life is a series of false values. There it is always the little things that are greatest. Art attempts to remedy this. It may be defined as an expurgated edition of Nature.
James Branch Cabell
• Writing on Charles Dickens, in "In Defence of an Obsolete Author" in William and Mary College Monthly (November 1897), VII, p. 3-4
• Source: Wikiquote: "James Branch Cabell" (Quotes)
One can't get to know people well here; the social life is amusing but superficial. However, remember that I am just a savage, from the jungles (of New Guinea where he had sailed and worked as a government clerk)! Perhaps when I am tamed, I will jump through the social hoops, too.
Errol Flynn
• Spoken to M.G. Hart, writer, after his success as "Captain Blood," about being a newcomer to Hollywood, for magazine article Silver Screen, January 1936
• Source: Wikiquote: "Errol Flynn" (Sourced)
Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.
Fernando Pessoa
Ibid., p. 18.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Fernando Pessoa" (Quotes, The Education of the Stoic: The only text left by heteronym The Baron of Teive (or Álvaro Coelho de Athayde), this work is left behind after the Baron's suicide and the burning of all his other writings. All quotations provided in English as translated by Richard Zenith.)
They gave me powers of thought and memory far beyond anything natural evolution would have given me, but that doesn't give them the right to decide the meaning of my life as if I were some dream. I decide the meaning. If my life is a dream then it's my dream, I'm the dreamer.
There is surely nothing other than the purpose of the present moment. A man’s whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do and nothing else to pursue. We should live by being true to the purpose of each moment.
I guess I don’t subscribe to the twee school. I remember trying to lose our copy of Thomas the Tank Engine before I had to read it again. Life is a more dimensional and interesting affair than vestigially Victorian notions of childhood. I was trying to make something substantial, something to be read and reread.
To all those who say they believe in God, please realize with faith that God hears every word you say. God hears your every thought. Realizing this, speak only what is truth and act only with God's qualities of love, compassion, justice, patience, and the realization that each life is as important as your own.
Of such as he was, there be few on earth; Of such as he is, there are few in Heaven: And life is all the sweeter that he lived, And all he loved more sacred for his sake: And Death is all the brighter that he died, And Heaven is all the happier that he's there.
Immortality
• Gerald Massey, In Memoriam for Earl Brownlow.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Immortality" (Sourced, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations: Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 388-90.)
The Christian life is a long and continual tendency of our hearts toward that eternal goodness which we desire on earth. All our happiness consists in thirsting for it. Now this thirst is prayer. Ever desire to approach your Creator, and you will never cease to pray. Do not think it necessary to pronounce many words.
Worship
• François Fénelon, p. 192.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Worship" (Quotes, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895): Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).)
When the Greeks said that all knowing is recollecting, they said that all existence, which is, has been; when one says that life is a repetition, one says; actually, which has been, now comes into existence. If one does not have the category of recollection or of repetition, all life dissolves into an empty, meaningless noise.
Fiction is unlike reality because it has an end, a conclusion, which allows the characters to stroll happily, or perhaps simply more wisely, out through the climax into the epilogue. But life is a tapestry. It has no satisfactory end. There are simply periods of acceleration and delay, victory and frustration, seasoned with periodic jolts of reality.
Jack McDevitt
• Chapter 44 (p. 412)
• Source: Wikiquote: "Jack McDevitt" (Sourced, Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006): All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published in 2007 by Ace Books )
The instinctive Indian sense that nothing begins and nothing ends. We are all living in an eternal present in which what was and what will be is contained in what is, or to put it in a more contemporary idiom, that life is a series of sequel to history.Book by Shashi Tharoor: "The Great Indian Novel", ISBN 0140120491
Life is a gift that the humblest may boast of And one that the humblest may well make the most of. Get out and live it each hour of the day, Wear it and use it as much as you may; Don't keep it in niches and corners and grooves, You'll find that in service its beauty improves.
Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope. Give us leave to live! The eternity that is like an eternal present, without memory and without hope, is death. Thus do ideas exist in the God-Idea, but not thus do men live in the living God, in the God-Man.
The brigand's life is a very fine life For men of generous mind; We rob the rich to help the poor And succour oppressed mankind. The rich, dear souls, are close around And it's easy work to skelp 'em; But the poor — damn their eyes — can never be found When we're in the mood to help them.
Christian life is action: not a speculating, not a debating, but a doing. One thing, and only one, in this world has eternity stamped upon it. Feelings pass; resolves and thoughts pass; opinions change. What you have done lasts — lasts in you. Through ages, through eternity, what you have done for Christ, that, and only that, you are.
Frederick William Robertson
• P. 2.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Frederick William Robertson" (Sourced, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895): Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).)
Life is a thin narrowness of taken-for-granted, a plank over a canyon in a fog. There is something under our feet, the taken-for-granted. A table is a table, food is food, we are we—because we don’t question these things. And science is the enemy because it is the questioner. Faith saves our souls alive by giving us a universe of the taken-for-granted.
Rose Wilder Lane
• Journal entry (1923), as quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, ch. 7, by William V. Holtz (1993).
• Source: Wikiquote: "Rose Wilder Lane" (Sourced)
Man is a rational animal, and if human affairs are hard to regulate, his twofold nature is usually the cause. Reason is something ultimate; it would be the same in another planet, or in another universe, as it is here. Animal nature is something contingent; it might have been different. Our life is a compromise, a blend between the animal and the rational.
A woman's whole life is a history of the affections. The heart is her world: it is there her ambition strives for empire; it is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she embarks her whole soul on the traffic of affection; and if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless — for it is a bankruptcy of the heart.
There is so much that is true in your letter — if not all— and I must confess that with remorse and regret; but with pleasure and satisfaction I realise how kind it is — only an angel like you could have written so kindly... Life is a wild polyphony, but often a good woman like you can bring about some exquisite resolution of its discords.
On this earth all is temptation. Crosses tempt us by irritating our pride, and prosperity by flattering it. Our life is a continual combat, but one in which Jesus Christ fights for us. We must pass on unmoved, while temptations rage around us, as the traveler, overtaken by a storm, simply wraps his cloak more closely about him, and pushes on more vigorously toward his destined home.
Temptation
• François Fénelon, p. 577.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Temptation" (Quotes, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895): Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).)
The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously. A joyful life is an active life - it is not a dull static state of so-called happiness. Full of the burning fire of enthusiasm, anarchic, revolutionary, energetic, daemonic, Dionysian, filled to overflowing with the terrific urge to create - such is the life of the man who risks safety and happiness for the sake of growth and happiness.
I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing — for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible not to see that your opponent is you... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.
The sheer magnificence and vastness of the coastal environment — an epitome of the true wilderness of the world — stood as a reminder that all human life is a mere flicker within something unimaginably greater. Jeffer's western wilderness was a key to perceiving the essential wildness of the universe as a whole, in which human personality is only something like a lichen on a rock. No tall heroics for Jeffers.
About Robinson Jeffers
• Thomas J. Lyon, as quoted in The Oxbow Man : A Biography of Walter Van Tilburg Clark (2006) by Jackson J. Benson, p. 77
• Source: Wikiquote: "Robinson Jeffers" (Quotes about Jeffers: Alphabetized by author )
I'd like them to see that those things that set us apart or make us different can be wonderful contributions to the world around us. I'd like them to see that size and color are irrelevant to the dreams we envision for ourselves. And I'd also love for them to see that life is a journey, and every step of the way, we can learn something and become stronger and wiser.
Gloria Estefan
• answer to what she would like young readers to take away after reading her first children's book -- quote from Latina Magazine (October 2005)
• Source: Wikiquote: "Gloria Estefan" (Sourced)
The reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people that can write know anything. In general an author has always lived in a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors, but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see. His life is a vacuum.
I really enjoy good murder mystery writers, usually women, frequently English, because they have a sense of what the human soul is about and why people do dark and terrible things. I also read quite a lot in the area of particle physics and quantum mechanics, because this is theology. This is about the nature of being. This is what life is all about. I try to read as widely as I possibly can.
Madeleine L'Engle
• Source: Wikiquote: "Madeleine L'Engle" (Quotes, Penguins and Golden Calves (2003): Penguins and Golden Calves : Icons and Idols in Antarctica and Other Unexpected Places )
We carry faithfully what one gives us to bear, on hard shoulders and over rough mountains. And should we sweat, we are told “Yes, life is a grave burden.” But man is only a grave burden to himself! That is because he carries on his shoulders too much that is alien to him. … Especially the strong, reverent spirit that would bear much: he loads too many alien grave words and values on himself.
Alienation
• Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 305, “On the Spirit of Gravity”
• Source: Wikiquote: "Alienation" (Quotes: Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author, M - R)
The frontier of the higher life is everywhere contiguous to the common life, and we can cross the border at any moment. The higher life is as real as the grosser things in which we put our trust. But our eyes must be anointed so that we may see it.
The office of the religious teacher is to be a seer, and to make others see, and thus to win them into the upward way.
It is extremely unlikely that I will ever be one of the richest people in the world. Almost all rich people were born rich, and almost all of them marry other rich people, and almost all of them hold onto almost all of their money, to pass on to their kids. Money doesn't appear out of nowhere—the more they have, the less for me. Life is a "zero sum game," and I am the zero.
The... stage of quasi-peaceable industry is usually characterized by an established chattel slavery, herds of cattle, and a servile class of herdsmen and shepherds; industry has advanced so far that the community is no longer dependent for its livelihood on the chase or on any other form of activity that can fairly be classed as exploit. From this point on, the characteristic feature of leisure class life is a conspicuous exemption from all useful employment.
I feel like I am on the right path now. It has helped me with my confidence on the sporting field and with my self-belief, but outside of sport my life is a lot smoother too. Like everyone, I have my faults and I veer off the path sometimes, but my faith helps me get back on it and to stay being a good person. I am a lot happier now in my own skin.
If this life is all there is, there is no basis for any meaning, hope, purpose, or significance to life. Everything in your life would simply be a random change of fate at best, or an accident at worst. Your life, and your death, would not matter at all. The logical end of such a life is despair. Moreover, we can forget about being decent or ethical, with no basis for human dignity, rights, or liberty.
Afterlife
• Rick Warren, pastor of the Saddleback Church and author of "The Purpose Driven Life," in "Lifer After Death" by Dinesh D'Souza, 2009, the foreword, pgs. x-xi.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Afterlife" (Sourced)
What we need is a concept of "gross national cost." Life is a balance sheet, not simply economic growth. It is income and outgo. And until we know what the cost of growth is we will continue to operate under an illusion. As long as we consider only the growth of goods and ignore the growth of personal and community well-being, we will be impoverished by growth. That is what is happening in our society today.
We cannot be scholars of Christ without trying to understand what is the place and the work in the world for which each of us is fitted. Every thing which befalls us is part of our education. Every event and condition of life is a lesson which is to be turned to account to make us more worthy of Him who by suffering was made perfect—who Himself entered not into glory, till first He had suffered pain.
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley
• P. 376.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Arthur Penrhyn Stanley" (Sourced, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895): Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).)
The exigencies of the modern industrial system frequently place individuals and households in juxtaposition between whom there is little contact in any other sense than that of juxtaposition. One's neighbors, mechanically speaking, often are socially not one's neighbors, or even acquaintances; and still their transient good opinion has a high degree of utility. The only practicable means of impressing one's pecuniary ability on these unsympathetic observers of one's everyday life is an unremitting demonstration of ability to pay.
I believe every lie that I ever told Paid for every heart that I ever stoll I paid my cause and I didn't fold Well, it ain't that hard when you got soul (This is my world) Somewhere I heard that life is a test I been though the worst but still I give my best yeah God made my mold different from the rest Then he broke that mold so I know I'm blessed (This is my world)
Aloe Blacc
The Man. Stand up now and face the sun
Won't hide my tail or turn and run
It's time to do what must be done
Be a king when kingdom comes Girl, you can tell everybody
Yeah, you can tell everybody
Go ahead and tell everybody
I'm the man, I'm the man, I'm the man Girl, you can tell everybody
Yeah, you can tell everybody
Go ahead and tell everybody
Reveal the man, I'm the man, I'm the man
Yes, I am, yes, I am, yes, I am
I'm the man, I'm the man, I'm the man I got all the answers to your questions
I'll be the teacher, you could be the lesson
I'll be the preacher, you be the confession
I'll be the
quick relief to all your stressing (This is my world)
It's a thin line between love and hate
Is you really real or is you really fake?
I'm a soldier standing on my feet
No surrender and I won't retreat (This is my world) Stand up now and face the sun
Won't hide my tail or turn and run
It's time to do what must be done
Be a king when kingdom comes Girl, you can tell everybody
Yeah, you can tell everybody
Go ahead and tell everybody
I'm the man, I'm the man, I'm the man Girl, you can tell everybody
Yeah, you can tell everybody
Go ahead and tell everybody
Reveal the man, I'm the man, I'm the man
Yes, I am, yes, I am, yes, I am
I'm the man, I'm the man, I'm the man Tell everybody
Yeah, you can tell everybody
Go ahead and tell everybody
I'm the man, I'm the man, I'm the man Girl, you can tell everybody
Yeah, you can tell everybody
Go ahead and tell everybody
I'm the man, I'm the man, I'm the man Girl, you can tell everybody
Yeah, you can tell everybody
Go ahead and tell everybody
Reveal the man, I'm the man, I'm the man
Yes, I am, yes, I am, yes, I am
I'm the man, I'm the man, I'm the man
• Source: Wikiquote: "Aloe Blacc" (Song lyrics)
Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.
The weed crushed and pressed by the heavy rock may slowly and gently grow up anew helped by the fresh air, sunshine, and sympathetic rain. On the other hand, the rock is often broken through exposure to nature and weathering. Life is a strong power to grow in tenderness; this fact may be considered as having a close relation with human life. At the same time tenderness has sometimes stronger power against stiffness or hardening due to extreme strain.
I could no longer reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of life. In particular, I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things. For many people who inhabit this planet, life is a cesspool of misery and suffering. I came to a point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge of it.
For all species, including our own, the true figure of life is a perching bird, a passerine, alert and nervous in every part, ready to dart off in an instant. Life is always poised for flight. From a distance it looks still, silhouetted against the bright sky or the dark ground; but up close it is flitting this way and that, as if displaying to the world at every moment its perpetual readiness to take off in any of a thousand directions.
The result of [the] cumulative efforts to investigate the cell—to investigate life at the molecular level—is a loud, clear, piercing cry of ‘design!’ The result is so unambiguous and so significant that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science. The discovery rivals those of Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrödinger, Pasteur, and Darwin. The observation of the intelligent design of life is as momentous as the observation that the earth goes around the sun.
I'm still at work with my hand to the plough and my face to the future. The shadows of evening … lengthen about me but morning is in my heart. … the testimony I bear is this: that the castle of enchantment is not yet behind me, it is before me still and daily I catch glimpses of its battlements and towers. The best of life is always further on. The real lure is hidden from our eyes, somewhere behind the hills of time.
A creative life is an energetic life, and this is only possible in one or the other of these two situations: either being the one who rules, or finding oneself placed in a world which is ruled by someone in whom we recognize full right to such a function: either I rule or I obey. By obedience I do not mean mere submission—this is degradation—but on the contrary, respect for the ruler and acceptance of his leadership, solidarity with him, and enthusiastic enrollment under his banner.
It appears to me to be indisputable that he who I am to-day derives, by a continuous series of states of consciousness, from him who was in my body twenty years ago. Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future.
Anything that deprives a man of real life is an enemy to that man. If real life is relationship, the dwelling on friendly and affectionate terms with God and man, then anything that separates us from God, from our better selves, and from our fellows, is an enemy. Another name for this enemy is sin. It is sin that wrecks the characters of men and deprives them of their spiritual heritage. Sin is the most subtle, treacherous, and deadly of all foes. It is the destroyer of real life.
Kirby Page
• p. 83-84
• Source: Wikiquote: "Kirby Page" (Sourced, Something More, A Consideration of the Vast, Undeveloped Resources of Life (1920))
The sponge, whether considered as a single or compound animal, has the power to reproduce itself, and here the mystery of life is as much hidden as it is in God's highest creation. It has been stated that every sponge contains a large number of separate cells which carry on the operation of circulation and respiration, and may be likened to the heart and lungs of an animal of a higher creation. Zoologists claim that each one of these cells represents a separate animal, living in a common structure.
Elisha Gray
• Familiar Talks on Science, Volume 1, 1899, p. 172
• Source: Wikiquote: "Elisha Gray" (Quotes, Nature's Miracles (1900): Three volumes: Familiar Talks on Science (Vol I.); Energy and Vibration (Vol II.); Electricity and Magnetism (Vol. III).)
You could make a good case that the history of social life is about the history of the technology of memory. That social order and control, structure of governance, social cohesion in states or organizations larger than face-to- face society depends on the nature of the technology of memory--both how it works and what it remembers... In short, what societies value is what they memorize, and how they memorize it, and who has access to its memorized form determines the structure of power that the society represents and acts from.
Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "Ports have names they call the sea." Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use — high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject — there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.    
Dream on! Though Heaven may woo our open eyes,
Through their closed lids we look on fairer skies;
Truth is for other worlds, and hope for this;
The cheating future lends the present's bliss;
Life is a running shade, with fettered hands,
That chases phantoms over shifting sands;
Death a still spectre on a marble seat,
With ever clutching palms and shackled feet;
The airy shapes that mock life's slender chain,
The flying joys he strives to clasp in vain,
Death only grasps; to live is to pursue, —
Dream on! there 's nothing but illusion true!
There is a lot of piety among us, but not enough spirituality. Piety consists in the performance of external devotional practices and is measured by one’s fidelity to these practices. Whether or not the faithful performance of these exercises of piety improves the quality of one’s Christian life is a question that is seldom asked. One is at times surprised that priests, sisters and lay people who are obviously pious are manifestly unfair in their dealings with other people. Some of them show so little of the compassion of Christ and are quite unwilling to forgive others.
Kurien Kunnumpuram
• Kunnumpuram, K. (ed) (2006) Life in Abundance: Indian Christian Reflections on Spirituality. Mumbai: St Pauls.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Kurien Kunnumpuram" (Sourced Quotes, On Spirituality)
The worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon ourselves; our officers cannot remove them, even if they would. From the last ills no being can save another; therein each man must be his own saviour. For the rest, whatever befall us, let us never train our murderous guns inboard; let us not mutiny with bloody pikes in our hands. Our Lord High Admiral will yet interpose; and though long ages should elapse, and leave our wrongs unredressed, yet, shipmates and world-mates! let us never forget, that, Whoever afflict us, whatever surround, Life is a voyage that's homeward-bound!
I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. … I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. … I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
Words, words that gender things! The soul is a new-comer on the scene;
Sufficeth not the breath of Life to work the matter-born machine?

The race of Be'ing from dawn of Life in an unbroken course was run;
What men are pleased to call their Souls was in the hog and dog begun:

Life is a ladder infinite-stepped, that hides its rungs from human eyes;
Planted its foot in chaos-gloom, its head soars high above the skies:

No break the chain of Being bears; all things began in unity;
And lie the links in regular line though haply none the sequence see.

The power which causes the several portions of the plant to help each other, we call life. Much more is this so in an animal. We may take away the branch of a tree without much harm to it; but not the animal's limb. Thus, intensity of life is also intensity of helpfulness — completeness of depending of each part on all the rest. The ceasing of this help is what we call corruption; and in proportion to the perfectness of the help, is the dreadfulness of the loss. The more intense the life has been, the more terrible is its corruption.
The ultimate beauty secret for a woman getting older is, Don't be too thin! When you are just muscle, you end up being gaunt in the face, and that makes you look older by 5 or 10 years. I don't think of getting older as looking better or worse; it's just different. You change, and that's OK. Life is about change. I don't have anxiety about it, so I'm not running to get Botox. Maybe that will change, but I don't think so. I feel comfortable in my skin and comfortable with aging, so I think it's OK that I get wrinkles.
As one advances in life, one realises more and more that the majority of men — and of women — are incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to external compulsion. And for that reason, the few individuals we have come across who are capable of a spontaneous and joyous effort stand out isolated, monumentalised, so to speak, in our experience. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training. Training = askesis. These are the ascetics.
There are certain caveats when it comes to considering synchronicity in the light of creative possibilities. First, we cannot force a synchronicity, nor can we expect to find one on command. Ascertaining the difference between a true synchronicity and a psuedo-coincidence is the goal of forming good criteria. Second, we must always beware of "reading into" things and relying exclusively on personal, subjective meanings. In other words, some events may truly be synchronicity. Recognizing them and their significance can be highly beneficial. But attempting to see synchronicity in each and every event in our life is an almost certain prescription for paranoia and delusional pathology.
The artistic decline we are seeing culturally is very prominent, very clear right now if you just look at what people are accepting as art. It affects me personally because art culture is something so important to me; art affects me and it means so much to me whether it be music, literature, fashion, design, fine art — it's all so important, I think it's really what, at least for me, it's what life is about, it’s what’s important, it’s what’s moving, it’s what inspires you, it’s what life is about. So when we’re seeing such decline in that art culture right now it’s heartbreaking to me.
It is not only in literature that fiction generates immorality. It does it also in life itself. For the substance of our life is almost exclusively composed of fiction. We fictionalize our future, and, unless we are heroically devoted to truth, we fictionalize our past, refashioning it to our taste. We do not study other people; we invent what they are thinking, saying, and doing. Reality provides us with some raw material, just as novelists often take a theme from a news item, but we envelop it in a fog in which, as in all fiction, values are reversed, so that evil is attractive and good is tedious.
Simone Weil
• “Morality and literature,” pp. 161-162
• Source: Wikiquote: "Simone Weil" (Quotes, On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968): Translated by R. Rees)
It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits — like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding — inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, a Roosevelt can feel themselves to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, a Blake. Understanding is for ever unattainable. Therein lies the inevitability of failure in embarking upon its quest, which is none the less the only one worthy of serious attention.
At eighty, a man has experienced everything: love, and its ending; ambition, and its emptiness; several foolish beliefs, and their rectification. Fear of death is not very great; affections and interest concern people who have died and events of the past. In a cinema theatre when the show is continuous the spectator has the right to retain his seat as long as he wishes to do so, but actually, when the scenes he has already witnessed reappear on the screen, he leaves the theatre. Life is a continuous show. The same events take place every thirty years, and they become boring. One after another the spectators take their departure.
A period of transition to a new quality in all spheres of society's life is accompanied by painful phenomena. When we were initiating perestroika we failed to properly assess and foresee everything. Our society turned out to be hard to move off the ground, not ready for major changes which affect people's vital interests and make them leave behind everything to which they had become accustomed over many years. In the beginning we imprudently generated great expectations, without taking into account the fact that it takes time for people to realize that all have to live and work differently, to stop expecting that new life would be given from above.
There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who's always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated and anyone can transport himself anywhere, instantly. Big deal, Buckminster. To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me.
Edward Abbey
• "Walking", p. 205
• Source: Wikiquote: "Edward Abbey" (Quotes, The Journey Home (1977): The Journey Home : Some Words in Defense of the American West (1977) ISBN 0452265622 )
A Buddhist saying, which I think captures perfectly the idea that life is a series of opportunities arising out of unforeseen circumstances: Unceasing change turns the wheel of life, and so reality is shown in all its many forms.
Now for those of you who have stayed up all night in advance of today’s activities, it may take a while for the deep wisdom of that idea to fully resonate, but once it creeps into your consciousness, and, as you continue your life’s journey from this day forth, I think the remarkable truth of this statement will surprise and amaze you and possibly even serve as a source of comfort at some point.
Dana Reeve
• Source: Wikiquote: "Dana Reeve" (Quotes, Middlebury College Address (2004): Commencement Address, Middlebury College (23 May 2004))
Moyers: Unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we're not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves.
Campbell: But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there's no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who's on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it's alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.
There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry … There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress.
Robert Oppenheimer
• As quoted in "J. Robert Oppenheimer" by L. Barnett, in Life, Vol. 7, No. 9, International Edition (24 October 1949), p. 58; sometimes a partial version (the final sentence) is misattributed to Marcel Proust.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Robert Oppenheimer" (Quotes)
To me, I don't even think of life after death. To me, life after death and reincarnation are just slices of the pie. Life is a huge wheel and it goes around and around, and life after death is just a segment of that. It comes down to spiritual growth. I think that we keep coming back until we learn what we need to learn, until we get it right. I think we've all lived hundreds, maybe thousands of times. That which you think becomes your world. It's only when we're alive and in this world that we have the chance to progress. From the state of the world today, we haven't made much progress.
We are all sons and daughters of the Most High, but the Anointed One was His first-born, who dwelt in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and He walked among us and we beheld Him.
All this I say that you may understand not only in the mind but rather in the spirit. The mind weighs and measures but it is the spirit that reaches the heart of life and embraces the secret; and the seed of the spirit is deathless.
The wind may blow and then cease, and the sea shall swell and then weary, but the heart of life is a sphere quiet and serene, and the star that shines therein is fixed for evermore.
"The concept of record labels at this point in life is almost ridiculous. They’ve become promotion machines. Maybe we’ll partner with somebody who would want to pick this record up, and maybe distribute it, and promote it, and probably can do it on a much grander scale than I’d be able to right now. But there’s no need for me right now. I have over the last few years had offers from labels that I was not interested even remotely in. For what relatively little amount of money they’re giving, to take away your ability to make money, it’s just not worth the tradeoff for me." Interview by Aborted Life on vampirefreaks.com May 2006 http://www.vampirefreaks.com/content/comment.php?entry=43&t=Celldweller (also available at MyGothicHeart.com)http://www.mygothicheart.com/articles.php?aid=6&PHPSESSID=41655405910c477a60d867ef7adae7f2
Writers are, in a way, very powerful indeed. They write the script for the reality film. Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages. Now if writers could get together into a real tight union, we'd have the world right by the words. We could write our own universes, and they would be as real as a coffee bar or a pair of Levis or a prom in the Jazz Age. Writers could take over the reality studio. So they must not be allowed to find out that they can make it happen. Kerouac understood long before I did. Life is a dream, he said.
About Jack Kerouac
• William S. Burroughs, in "Remembering Jack Kerouac" (1985), included in The Adding Machine : Selected Essays (1993), p. 180
• Source: Wikiquote: "Jack Kerouac" (Quotes about Kerouac: Alphabetized by author )
To be creative, scientists need libraries and laboratories and the company of other scientists; certainly a quiet and untroubled life is a help. A scientist's work is in no way deepened or made more cogent by privation, anxiety, distress, or emotional harassment. To be sure, the private lives of scientists may be strangely and even comically mixed up, but not in ways that have any special bearing on the nature and quality of their work. If a scientist were to cut off an ear, no one would interpret such an action as evidence of an unhappy torment of creativity; nor will a scientist be excused any bizarrerie, however extravagant, on the grounds that he is a scientist, however brilliant.
Peter Medawar
• Source: Wikiquote: "Peter Medawar" (Quotes, 1970s, Advice to a Young Scientist (1979): Source: Advice to a Young Scientist (1979), p.25, quoting his own article "Unnatural science", New York Review of Books 24 (Feb 3, 1977), p.13–18)
The boundaries between the reflection and that which is reflected no longer exist: "art is life, life is art" said Wolf Vostell. Men's physical action, the handling of things is already considered to be art. What happens, the "happening", is already art if only one wants it to be and one affirms it. If art is life, life is art, the work of art no longer needs an envelope or frame. Art steps out of its frame, melts immediately into the life stream and only the subjective will of the individual tries to suggest or arrange that anything pertaining to this life stream becomes art, if one fixes it simply and one detaches it from its customary connections and relations.
The illusion of free will... is itself an illusion. There is no illusion of free will. Thoughts and intentions simply arise. What else could they do? Now, some of you might think this sounds depressing, but it's actually incredibly freeing to see life this way. It does take something away from life: what it takes away from life is an egocentric view of life. We're not truly separate: we are linked to one another, we are linked to the world, we are linked to our past, and to history. And what we do actually matters because of that linkage, because of the permeability, because of the fact that we can't be the true locus of responsibility. That's what makes it all matter.
Mind from its object differs most in this:
Evil from good; misery from happiness;
The baser from the nobler; the impure
And frail, from what is clear and must endure.
If you divide suffering and dross, you may
Diminish till it is consumed away;
If you divide pleasure and love and thought,
Each part exceeds the whole; and we know not
How much, while any yet remains unshared,
Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared:
This truth is that deep well, whence sages draw
The unenvied light of hope; the eternal law
By which those live, to whom this world of life
Is as a garden ravaged
, and whose strife
Tills for the promise of a later birth
The wilderness of this Elysian earth.
The time comes in the life of each of us when we realize that death awaits us as it awaits others, that we will receive at the end neither preference nor exemption. It is then, in that disturbed moment, that we know life is an adventure with an ending, not a succession of bright days that go on forever. Sometimes the knowledge come with the repudiation and quick revolt that such injustice awaits us, sometimes with fear that dries the mouth and closes the eyes for an instant, sometimes with servile weariness, an acquiescence more dreadful than fear. The knowledge that my own end was near came with pain, and afterwards astonishment, with the conventional heart attack, from which, I've been told, I've made an excellent recovery.
It is the failing of a certain literature to believe that life is tragic because it is wretched. Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would be almost easy to live. And M. Sartre's hero does not perhaps give us the real meaning of his anguish when he insists on those aspects of man he finds repugnant, instead of basing his reasons for despair on certain of man's signs of greatness. The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.
Albert Camus
• Review of Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, published in the newspaper Alger Républicain (20 October 1938), p. 5; also quoted in Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd (2002) by Avi Sagi, p. 43.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Albert Camus" (Quotes)
...we can never prove the existence of things other than ourselves and our experiences. No logical absurdity results from the hypothesis that the world consists of myself and my thoughts and feelings and sensations, and that everything else is mere fancy. ...There is no logical impossibility in the supposition that the whole of life is a dream, in which we ourselves create all the objects that come before us. But although this is not logically impossible, there is no reason whatever to suppose that it is true; and it is, in fact, a less simple hypothesis, viewed as a means of accounting for the facts of our own life, than the common-sense hypothesis that there really are objects independent of us, whose action on us causes our sensations.
No League of Nations, or of individuals, can avail, without a change of heart. Reformers of all classes must recognize that it is useless to preach peace by itself, or socialism by itself, or anti-vivisection by itself, or vegetarianism by itself, or kindness to animals by itself. The cause of each and all of the evils that afflict the world is the same the general lack of humanity, the lack of the knowledge that all sentient life is akin, and that he who injures a fellow-being is in fact doing injury to himself. The prospects of a happier society are wrapped up in this despised and neglected truth, the very statement of which, at the present time, must (I well know) appear ridiculous to the accepted instructors of the people.
Probably the profoundest difference between human and animal needs is made by one piece of human awareness, one fact that is not present to animals, because it is never learned in any direct experience: that is our foreknowledge of death. The fact that we ourselves must die is not a simple and isolated fact. It is built on a wide survey of facts that discloses the structure of history as a succession of overlapping brief lives, the patterns of youth and age, growth and decline; and above all that, it is built on the logical insight that one’s own life is a case in point. Only a creature that can think symbolically about life can conceive of its own death. Our knowledge of death is part of our knowledge of life.
Each being is assigned only to himself, and the one who takes care to remain here has a solid foundation to walk on that will not shame him. If he then deliberates with himself about what he will, how far he wills, if by virtue of this deliberation he begins slowly and silently, his earnestness will not be put to shame. If, on the other hand, it pleases a man to wax serious in thought of what he will do for others, this demonstrates that basically he is a fool whose life is and remains a jest despite looks and gestures and powerful eloquence and careful theatrical postures, the existence of which means nothing except insofar as with the assistance of irony there can be a little amusement out of it.
Prefaces
• Prefaces, Nichol, 1997 p. 42-43
• Source: Wikiquote: "Prefaces" (Quotes: Primary source: Prefaces, Light Reading For People in Various Estates According to Time and Opportunity, by Nicolaus Notabene, by Soren Kierkegaard, June 17, 1844, Edited and Translated by Todd W. Nichol, 1997, Princeton University Press)
"To Be or Not to Be: In Nature all life is a question of the minutest, but extremely precisely graduated differences in the particular thermal motion within every single body, which continually changes in rhythm with the processes of pulsation. This unique law, which manifests itself throughout Nature's vastness and unity and expresses itself in every creature and organism, is the ' law of ceaseless cycles' that in every organism is linked to a certain time span and a particular tempo. The slightest disturbance of this harmony can lead to the most disastrous consequences for the major life forms. In order to preserve this state of equilibrium, it is vital that the characteristic inner temperature of each of the millions of micro-organisms contained in the macro-organisms be maintained." (Callum Coats: Water Wizard)
“Perpetual peace is a dream,” he said, “as much as we may yearn for it—but war! War is an integral part of God’s ordering of the universe, without which the world would be swamped in selfishness and materialism. War is the very vessel of honor, and who of us could endure a world without the divine folly of honor? That faith is especially true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause he little understands, during a campaign of which he has little notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use. On the field of battle, where a man lives or dies by the caprice of a bullet or the verdict of a bayonet, life is at its best and healthiest.”
The students will get over this [Rock] music, or at least the exclusive passion for it. But they will do so in the same way Freud says that men accept the reality principle—as something harsh, grim and essentially unattractive, a mere necessity. These students will assiduously study economics or the professions and the Michael Jackson costume will slip off to reveal a Brooks Brothers suit beneath. They will want to get ahead and live comfortably. But this life is as empty and false as the one they left behind. The choice is not between quick fixes and dull calculation. This is what liberal education is meant to show them. But as long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf.
You know, in the case of most of us, the mind is noisy, everlastingly chattering to itself , soliloquizing or chattering about something, or trying to talk to itself, to convince itself of something; it is always moving, noisy. And from that noise, we act. Any action born of noise produces more noise, more confusion. But if you have observed and learnt what it means to communicate, the difficulty of communication, the non-verbalization of the mind — that is, that communicates and receives communication— , then, as life is a movement, you will, in your action, move on naturally, freely, easily, without any effort, to that state of communion. And in that state of communion, if you enquire more deeply, you will find that you are not only in communion with nature, with the world, with everything about you, but also in communion with yourself.
The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions; for life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or the want of it. By playing at Chess then, we may learn: 1st, Foresight, which looks a little into futurity, and considers the consequences that may attend an action … 2nd, Circumspection, which surveys the whole Chess-board, or scene of action:—the relation of the several Pieces, and their situations; … 3rd, Caution, not to make our moves too hastily...
A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition. When we say an artist is in a state of transition, many believe that we are belittling. In my opinion when people speak of an art of transition this indicates a better art and the best that art can give. Transition is a complete present which unites the past and the future in a momentary progressive ecstasy, a progressive eternity, a true eternity of eternities, eternal moments. Progressive ecstasy is above all dynamic; movement is what sustains life and true death is nothing but lack of movement, be the corpse upright or supine. Without movement life is annihilated, within and without, for lack of dynamic cohesion. But the dynamism should be principally of the spirit, of the idea, it should be a moral dynamic ecstasy, dynamic in relation to progress, ecstatic in relation to permanence.
Juan Ramón Jiménez
• "Heroic Reason", as translated by H. R. Hays, in Selected Writings of Juan Ramon Jimenez (1957) edited by Eugenio Florit, p. 231.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Juan Ramón Jiménez" (Quotes)
Consider Every Battle a Life and Death Struggle. This principle focuses on commitment and determination. When your life is at stake, you make an absolute commitment of all your power to your survival. For a shaman, the proper way to approach every task it with absolute commitment. The shaman realizes that a predator is not automatically successful because it is equipped with sharper teeth or stronger muscles. A predator can be seriously injured or even killed during the hunt. The lion kicked in the jaw by a zebra might be unable to hunt and die of starvation. So in every hunt, the hunter must be prepared to die. But this threat gives the hunter the advantage because it ensures that they will operate at peak performance level, completely at attention, keenly observant of everything in their environment, and fully in charge at the moment of action.
Jose Stevens
The Power Path: The Shaman's Way to Success in Business and Life. Dr. Jose Stevens and Lena Stevens. ISBN 978-1577312178.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Jose Stevens" (Sourced)
The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions; for life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or the want of it. By playing at Chess then, we may learn: 1st, Foresight, which looks a little into futurity, and considers the consequences that may attend an action … 2nd, Circumspection, which surveys the whole Chess-board, or scene of action: — the relation of the several Pieces, and their situations; … 3rd, Caution, not to make our moves too hastily...
I love you sons of bitches. You’re all I read any more. You're the only ones who’ll talk all about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstanding, mistakes, accidents, catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.
There are two types of education: education for livelihood and education for life. When we study in college, it helps us to get a job so that we can earn a living. We can become a doctor, a scientist, an engineer or whatever we want. We may go on to attain wealth, possession and fame. All of this comes from education for livelihood. But this alone will never make our life full and complete. Education is not only to help us live a comfortable life of plenty. When our plans fall apart, when we face failure and loss, when we are knocked down, education should help us get back on our feet. Education should help us regain our mental equipoise, self-confidence and positive attitude, so that we can continue forward. This is why education for life is as important as education for livelihood. Education for life is spirituality.
Manipuri dancing is charge with faith, the devotional fervor of bhakthi. To a Manipuri, one whole life is a dance offering. The Tandva style of men’s dancing may be swift and vigorous , the feminine Lasya an apotheosis of grace: fluid movements merging into one another with no clearly defined beginning or end, continuous as the rhythm of birth and death. One style is not more or less than the other, that’s not the point. The point is that no extraneous glance or gesture should be allowed to defile the sanctity of your offering. The ignorant call it an expressionless dance. Never! You aspire not to subtract emotion but to absorb it. The true dancer has reached a stage where the earthly audience has ceased to matter, and she is conscious of the deity in the temple of - another shrewd look – the gift of life itself.
One of the most controversial issues of our time and one in which we share a keen interest is the question of abortion. I have grave concern over the serious moral questions raised by this issue. Each new life is a miracle of creation. To interfere with that creative process is a most serious act. In my view, the Government has a very special role in this regard. Specifically, the Government has a responsibility to protect life — and indeed to provide legal guarantees for the weak and unprotected. It is within this context that I have consistently opposed the 1973 decision of the Supreme Court. As President, I am sworn to uphold the laws of the land and I intend to carry out this responsibility. In my personal view, however, this court decision was unwise. I said then and I repeat today — abortion on demand is wrong.
But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development; and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the variety of plants can in the same physical, atmosphere and climate. The same things which are helps to one person towards the cultivation of his higher nature, are hindrances to another. The same mode of life is a healthy excitement to one, keeping all his faculties of action and enjoyment in their best order, while to another it is a distracting burthen, which suspends or crushes all internal life. Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable.
After all human beings have to live dogs too so as not to know that time is passing, that is the whole business of living to go on so they will not know that time is passing, that is why they get drunk that is why they like to go to war, during a war there is the most complete absence of the sense that time is passing a year of war lasts so much longer than any other year. After all that is what life is and that is the reason there is no Utopia, little or big young or old dog or man everybody wants every minute so filled that they are not conscious of that minute passing. It's just as well they do not think about it you have to be a genius to live in it and know it to exist in it and express it to accept it and deny it by creating it.
We need upright politicians, who will take the time and trouble, and who possess the capacity, to manage caucuses, conventions, and public assemblies. [...] In public life we need not only men who are able to work in and through their parties, but also upright, fearless, rational independents, who will deal impartial justice to all men and all parties. We need men who are far-sighted and resolute; men who combine sincerity with sanity. [...] It is vital that every man who is in politics, as a man ought to be, with a disinterested purpose to serve the public, should strive steadily for reform; that he should have the highest ideals. He must lead, only he must lead in the right direction, and normally he must be in sight of his followers. Cynicism in public life is a curse, and when a man has lost the power of enthusiasm for righteousness it will be better for him and the country if he abandons public life.
The daimonic is is obviously not an an entity but refers to a fundamental, archetypal function of human experience — an existential reality in modern man, and, as far as we know, in all men.
The daimonic is the urge in every being to affirm itself, assert itself, perpetuate and increase itself. The daimonic becomes evil when it usurps the total self without regard to the integration of that self, or to the unique forms and desires of others and their need for integration. It then appears in excessive aggression, hostility, cruelty — the things about ourselves which horrify us most, and which we repress whenever we can or, more likely, project on others. But these are the reverse side of the same assertion which empowers our creativity. All life is a flux between these two aspects of the daimonic. We can repress the daimonic, but we cannot avoid the toll of apathy and the tendency toward later explosion which such repression brings in its wake.
The Spirit is a higher infinite of verities; life is a lower infinite of possibilities which seek to grow and find their own truth and fulfilment in the light of these verities. Our intellect, our will, our ethical and our aesthetic being are the reflectors and the mediators. The method of the West is to exaggerate life and to call down as much — or as little — as may be of the higher powers to stimulate and embellish life.
But the method of India is on the contrary to discover the spirit within and the higher hidden intensities of the superior powers and to dominate life in one way or another so as to make it responsive to and expressive of the spirit and in that way increase the power of life. Its tendency with the intellect, will, ethical, aesthetic and emotional being is to sound indeed their normal mental possibilities, but also to upraise them towards the greater light and power of their own highest intuitions.
Part 2
We know that, if the armies of our war did anything worth remembering, the credit belongs not mainly to the individuals who did it, but to average human nature. We also know very well that we cannot live in associations with the past alone, and we admit that, if we would be worthy of the past, we must find new fields for action or thought, and make for ourselves new careers.
But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us.
Our American newspapers serve a double purpose. They bring knowledge and information to their readers, and at the same time they play a most important part in connection with the business interests of the community, both through their news and advertising departments. Probably there is no rule of your profession to which you gentlemen are more devoted than that which prescribes that the editorial and the business policies of the paper are to be conducted by strictly separate departments. Editorial policy and news policy must not be influenced by business consideration ; business policies must not be affected by editorial programs. Such a dictum strikes the outsider as involving a good deal of difficulty in the practical adjustments of c very-day management. Yet, in fact, I doubt if those adjustments are any more difficult than have to be made in every other department of human effort. Life is a long succession of compromises and adjustments, and it may be doubted whether the press is compelled to make them more frequently than others do.
“Wait,” Foyle commanded. He looked at the beaming grin engraved in the steel robot face. “But society can be so stupid. So confused. You’ve witnessed this conference.” “Yes, sir, but you must teach, not dictate. You must teach society.” “To space-jaunte? Why? Why reach out to the stars and galaxies? What for?” “Because you’re alive, sir. You might as well ask: Why is life? Don’t ask about it. Live it.” “Quite mad,” Dagenham muttered. “But fascinating,” Y’ang-Yeovil murmured. “There’s got to be more to life than just living,” Foyle said to the robot. “Then find it for yourself, sir. Don’t ask the world to stop moving because you have doubts.” “Why can’t we all move forward together?” “Because you’re all different. You’re not lemmings. Some must lead, and hope that the rest will follow.” “Who leads?” “The men who must … driven men, compelled men.” “Freak men.” “You’re all freaks, sir. But you always have been freaks. Life is a freak. That’s its hope and glory.” “Thank you very much.” “My pleasure, sir.”
If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.
Socrates had taught him to take nothing for granted, not even the common relations of husband and wife or parent and child. His Republic, the first of all Utopian books, is a young man's dream of a city in which human life is arranged according to a novel and a better plan; his last unfinished work, the Laws, is a discussion of the regulation of another such Utopia. There is much in Plato at which we cannot even glance here, but it is a landmark in this history, it is a new thing in the development of mankind, this appearance of the idea of willfully and completely recasting human conditions. So far mankind has been living by tradition under the fear of the gods. Here is a man who says boldly to our race, and as if it were a quite reasonable and natural thing to say, "Take hold of your lives. Most of these things that distress you, you can avoid; most of these things that dominate you, you can overthrow. You can do as you will with them".
I experience the same sense of absurdity when I listen to a cosmologist like Stephen Hawking telling us that the universe began with a big bang fifteen billion years ago, and that physics will shortly create a 'theory of everything' that will answer every possible question about our universe; this entails the corollary that God is an unnecessary hypothesis. Then I think of the day when I suddenly realized that I did not know where space ended, and it becomes obvious that Hawking is also burying his head in the sand. God may be an unnecessary hypothesis for all I know, and I do not have the least objection to Hawking dispensing with him, but until we can understand why there is existence rather than nonexistence, then we simply have no right to make such statements. It is unscientific. The same applies to the biologist Richard Dawkins, with his belief that strict Darwinism can explain everything, and that life is an accidental product of matter. I feel that he is trying to answer the ultimate question by pretending it does not exist.
Listen! what is life? It is a feather, it is the seed of the grass, blown hither and thither, sometimes multiplying itself and dying in the act, sometimes carried away into the heavens. But if that seed be good and heavy it may perchance travel a little way on the road it wills. It is well to try and journey one’s road and to fight with the air. Man must die. At the worst he can but die a little sooner... Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go. Like a storm-driven bird at night we fly out of the Nowhere; for a moment our wings are seen in the light of the fire, and, lo! we are gone again into the Nowhere. Life is nothing. Life is all. It is the Hand with which we hold off Death. It is the glow-worm that shines in the night-time and is black in the morning; it is the white breath of the oxen in winter; it is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset.
There are ways to really live in the present moment. What's the alternative? It is always now. However much you feel you may need to plan for the future, to anticipate it, to mitigate risks, the reality of your life is now. This may sound trite... but it's the truth... As a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now. I think this is a liberating truth about the human mind. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand about your mind than that if you want to be happy in this world. The past is a memory. It's a thought arising in the present. The future is merely anticipated, it is another thought arising now. What we truly have is this moment. And this. And we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth. Repudiating it. Fleeing it. Overlooking it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we are continually hoping to become happy in the future, and the future never arrives.
I have spoken of the forceful sonnets of that tragic Portuguese, Antero de Quental, who died by his own hand. Feeling acutely for the plight of his country on the occasion of the British ultimatum in 1890, he wrote as follows: "An English statesman of the last century, who was also undoubtedly a perspicacious observer and a philosopher, Horace Walpole, said that for those who feel, life is a tragedy, and a comedy for those who think. Very well then, if we are destined to end tragically, we Portuguese, we who feel, we would rather prefer this terrible, but noble destiny to that which is reserved, and perhaps at no very remote future date, for England, the country that thinks and calculates, whose destiny it is to finish miserably and comically." …we twin-brothers of the Atlantic seaboard have always been distinguished by a certain pedantry of feeling, but there remains a basis of truth underlying this terrible idea — namely that some peoples, those who put thought above feeling, I should say reason above faith, die comically, while those die tragically who put faith above reason.
There are ways to really live in the present moment. What's the alternative? It is always now. However much you feel you may need to plan for the future, to anticipate it, to mitigate risks, the reality of your life is now. This may sound trite … but it's the truth. … As a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now. I think this is a liberating truth about the human mind. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand about your mind than that, if you want to be happy in this world. The past is a memory. It's a thought arising in the present. The future is merely anticipated, it is another thought arising now. What we truly have is this moment. And this. And we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth. Repudiating it. Fleeing it. Overlooking it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we are continually hoping to become happy in the future, and the future never arrives.
It is often said, as an excuse for the slaughter of animals, that it is better for them to live and to be butchered than not to live at all. Now, obviously, if such reasoning justifies the practice of flesh-eating, it must equally justify all breeding of animals for profit or pastime, when their life is a fairly happy one. (...) In fact, if we once admit that it is an advantage to an animal to be brought into the world, there is hardly any treatment that cannot be justified by the supposed terms of such a contract. Also, the argument must apply to mankind. It has, in fact, been the plea of the slave-breeder; and it is logically just as good an excuse for slave-holding as for flesh-eating. It would justify parents in almost any treatment of their children, who owe them, for the great boon of life, a debt of gratitude which no subsequent services can repay. We could hardly deny the same merit to cannibals, if they were to breed their human victims for the table, as the early Peruvians are said to have done.
Our rulers are theoretically 'our' representatives, but they are busy turning us into the instruments of the projects they keep dreaming up. The business of governments, one might think, is to supply the framework of law within which we may pursue happiness on our own account. Instead, we are constantly being summoned to reform ourselves. Debt, intemperance, and incompetence in rearing our children are no doubt regrettable, but they are vices, and left alone, they will soon lead to the pain that corrects. Life is a better teacher of virtue than politicians, and most sensible governments in the past left moral faults to the churches. But democratic citizenship in the twenty-first century means receiving a stream of improving 'messages' from politicians. Some may forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned. Who would defend prejudice, debt, or excessive drinking? The point, however, is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in their exercise of authority -- they are intolerable when they mount the pulpit. Nor should we be in any doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step towards totalitarianism.
Kenneth Minogue
• Introduction, pp. 2-3
• Source: Wikiquote: "Kenneth Minogue" (Quotes, The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life: The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life (c. 2010), Minogue, Encounter Books, ISBN 1594036519)
Dear friends, in their experience of union with God, Saints attain such a profound knowledge of the divine mysteries in which love and knowledge interpenetrate, that they are of help to theologians themselves in their commitment to study, to intelligentia fidei, to an intelligentia of the mysteries of faith, to attain a really deeper knowledge of the mysteries of faith, for example, of what purgatory is. With her life St Catherine teaches us that the more we love God and enter into intimacy with him in prayer the more he makes himself known to us, setting our hearts on fire with his love. In writing about purgatory, the Saint reminds us of a fundamental truth of faith that becomes for us an invitation to pray for the deceased so that they may attain the beatific vision of God in the Communion of Saints (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 1032). Moreover the humble, faithful and generous service in Pammatone Hospital that the Saint rendered throughout her life is a shining example of charity for all and an encouragement, especially for women who, with their precious work enriched by their sensitivity and attention to the poorest and neediest, make a fundamental contribution to society and to the Church.
Now life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere beginner. In life, we must begin to give a public performance before we have acquired even a novice's skill; and often our moments of seeming mastery are upset by new demands, for which we have acquired no preparatory facility. Life is a score that we play at sight, not merely before we have divined the intentions of the composer, but even before we have mastered our instruments; even worse, a large part of the score has been only roughly indicated, and we must improvise the music for our particular instrument, over long passages. On these terms, the whole operation seems one of endless difficulty and frustration; and indeed, were it not for the fact that some of the passages have been played so often by our predecessors that, when we come to them, we seem to recall some of the score and can anticipate the natural sequence of the notes, we might often give up in sheer despair. The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression.
There are certain things that our age needs, and certain things that it should avoid. It needs compassion and a wish that mankind should be happy; it needs the desire for knowledge and the determination to eschew pleasant myths; it needs above all, courageous hope and the impulse to creativeness. The things that it must avoid, and that have brought it to the brink of catastrophe, are cruelty, envy, greed, competitiveness, search for irrational subjective certainty, and what Freudians call the death wish.
The root of the matter (if we want a stable world) is a very simple and old-fashioned thing, a thing so simple that I am almost ashamed to mention it, for fear of the derisive smile with which wise cynics will greet my words. The thing I mean — please forgive me for mentioning it — is love, Christian love, or compassion. If you feel this, you have a motive for existence, a guide in action, a reason for courage, an imperative necessity for intellectual honesty. If you feel this, you have all that anybody should need in the way of religion. Although you may not find happiness, you will never know the despair of those whose life is aimless and void of purpose, for there is always something that you can do to diminish the awful sum of human misery.
Wars always bring about a conservative reaction. They overwhelm and destroy patient and careful efforts to improve the condition of man. Nothing can be heard in the cannon's roar but the voice of might. All the safeguards laboriously built to preserve individual freedom and foster man's welfare are blown to pieces with shot and shell. In the presence of the wholesale slaughter of men the value of life is cheapened to the zero point. What is one life compared with the almost daily records of tens of thousands or more mowed down like so many blades of grass in a field? Building up a conception of the importance of life is a matter of slow growth and education; and the work of generations is shattered and laid waste by machine guns and gases on a larger scale than ever before. '''Great wars have been followed by an unusually large number of killings between private citizens and individuals. These killers have become accustomed to thinking in terms of slaying and death toward all opposition, and these have been followed in turn by the most outrageous legal penalties and a large increase in the number of executions by the state. It is perfectly clear that hate begets hate, force is met with force, and cruelty can become so common that its contemplation brings pleasure, when it should produce pain.
When Shaw is read in the light of the existentialist thinkers, a new philosophical position arises from his works as a whole, a position of he himself was probably unconscious. It is this: that although the ultimate reality may be irrational, yet man's relation to it is not. Existentialism means the recognition that life is a tiny corner of casual order in a universe of chaos. All men are aware of that chaos; but some insulate themselves from it and refuse to face it. These are the Insiders, and they make up the overwhelming majority of the human race. The Outsider is the man who has faced chaos. If he is an abstract philosopher — like Hegel — he will try to demonstrate that chaos is not really chaos, but that underlying it is an order of which we are unaware. If he is an existentialist, he acknowledges that chaos is chaos, a denial of life — or rather, of the conditions under which life are possible. If there is nothing but life and chaos, then life is permanently helpless — as Sartre and Camus think it is. But if a rational relation can somehow exist between them, ultimate pessimism is avoided, as it must be avoided if the Outsider is to live at all. It is this contribution which makes Shaw the key figure of existentialist thought.
The time is very near for the breaking of my silence and then, within a short period all will happen — my humiliation, my glorification, my manifestation, and the dropping of my body. All this will happen soon and within a short period. So, from this moment love me more and more.
Do not propagate what you do not feel. What your heart says and your conscience dictates about me, pour out without hesitation. Be unmindful of whether you are ridiculed or accepted in pouring out your heart for me, or against me, to others.
If you take "Baba" as "God-Incarnate," say so; do not hesitate.
If you think "Baba" is "the devil," say it; do not be afraid.
I am everything that you take me to be, and I am also beyond everything. If your conscience says that "Baba" is the Avatar, say it even if you are stoned for it. But if you feel he is not, then say that you feel "Baba" is not the Avatar. Of myself I say again and again, I am the Ancient One — the Highest of the High.
If you had even the tiniest glimpse of my Divinity, all doubts would vanish and love — Real Love — would be established. Illusion has such a tight grip on you that you forget Reality. Your life is a Shadow. The only Reality is Existence Eternal — which is GOD.
It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a fact, not theory, and that what is at issue within biology are questions of details of the process and the relative importance of different mechanisms of evolution. It is a fact that the earth, with liquid water, is more than 3.6 billion years old. It is a fact that cellular life has been around for at least half of that period and that organized multicellular life is at least 800 million years old. It is a fact that major life forms now on earth were not at all represented in the past. There were no birds or mammals 250 million years ago. It is a fact that major life forms of the past are no longer living. There used to be dinosaurs and Pithecanthropus, and there are none now. It is a fact that all living forms come from previous living forms. Therefore, all present forms of life arose from ancestral forms that were different. Birds arose from nonbirds and humans from nonhumans. No person who pretends to any understanding of the natural world can deny these facts any more than she or he can deny that the earth is round, rotates on its axis, and revolves around the sun. The controversies about evolution lie in the realm of the relative importance of various forces in molding evolution.
Creationism
• Richard C. Lewontin, "Evolution/Creation Debate: A Time for Truth", BioScience volume 31 (1981) p. 559
• (Reprinted in J. Peter Zetterberg, editor, Evolution versus Creationism, Oryx Press, Phoenix, Arizona, 1983).
• Source: Wikiquote: "Creationism" (20th century, 1980s)
If you ask any man in America, or any man in business in England, what is it that most interferes with his enjoyment of existence, he will say: 'The struggle for life.' He will say this in all sincerity; he will believe it. In a certain sense it is true; yet in another, and that a very important sense, it is profoundly false. The struggle for life is a thing which does, of course, occur. It may occur to any of us, if we are unfortunate. It occurred, for example, to Conrad's hero Falk, who found himself on a derelict ship, one of the two men among the crew who were possessed of fire-arms, with nothing to eat but the other men. When the two men had finished the meals upon which they could agree, a true struggle for life began. Falk won, but was ever after a vegetarian. Now that is not what the businessmen means when he speaks of the 'struggle for life'. It is an inaccurate phrase which he has picked up in order to give dignity to something essentially trivial. Ask him how many men he has known in his class of life who have died of hunger. Ask him what happened to his friends after they had been ruined. Everybody knows a businessman who has been ruined is better off so far as material comforts are concerned than a man who has never been rich enough to have the chance of being ruined. What people mean, therefore, by the struggle for life is really the struggle for success. What people fear when they engage in the struggle is not that they will fail to get their breakfast next morning, but that they will fail to outshine their neighbours.
This was an high marvel to the soul which was continually shewed in all the Revelations, and was with great diligence beholden, that our Lord God, anent Himself may not forgive, for He may not be wroth: it were impossible. For this was shewed: that our life is all grounded and rooted in love, and without love we may not live; and therefore to the soul that of His special grace seeth so far into the high, marvellous Goodness of God, and seeth that we are endlessly oned to Him in love, it is the most impossible that may be, that God should be wroth. For wrath and friendship be two contraries. For He that wasteth and destroyeth our wrath and maketh us meek and mild, — it behoveth needs to be that He be ever one in love, meek and mild: which is contrary to wrath.
For I saw full surely that where our Lord appeareth, peace is taken and wrath hath no place. For I saw no manner of wrath in God, neither for short time nor for long; — for in sooth, as to my sight, if God might be wroth for an instant, we should never have life nor place nor being. For as verily as we have our being of the endless Might of God and of the endless Wisdom and of the endless Goodness, so verily we have our keeping in the endless Might of God, in the endless Wisdom, and in the endless Goodness. For though we feel in ourselves, wretches, debates and strifes, yet are we all-mannerful enclosed in the mildness of God and in His meekness, in His benignity and in His graciousness. For I saw full surely that all our endless friendship, our place, our life and our being, is in God.
You often hear people speaking as if life was like striving upward toward a mountain peak. That is not so. Life is as if you were traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on one side and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have avoided one gulf if you fall into the other. It shall profit us nothing if our people are decent and ineffective. It shall profit us nothing if they are efficient and wicked. In every walk of life, in business, politics; if the need comes, in war; in literature, science, art, in everything, what we need is a sufficient number of men who can work well and who will work with a high ideal. The work can be done in a thousand different ways. Our public life depends primarily not upon the men who occupy public positions for the moment, because they are but an infinitesimal fraction of the whole. Our public life depends upon men who take an active interest in that public life; who are bound to see public affairs honestly and competently managed; but who have the good sense to know what honesty and competency actually mean. And any such man, if he is both sane and high-minded, can be a greater help and strength to any one in public life than you can easily imagine without having had yourselves the experience. It is an immense strength to a public man to know a certain number of people to whom he can appeal for advice and for backing; whose character is so high that baseness would shrink ashamed before them; and who have such good sense that any decent public servant is entirely willing to lay before them every detail of his actions, asking only that they know the facts before they pass final judgment.
Isn’t it noteworthy in the parable of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan" target="_blank">Good Samaritana> that Jesus does not give a straightforward answer to the question "Who is my neighbor?" (Luke 10:29). Surely he could have provided a catalog of those whom the scribe could love as himself as the law required. He does not. Instead, he tells a story. It is as if Jesus wanted among other things to point out that life is a bit more complex; it has too many ambivalences and ambiguities to allow always for a straightforward and simplistic answer.
This is a great mercy, because in times such as our own — times of change when many familiar landmarks have shifted or disappeared — people are bewildered; they hanker after unambiguous, straightforward answers. We appear to be scared of diversity in ethnicities, in religious faiths, in political and ideological points of view. We have an impatience with anything and anyone that suggests there might just be another perspective, another way of looking at the same thing, another answer worth exploring. There is a nostalgia for the security in the womb of a safe sameness, and so we shut out the stranger and the alien; we look for security in those who can provide answers that must be unassailable because no one is permitted to dissent, to question. There is a longing for the homogeneous and an allergy against the different, the other.
Now Jesus seems to say to the scribe, "Hey, life is more exhilarating as you try to work out the implications of your faith rather than living by rote, with ready-made second-hand answers, fitting an unchanging paradigm to a shifting, changing, perplexing, and yet fascinating world." Our faith, our knowledge that God is in charge, must make us ready to take risks, to be venturesome and innovative; yes, to dare to walk where angels might fear to tread.
Desmond Tutu
• Ch. 1 : God is Clearly Not a Christian: Pleas for Interfaith Tolerance
• Source: Wikiquote: "Desmond Tutu" (Quotes, God Is Not a Christian: And Other Provocations (2011))
Ballads of a Great Weariness

Scratch a lover, and find a foe. Observation

If I didn't care for fun and such,

I'd probably amount to much.

But I shall stay the way I am,

Because I do not give a damn.
 First printed in New York World, (16 August 1925) Comment

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

A medley of extemporanea,

And love is a thing that can never go wrong,

And I am Marie of Roumania.
 First printed in New York World, (16 August 1925) Résumé

Razors pain you,

Rivers are damp,

Acids stain you,

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren't lawful,

Nooses give,

Gas smells awful.

You might as well live.
 First printed in New York World, (16 August 1925) News Item

Men seldom make passes

At girls who wear glasses.
 First printed in New York World, (16 August 1925) Unfortunate Coincidence

By the time you swear you're his,

 Shivering and sighing,

And he vows his passion is

 Infinite, undying,

Lady, make a note of this —

 One of you is lying.
First printed in Life, (8 April 1926) p. 11 Experience

Some men tear your heart in two,

Some men flirt and flatter,

Some men never look at you,

And that clears up the matter.
 First printed in Life, (8 April 1926) p. 11 Rainy Night

I am sister to the rain;

Fey and sudden and unholy,

Petulant at the windowpane,

Quickly lost, remembered slowly.
 First printed in New Yorker, (26 September 1926) p. 10 Inventory

Four be the things I am wiser to know:

Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.

Four be the things I'd been better without:

Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.

Three be the things I shall never attain:

Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.

Three be the things I shall have till I die:

Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.

 First printed in Life, (11 November 1926) p. 12
I decided that I was a feminist and this seemed uncomplicated to me. But my recent research has shown me that feminism has become an unpopular word. Women are choosing not to identify as feminists. Apparently I am among the ranks of women whose expressions are seen as too strong, too aggressive, isolating, and anti-men, unattractive even. Why has the word become such an uncomfortable one? I am from Britain and think it is right that I am paid the same as my male counterparts. I think it is right that I should be able to make decisions about my own body. I think it is right that women be involved on my behalf in the policies and the decisions that will affect my life. I think it is right that socially I am afforded the same respect as men. But sadly I can say that there is no one country in the world where all women can expect to receive these rights. No country in the world can yet say that they have achieved gender equality. These rights I consider to be human rights but I am one of the lucky ones. My life is a sheer privilege because my parents didn’t love me less because I was born a daughter. My school did not limit me because I was a girl. My mentors didn’t assume that I would go less far because I might give birth to a child one day. These influencers were the gender equality ambassadors that made who I am today. They may not know it, but they are the inadvertent feminists who are changing the world today. We need more of those.  And if you still hate the word — it is not the word that is important. It's the idea and the ambition behind it. Because not all women have received the same rights that I have. In fact, statistically, very few have been.
The illusion of free will...is itself an illusion. There is no illusion of free will. Thoughts and intentions simply arise. What else could they do? Now, some of you might think this sounds depressing, but it's actually incredibly freeing to see life this way. It does take something away from life: what it takes away from life is an egocentric view of life. We're not truly separate: we are linked to one another, we are linked to the world, we are linked to our past, and to history. And what we do actually matters because of that linkage, because of the permeability, because of the fact that we can't be the true locus of responsibility. That's what makes it all matter. So you can't take credit for your talents, but it really matters if you use them. You can't really be blamed for your weaknesses and your failings, but it matters if you correct them. Pride and shame don't make a lot of sense in the final analyses. But they were no fun anyway. These are isolating emotions. What does make sense are things like compassion and love: caring about well-being makes sense; trying to maximize your well-being and the well-being of others makes sense. There is still a difference between suffering and happiness, and love consists in wanting those we love to be happy. All of that still makes sense without free will. And, of course, nothing that I've said makes social and political freedom any less valuable: having a gun to your head is still a problem worth rectifying, wherever intentions come from. So the freedom to do what one wants is still precious. But the idea that we as conscious beings are deeply responsible for what we want I think needs to be revised: it just can't be mapped onto reality, neither objective nor subjective. And if we're going to be guided by reality, rather than by the fantasy lives of our antecessors, I think our view of ourselves needs to change.
In sculpture the projection of the fasciculi must be accentuated, the foreshortening forced, the hollows deepened ; sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodelled figures. Ignorant people, when they see close-knitted true surfaces, say that 'it is not finished.' No notion is falser than that of finish unless it be that of elegance ; by means of these two ideas people would kill our art. The way to obtain solidity and life is by work carried out to the fullest, not in the direction of achievement and of copying détails, but in that of truth in the successive schemes. The public, perverted by académie préjudices, confounds art with neatness. The simplicity of the 'École' is a painted cardboard ideal, A cast from life is a copy, the exactest possible copy, and yet it has neither motion nor eloquence. Art intervenes to exaggerate certain surfaces, and also to fine down others. In sculpture everything depends upon the way in which the modelling is carried out with a constant thought of the main line of the scheme, upon the rendering of the hollows, of the projections and of their connections ; thus it is that one may get fine lights, and especially fine shadows that are not opaque. Everything should be emphasised according to the accent that it is desired to render, and the degree of amplification is personal, according to the tact and the temperament of each sculptor; and for this reason there is no transmissible process, no studio recipe, but only a true law. I see it in the antique and in Michael Angelo. To work by the profiles, in depth not by surfaces, always thinking of the few geometrical forms from which all nature proceeds, and to make these eternal forms perceptible in the individual case of the object studied, that is my criterion. That is not idealism, it is a part of the handicraft. My ideas have nothing to do with it but for that method ; my Danaids and my Dante figures would be weak, bad things. From the large design that I get your mind deduces ideas.
Endurance is composed of four attributes: eagerness, fear, piety and anticipation (of death). so whoever is eager for Paradise will ignore temptations; whoever fears the fire of Hell will abstain from sins; whoever practices piety will easily bear the difficulties of life and whoever anticipates death will hasten towards good deeds. Conviction has also four aspects to guard oneself against infatuations of sin; to search for explanation of truth through knowledge; to gain lessons from instructive things and to follow the precedent of the past people, because whoever wants to guard himself against vices and sins will have to search for the true causes of infatuation and the true ways of combating them out and to find those true ways one has to search them with the help of knowledge, whoever gets fully acquainted with various branches of knowledge will take lessons from life and whoever tries to take lessons from life is actually engaged in the study of the causes of rise and fall of previous civilizations. Justice also has four aspects depth of understanding, profoundness of knowledge, fairness of judgment and dearness of mind; because whoever tries his best to understand a problem will have to study it, whoever has the practice of studying the subject he is to deal with, will develop a clear mind and will always come to correct decisions, whoever tries to achieve all this will have to develop ample patience and forbearance and whoever does this has done justice to the cause of religion and has led a life of good repute and fame. Jihad is divided into four branches: to persuade people to be obedient to Allah; to prohibit them from sin and vice; to struggle (in the cause of Allah) sincerely and firmly on all occasions and to detest the vicious. Whoever persuades people to obey the orders of Allah provides strength to the believers; whoever dissuades them from vices and sins humiliates the unbelievers; whoever struggles on all occasions discharges all his obligations and whoever detests the vicious only for the sake of Allah, then Allah will take revenge on his enemies and will be pleased with Him on the Day of Judgment.
The appeal to a religious meaning to life is a bit different. If you believe that the meaning of your life comes from fulfilling the purpose of God, who loves you, and seeing Him in eternity, then it doesn't seem appropriate to ask, "And what is the point of that?"It's supposed to be something which is its own point, and can't have a purpose outside itself. But for this very reason it has its own problems. The idea of God seems to be the idea of something that can explain everything else, without having to be explained itself. But it's very hard to understand how there could be such a thing. If we ask the question, "Why is the world like this?" and are offered a religious answer, how can we be prevented from asking again, "And why is that true?" What kind of answer would bring all of our "Why?" questions to a stop, once and for all? And if they can stop there, why couldn't they have stopped earlier? The same problem seems to arise if God and His purposes are offered as the ultimate explanation of the value and meaning of our lives. The idea that our lives fulfil God's purpose is supposed to give them their point, in a way that doesn't require or admit of any further point. One isn't supposed to ask "What is the point of God?" any more than one is supposed to ask, "What is the explanation of God?" But my problem here, as with the role of God as ultimate explanation, is that I'm not sure I understand the idea. Can there really be something which gives point to everything else by encompassing it, but which couldn't have, or need, any point itself? Something whose point can't be questioned from outside because there is no outside? If God is supposed to give our lives a meaning that we can't understand, it's not much of a consolation. God as ultimate justification, like God as ultimate explanation, may be an incomprehensible answer to a question that we can't get rid of. On the other hand, maybe that's the whole point, and I am just failing to understand religious ideas. Perhaps the belief in God is the belief that the universe is intelligible, but not to US.
God
• Thomas Nagel, What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy (1987), Ch. 10. The Meaning of Life
• Source: Wikiquote: "God" (N)
I shall now no more behold my dear father with these "bodily eyes. With him a whole threescore and ten years of the past has doubly died for me. It is as if a new leaf in the great hook of time were turned over. Strange time — endless time or of which I see neither end nor beginning. All rushes on. Man follows man. His life is as a tale that has been told; yet under Time does there not lie Eternity? Perhaps my father, all that essentially was my father, is even now near me, with me. Both he and I are with God. Perhaps, if it so please God, we shall in some higher state of being meet one another, recognize one another. As it is written. We shall be forever with God. The possibility, nay (in some way), the certainty, of perennial existence daily grows plainer to me. "The essence of whatever was, is, or shall be, even now is." God is great. God is good. His will be done, for it will be right. As it is, I can think peaceably of the departed love. All that was earthly, harsh, sinful, in our relation has fallen away; all that was holy in it remains. I can see my dear father's life in some measure as the sunk pillar on which mine was to rise and be built; the waters of time have now swelled up round his (as they will round mine); I can see it all transfigured, though I touch it no longer. I might almost say his spirit seems to have entered into me (so clearly do I discern and love him); I seem to myself only the continuation and second volume of my father. These days that I have spent thinking of him and of his end are the peaceablest, the only Sabbath that I have had in London. One other of the universal destinies of man has overtaken me. Thank Heaven, I know, and have known, what it is to be a son; to love a father, as spirit can love spirit. God give me to live to my father's honor and to His. And now, beloved father, farewell for the last time in this world of shadows I In the world of realities may the Great Father again bring us together in perfect holiness and perfect love! Amen!
Further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous environment, the most dangerous environment of all is the commodious environment. I know that the most modern manufacture has been really occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large needle. I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small camel. But if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest—if, in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least that they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this—that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy. Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags. The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world. For the whole modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a Christian) is not tenable. You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. The whole case for Christianity is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt. There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have said simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to kill the rich as violators of definable justice. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to crown the rich as convenient rulers of society. It is not certainly un-Christian to rebel against the rich or to submit to the rich. But it is quite certainly un-Christian to trust the rich, to regard the rich as more morally safe than the poor. A Christian may consistently say, "I respect that man's rank, although he takes bribes." But a Christian cannot say, as all modern men are saying at lunch and breakfast, "a man of that rank would not take bribes." For it is a part of Christian dogma that any man in any rank may take bribes. It is a part of Christian dogma; it also happens by a curious coincidence that it is a part of obvious human history.
For (if I may pursue the too flattering parallel) Mr. McCabe thinks of the Alhambra and of my articles as two very odd and absurd things, which some special people do (probably for money) in order to amuse him. But if he had ever felt himself the ancient, sublime, elemental, human instinct to dance, he would have discovered that dancing is not a frivolous thing at all, but a very serious thing. He would have discovered that it is the one grave and chaste and decent method of expressing a certain class of emotions. And similarly, if he had ever had, as Mr. Shaw and I have had, the impulse to what he calls paradox, he would have discovered that paradox again is not a frivolous thing, but a very serious thing. He would have found that paradox simply means a certain defiant joy which belongs to belief. I should regard any civilization which was without a universal habit of uproarious dancing as being, from the full human point of view, a defective civilization. And I should regard any mind which had not got the habit in one form or another of uproarious thinking as being, from the full human point of view, a defective mind. It is vain for Mr. McCabe to say that a ballet is a part of him. He should be part of a ballet, or else he is only part of a man. It is in vain for him to say that he is "not quarrelling with the importation of humour into the controversy." He ought himself to be importing humour into every controversy; for unless a man is in part a humorist, he is only in part a man. To sum up the whole matter very simply, if Mr. McCabe asks me why I import frivolity into a discussion of the nature of man, I answer, because frivolity is a part of the nature of man. If he asks me why I introduce what he calls paradoxes into a philosophical problem, I answer, because all philosophical problems tend to become paradoxical. If he objects to my treating of life riotously, I reply that life is a riot. And I say that the Universe as I see it, at any rate, is very much more like the fireworks at the Crystal Palace than it is like his own philosophy. About the whole cosmos there is a tense and secret festivity—like preparations for Guy Fawkes' day. Eternity is the eve of something. I never look up at the stars without feeling that they are the fires of a schoolboy's rocket, fixed in their everlasting fall.
Prabhupāda: Yes, that is law always. Rape means without consent, sex. Otherwise there is no rape. There was a rape case in Calcutta, and the lawyer was very intelligent. He some way or other made the woman admit, “Yes, I felt happiness.” So he was released. “Here is consent.” And that’s a fact. Because after all, sex, rape or no rape, they will feel some pleasure. So the lawyer by hook and crook made the woman agree, “Yes, I felt some pleasure.” “Now, there is consent.” So he was released. After all, it is an itching sensation. So either by force or by willingly, if there is itching, everyone feels relieved itching it. That’s a psychology. It is not that the woman do not like rape. They like sometimes. They willingly. That is the psychology. Outwardly they show some displeasure, but inwardly they do not. This is the psychology. Devotee (1): So what this law means is that anybody can rape anybody. Prabhupāda: There is no law; it is all lusty desire. All law or no law, these are all nonsense. The śāstra has… It is lusty desire, that’s all. Everyone wants to fulfill a lusty desires. So unless one is not in the modes of goodness or transcendental, everyone will like. That is the material world, rajas-tamaḥ. Rajas-tamo-bhāvaḥ kāma-lobhadayaś ca ye [SB 1.2.19]. It is all discussed in the śāstra. Just like I am hungry man. There is foodstuff. I want to eat it. So if I take by force, that is illegal, and if I pay for it, then it is legal. But I am the hungry man, I want it. This is going on. Everyone is lusty. Therefore they say “legalized prostitution.” They want it. So marriage is something legalized, that’s all. The passion and the desire is the same, either married or not married. So this Vedic law says, “Better married. Then you will be controlled.” Married life… So he will not be so lusty as without married life. So the gṛhastha life is a concession-same lusty desire under rules and regulation. That’s all. That is our higher… (?) Without married life he will commit rapes in so many ways, so better let him be satisfied with one, both the man and woman, and make progress in spiritual life. That is concession. Everyone in this material world has come with these lusty desires and greediness. Even demigods like Lord Śiva, Lord Brahmā… The Lord Brahmā became lusty after his daughter. And Lord Śiva became so mad afterMohinī–murti. So what to speak of us insignificant creatures. So lusty desire is there. That is material world. Unless one is fully Kṛṣṇa conscious, this lusty desire cannot be checked. It is not possible.
We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil acts, because the criminal adheres to his vice and contumacy, and does not come to a crisis or judgment anywhere in visible nature. There is no stunning confutation of his nonsense before men and angels. Has he therefore outwitted the law? Inasmuch as he carries the malignity and the lie with him, he so far deceases from nature. In some manner there will be a demonstration of the wrong to the understanding also; but should we not see it, this deadly deduction makes square the eternal account. Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of rectitude must be bought by any loss. There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions of being. In a virtuous action, I properly am; in a virtuous act, I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon. There can be no excess to love; none to knowledge; none to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism, never a Pessimism. His life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct is trust. Our instinct uses "more" and "less" in application to man, of the presence of the soul, and not of its absence; the brave man is greater than the coward; the true, the benevolent, the wise, is more a man, and not less, than the fool and knave. There is no tax on the good of virtue; for that is the incoming of God himself, or absolute existence, without any comparative. Material good has its tax, and if it came without desert or sweat, has no root in me, and the next wind will blow it away. But all the good of nature is the soul's, and may be had, if paid for in nature's lawful coin, that is, by labor which the heart and the head allow. I no longer wish to meet a good I do not earn, for example, to find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it brings with it new burdens. I do not wish more external goods, — neither possessions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. The gain is apparent; the tax is certain. But there is no tax on the knowledge that the compensation exists, and that it is not desirable to dig up treasure. '''Herein I rejoice with a serene eternal peace. I contract the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn the wisdom of St. Bernard, — "Nothing can work me damage except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault."
I'd always, you see, even in my early teens, had these problems — problems of suddenly waking up in the middle of the night and having this horrifying vision that life is completely meaningless. You know — just thinking about something like the depths of space, and realizing it's got to come to an end somewhere, but apparently it doesn't, and then suddenly getting this terrible feeling that maybe life is a total delusion. G. K. Chesterton once said that in his teens he saw hell, and I really think I did too. I went through extreme depressions, glooms. There was one occasion on which I decided actually to commit suicide. I'd got into this state — I was working as a lab assistant at the school, and what would happen was that I'd make tremendous efforts to push myself up to a level of optimism. I'd do it in the evenings by reading poetry, thinking, writing in my journals, then I'd go back to the school the next day and blaaahhh, right down to the bottom again. This was the feeling of The Mind Parasites — there's something that waits until you've got lots of energy and just sucks you dry like a vampire. This sudden feeling that God was making fun of me made me feel one day, "For God's sake, let's not have any more of this nonsense. I'm damned if I'll be played about with like this. Let me kill myself." And immediately I felt this, I felt a curious sense of inner strength. So I went off to night school quite determined that what I was going to do was to take down the bottle of potassium cyanide from the reagent shelves and drink it. I knew that cyanide burns a hole in the bottom of the stomach and kills you within seconds. Well, I went into the classroom quite determined. There was a group gathered around the professor at the desk. I went over to the reagent shelves, I took down the bottle of potassium cyanide, I uncorked it, and as I started raising this to my lips I suddenly had an extremely clear vision of myself in a few seconds' time with an agonizing pain in the pit of my stomach, and at the same time I suddenly turned into two people. I don't mean that literally, but I mean that there was I, and there beside me was this silly, bloody little idiot called Colin Wilson who was in a state of self-pity and about to kill himself, and I didn't give a damn whether the fool killed himself or not. The trouble was, if he killed himself he'd kill me too. And quite suddenly a terrific sense of overwhelming happiness came over me. I corked up the bottle, put it on the shelf, and for the next few days was in total control of my emotions and everything else. I realized suddenly that you can achieve these states of control, provided that you put yourself in a crisis situation. And that's why throughout The Outsider I keep saying the outsider's salvation lies in extremes.
Here is an infusion of organic matter, as limpid as distilled water, and extremely alterable. It has been prepared to-day. To-morrow it will contain animalculae, little infusories, or flakes of mouldiness. I place a portion of that infusion into a flask with a long neck, like this one. Suppose I boil the liquid and leave it to cool. After a few days, mouldiness or animalculae will develop in the liquid. By boiling, I destroyed any germs contained in the liquid or against the glass ; but that infusion being again in contact with air, it becomes altered, as all infusions do. Now suppose I repeat this experiment, but that, before boiling the liquid, I draw (by means of an enameller's lamp) the neck of the flask into a point, leaving however, its extremity open. This being done, I boil the liquid in the flask, and leave it to cool. Now the liquid of this second flask will remain pure not only two days, a month, a year, but three or four years — for the experiment I am telling you about is already four years old, and the liquid remains as limpid as distilled water. What difference is there, then, between those two vases ? They contain the same liquid, they both contain air, both are open ! Why does one decay and the other remain pure ? The only difference between them is this : in the first case, the dusts suspended in air and their germs can fall into the neck of the flask and arrive into contact with the liquid, where they find appropriate food and develop; thence microscopic beings. In the second flask, on the contrary, it is impossible, or at least extremely difficult, unless air is violently shaken, that dusts suspended in air should enter the vase; they fall on its curved neck. When air goes in and out of the vase through diffusions or variations of temperature, the latter never being sudden, the air comes in slowly enough to drop the dusts and germs that it carries at the opening of the neck or in the first curves. This experiment is full of instruction ; for this must be noted, that everything in air save its dusts can easily enter the vase and come into contact with the liquid. Imagine what you choose in the air — electricity, magnetism, ozone, unknown forces even, all can reach the infusion. Only one thing cannot enter easily, and that is dust, suspended in air. And the proof of this is that if I shake the vase violently two or three times, in a few days it contains animalculae or mouldiness. Why? because air has come in violently enough to carry dust with it. And, therefore, gentlemen, I could point to that liquid and say to you, I have taken my drop of water from the immensity of creation, and I have taken it full of the elements appropriated to the development of inferior beings. And I wait, I watch, I question it, begging it to recommence for me the beautiful spectacle of the first creation. But it is dumb, dumb since these experiments were begun several years ago; it is dumb because I have kept it from the only thing man cannot produce, from the germs which float in the air, from Life, for Life is a germ and a germ is Life. Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow of this simple experiment.
Louis Pasteur
• Translation from The Life of Pasteur, pp. 141-142
• Original in French: Et par conséquent, messieurs pourrais-je dire, en vous montrant ce liquide : J’ai pris dans l’immensité de la création ma goutte d’eau, et je l’ai prise toute pleine de la gelée féconde, c’est-à-dire, pour parler le langage de la science, toute pleine des éléments appropriés au développement des êtres inférieurs, Et j’attends, et j’observe, et je l’interroge, et je lui demande de vouloir bien recommencer pour moi la primitive création ; ce serait un si beau spectacle ! Mais elle est muette ! Elle est muette depuis plusieurs années que ces expériences sont commencées. Ah ! c’est que j’ai éloigné d’elle, et que j’éloigne encore en ce moment, la seule chose qu’il n’ait pas été donné à l’homme de produire, j’ai éloigné d’elle les germes qui flottent dans l’ait" j’ai éloigné d’elle la vie, car la vie c’est le germe et le germe c’est la vie. Jamais la doctrine de la génération spontanée ne se relèvera du coup mortel que Cette simple expérience lui porte.
• Source: Wikiquote: "Louis Pasteur" (Quotes, Soirées scientifiques de la Sorbonne (1864): Address delivered by Pasteur at the "Sorbonne Scientific Soirée" (Soirées scientifiques de la Sorbonne), on April 7, 1864; in which he reported the results of his experiments refuting spontaneous generation. The original excerpt in French is found in Oeuvres de Pasteur Volume 2, (1922), Vallery-Radot, Pasteur. Paris: Masson, pp. 328-346, and is available at Gloubik Sciences.org)

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