Life famous quotes
Last updated: Jul 22, 2024
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But smiles and tears are so alike with me, they are neither of them confined to any particular feelings: I often cry when I am happy, and smile when I am sad.
-- Anne Bronte -
We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life.
-- Anne Carson -
For truly in nature there are many operations that are far more than mechanical. Nature is not simply an organic body like a clock, which has no vital principle of motion in it; but it is a living body which has life and perception, which are much more exalted than a mere mechanism or a mechanical motion.
-- Anne Conway, Viscountess Conway -
Of all the journeys to undertake, the one of self-compassion is one of utmost importance for long-term well-being.
-- Anne Foy -
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Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.
-- Anne Frank -
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
-- Anne Frank -
I don't think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.
-- Anne Frank -
When we clutter our lives with imagined obligations, unnecessary activities, and distractions that only kill time, we dilute the power of our lives.
-- Anne Katherine -
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You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
-- Anne Lamott -
Sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it all feels like a mean joke, like God's advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly.
-- Anne Lamott -
Living on Earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.
-- Anne Lamott -
What fills us is real, sweet, dopey, funny life.
-- Anne Lamott -
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Who wills, Can. Who tries, Does. Who loves, Lives.
-- Anne McCaffrey -
If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh -
The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh -
The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was, nor forward to what it might be, but living in the present and accepting it as it is now.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh -
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The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh -
I have been overcome by the beauty and richness of our life together, those early mornings setting out, those evenings gleaming with rivers and lakes below us, still holding the last light.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh -
...I want first of all - in fact, as an end to these other desires - to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central cor to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact - to borrow from the language of the saints -to live 'in grace' as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony...
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh -
For relationships, too, must be like islands. One must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands surrounded and interrupted by the sea, continuously visited and abandoned by the tides. One must accept the serenity of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh -
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Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distraction...What matters is that one be for a time inwardly attentive.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh -
Total freedom is never what one imagines and, in fact, hardly exists. It comes as a shock in life to learn that we usually only exchange one set of restrictions for another. The second set, however, is self-chosen, and therefore easier to accept.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh -
We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of time and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh -
I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.
-- Anne Rice -
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Remember always, he said, that nothing is as precious to us as the magnificent gift of life. Let the moon and the stars always remind you of this-that though we are tiny creatures in this universe, we are filled with life.
-- Anne Rice -
We are not damned. We never were. Who under the sun has the right to damn any living breathing creature?
-- Anne Rice -
Perhaps the most important thing we can ever do in our lives is find a way to keep the wild-both the wild inside and the wild outside us-and tap into it.
-- Anne Rivers Siddons -
Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.
-- Anne Roiphe -
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I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.
-- Anne Sexton -
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
-- Anne Sexton -
It's not the balanced life we remember, it's the beautiful life.
-- Anne Sweeney -
It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.
-- Anne Tyler -
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Life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful.
-- Annette Funicello -
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
-- Annie Dillard -
The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
-- Annie Dillard -
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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
-- Annie Dillard -
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
-- Annie Dillard -
One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.
-- Annie Dillard -
We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
-- Annie Dillard -
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Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
-- Annie Dillard -
We face up to awful things because we can't go around them, or forget them. The sooner you say 'Yes, it happened, and there's nothing I can do about it,' the sooner you can get on with your own life. You've got children to bring up. So you've got to get over it. What we have to get over, somehow we do. Even the worst things.
-- Annie Proulx -
The human drama is reaching its denouement. The great unveiling is approaching, a time when the power structures of the world begin to crumble and people of the heart sing out a new truth. Many voices are joining the chorus, many feet are walking the path, many minds are dreaming possibilities for a magnificent future. For beneath the crises that are looming at every level of civilization, the global heart is awakening, beating out the rhythm of a new and glorious dance, calling us to a better way of living.
-- Anodea Judith -
In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.
-- Ansel Adams -
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The only things in my life that compatibly exists with this grand universe are the creative works of the human spirit.
-- Ansel Adams -
A Prayer of Anselm My God, I pray that I may so know you and love you that I may rejoice in you. And if I may not do so fully in this life let me go steadily on to the day when I come to that fullness . . . Let me receive That which you promised through your truth, that my joy may be full.
-- Anselm of Canterbury -
Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
-- Anthony Burgess -
It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.
-- Anthony Burgess -
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I mean, there's little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you're going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning.
-- Anthony Burgess -
Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
-- Anthony Burgess -
The more time we spend with Mother nature the more we fall in love with her.
-- Anthony D. Williams -
Hidden paths can't be walked without moving obstacles.
-- Anthony D. Williams -
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You know, all mystics - Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion - are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare.
-- Anthony de Mello -
Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don't know it, are asleep. They're born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.
-- Anthony de Mello -
So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?
-- Anthony Doerr -
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In a world of alternative lifestyle options, strategic life planning becomes of special importance. Like lifestyle patterns, life plans of one kind or another are something of an inevitable concomitant of post-traditional social forms. Life plans are the substantial content of the reflexively organised trajectory of the self. Life-planning is a means of preparing a course of future actions mobilised in terms of the self's biography. We may also speak here of the existence of personal calendars or life-plan calendars, in relation to which the personal time of the lifespan is handled.
-- Anthony Giddens -
'Taking charge of one's life' involves risk, because it means confronting a diversity of open possibilities.
-- Anthony Giddens -
In the deep, unwritten wisdom of life there are many things to be learned that cannot be taught. We never know them by hearing them spoken, but we grow into them by experience and recognize them through understanding. Understanding is a great experience in itself, but it does not come through instruction.
-- Anthony Hope -
We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by thinking about everything. Think. Think. Think. You can never trust the human mind anyway. It's a death trap.
-- Anthony Hopkins -
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Life's too short to deal with other people's insecurities.
-- Anthony Hopkins -
Sometimes life's so much cooler when you just don't know any better and all the painful lessons have not hammered your head open yet.
-- Anthony Kiedis -
Thus, flexibility, as displayed by water, is a sign of life. Rigidity, its opposite, is an indicator of death.
-- Anthony Lawlor -
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On the stage . . . masks are assumed with some regard to procedure; in everyday life, the participants act their parts without consideration either for suitability of scene or for the words spoken by the rest of the cast: the result is a general tendency for things to be brought to the level of farce even when the theme is serious enough.
-- Anthony Powell -
Life isn't what you want it to be, it's what you make it become.
-- Anthony Ryan -
All the world loves a lover, and a lover loves all the world.
-- Anthony Storr -
It is better to fall among crows than flatterers; for those devour only the dead - these the living.
-- Antisthenes -
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And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Sometimes we behave as though there was something more important than life. But what?
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
It is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory, and in creative action, that man finds his supreme joys.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.
-- Antoine Rivarol -
Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
-- Anton Chekhov -
The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.
-- Anton Chekhov -
I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean - wherever my imagination ranges.
-- Anton Chekhov -
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"Do you know," Ivan Bunin recalls Anton Chekhov saying to him in 1899, near the end of his too-short life, "for how many years I shall be read? Seven." "Why seven?" Bunin asked. "Well," Chekhov answered, "seven and a half then."
-- Anton Chekhov -
When we speak the word 'life,' it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.
-- Antonin Artaud -
In Spain we have a saying about the essentials of life: good food, good wine, good sex, good sleep.
-- Antonio Banderas -
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Following straight lines shortens distances, and also life.
-- Antonio Porchia -
Situated in some nebulous distance I do what I do so that the universal balance of which I am a part may remain a balance.
-- Antonio Porchia -
Yes I will try to be. Because I believe that not being is arrogant.
-- Antonio Porchia -
We tear life out of life to use it for looking at itself.
-- Antonio Porchia -
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No, I'm happy to go on living the life I've chosen. I'm a university teacher and I like my job.
-- Antonio Tabucchi -
You own a dog with the knowledge that it will move through the stages of existence in fast forward, providing you with a lesson about your own life passages if you let it.
-- Antonya Nelson -
I only know that from wherever it is that we're going there can be no turning back
-- Anya Seton -
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I was looking for the key for years But the door was always open
-- Aravind Adiga -
And by a prudent flight and cunning save A life which valour could not, from the grave. A better buckler I can soon regain, But who can get another life again?
-- Archilochus -
Wise people, even though all laws were abolished, would still lead the same life.
-- Aristophanes -
What unlooked-for things do happen, to be sure, in a long life!
-- Aristophanes -
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Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.
-- Aristotle -
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
-- Aristotle -
The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.
-- Aristotle -
I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.
-- Aristotle -