Life
"The big problems of our growing up are not limited by time, culture, or geography. We share our wonder and confusion: Who am I? Why am I here? Does it matter? Ultimately I hope we all answer [...]: Yes, it does. We do matter. What we do matters. And that is both a challenge and a joy." --Madeleine L’’Engle, Troubling a Star
"Everyone is an explorer. How could you possibly live your life looking at a door and not open it? "--Robert D. Ballard
"How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. [...] There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light." --Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams
"Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time." --Sir J. Lubbock
"No one is listening until you make a mistake." --Anon
"To be nobody but yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and to never stop fighting." --e. e. cummings
"This above all: to thine own self be true; and it follows, as the night the day, thou canst not be false to any man." --Shakespeare
"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; [...] a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance." --Ecclesiastes, The Bible
"It’’s surprising how many persons go through life without ever recognizing that their feelings toward other people are largely determined by their feelings toward themselves, and if you’’re not comfortable within yourself, you can’’t be comfortable with others." --Sydney J. Harris
"Praise is like sunlight to the human spirit: we cannot flower and grow without it." --Jess Lair
"One ought, every day, to hear a song, read a fine poem, and, if possible, to speak a few reasonable words." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." --Tom Clancy
"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." --Maya Angelou
"Isolation is aloneness that feels forced upon you, like a punishment. Solitude is aloneness you choose and embrace. I think great things can come out of solitude, out of going to a place where all is quiet except the beating of your heart." --Jeanne Marie Laskas
"I am not young enough to know everything."--Oscar Wilde
"It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end." --Ursula K. LeGuin
"The reward of a thing well done is to have it done." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The old woman I shall become will be quite different from the woman I am now. Another I is beginning." --George Sand
"Life is a succession of moments. To live each one is to succeed." --Corita Kent
"Things do not change; we change." --Henry David Thoreau
"Wherever we are, it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else, and whatever we do, however well we do it, it is only the preparation to do something that shall be different." --Robert Louis Stevenson
"Invest yourself in everything you do. There's fun in being serious." -- Wynton Marsalis
"Naps are nature's way of reminding you that life is nice- like a beautiful, softly swinging hammock strung between birth and infinity." --Peggy Noonan
"When you don't know what you want, you often end up where you don't want to be." --Bob Greene
"Don't take life too serious. You'll never escape it alive anyway." --Elbert Hubbard
"Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he is most likely to be creamed? " --Solomon Short
"Enjoy every minute. There's plenty of time to be dead. "-- unknown
"Life is too important to take seriously." --Corky Siegel
"Life isn't a science; we make it up as we go along." --Al Hirshfeld
"You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you." -- Mary Tyler Moore
"We're all only fragile threads, but what a tapestry we make." --Jerry Ellis
"We all live every day in virtual environments, defined by our ideas." -- Michael Crichton
"A youth was questioning a lonely old man, 'What is life's heaviest burden?' he asked. The old fellow answered sadly, 'To have nothing to carry.'" --anonymous
"Let the world know you as you are, not as you think you should be- because sooner or later, if you are posing, you will forget the pose and then where are you?" --Fanny Brice
"Life does not cease to be funny when people die, any more that it ceases to be serious when people laugh." --George Bernard Shaw
"Love is only for the young, the middle-aged, and the old." --anonymous
"Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper." --Albert Einstein
"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance." -- Oscar Wilde
"Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out". -- Chekhov
" The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn." -- David Russell
" I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." -- Woody Allen
"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." -- Albert Einstein
"Do not needlessly endanger your lives until ordered to do so." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I; I took the one less traveled by; And that has made all the difference." -- Robert Frost
"The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball." -- Doug Larson
"Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking" -- H. L. Mencken
"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." --Susan Ertz
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." -- C. G. Jung
"Is there life before death?" -- Belfast Graffito
"All say, 'How hard it is to die' - a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live." --Mark Twain
"Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world." --Mark Twain
"There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it."-- Bernard Shaw
"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." --Albert Einstein
"When it comes time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home." --Chief Aupumut , Mohican leader
"You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now." --Joan Baez
"The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted thirty years of his life." -- Muhammad Ali
"Only actions give to life its strength, as only moderation gives it its charm." -- Jean Paul Richter
"At any given moment life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, tending in a certain direction." --Aldous Huxley
"One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum." --Walter Scott
"Be glad for life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to look up at the stars." --Henry Van Dyke
"We never live, but are always in the expectation of living." --Voltaire
"Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people." -- Carl Sagan
"Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one." --Bruce Lee
"Always do more than is required of you." --George Patton
"Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment - the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.” --Jorge Luis Borges
"If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well." --Martin Luther King Jr.
"If you're truly serious about preparing your child for the future, don't teach him to subtract- teach him to deduct." --Fran Lebowitz
"We all make mistakes, but everyone makes different mistakes." -- Ludwig van Beethoven
"Nobody makes a greater mistake then he who does nothing because he could only do a little." --Edmund Burke
"Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other." --Brenda Ueland
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