Alive Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The museums of medieval Europe, from Holland to Tuscany, are crammed with instruments and devices upon which the holy men labored devoutly, in order to see how long they could keep someone alive while being roasted. It is not needful to go into further details, but there were also religious books of instruction in this art, and guides for the detection of heresy by pain.

Christopher Hitchens

The people here in fact seem to live in the streets, which are alive from morning until night, not as they are in New York with that never-ending determination for the 'long-green', but with a pleasure-loving crowd that doesn't care what it does or where it goes, so that it has a good time.

At this time there was a wise man who was called Jesus. And his conduct was good, and he was known to be virtuous. And many people from among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned Him to be crucified to die. And those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that He had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that He was alive.

Flavius Josephus

Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.

They all think any minute I'm going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself — ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide.

It was not my intention to make such a production of the emptiness between us, playing tuba on the tombstone of a soprano to try to keep some dead singer's perspective alive. It's just that I could have swore you had sung me a love song back there; and that you meant it.

Buddy Wakefield

The trade unions that were swayed by Marxist teaching did not want social peace. They calculated that their chances of acquiring political power would improve with the growing dissatisfaction of the workers. One of the first necessities with which the Hitler Government found itself faced was that of dissolving the organizations that kept alive the antagonism between employers and employees. They were replaced by the Labour Front.

All good music, whatever its date, is ageless - as alive and significant today as it was when it was written.

I think poetry should be alive. You should be able to dance it.

Benjamin Zephaniah

It had been only through books — at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions — that I had managed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.

Let's pretend that we're human beings and that we're actually alive.

This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away. The dead are not alive, and the living will not die.

Thomas the Apostle

Boast not my fall (he cried), insulting foe!
Thou by some other shalt be laid as low;
Nor think to die dejects my lofty mind;
All that I dread is leaving you behind!
Rather than so, ah let me still survive,
And burn in Cupid's flames — but burn alive.

Eve, I said, please stop for a minute. I think I finally get it. As you read to me aloud, the words become alive for me, and I can see pictures in my head. But when I try to read, all those little letters just confuse me. Because it's the white of the page between the words that truly grab me. Do I make any sense? Reading, I do believe, is a very unnatural thing. But to listen to a story, like sitting around a campfire, is very natural.

Victor Villaseñor

Look after each other. As a couple. When you have kids, you'll want to put them first. Don't. Marriage is like a plant. To keep it alive you've got to water it and feed it. If you don't, when the kids are gone, you'll look in the corner and it'll be dead.

I am grateful for who I am and who I am not. I am grateful for the life I have been given and for all that I have and all that I don't. Every breath I take is a blessing and an opportunity to fully experience the sheer joy of being alive.

I became a geologist forever by seeing with my own eyes: THE EARTH IS ALIVE.

If you end your story, it's a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don't, it belongs to anyone's imagination. It stays alive forever.

I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.

It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
When shall I come to say of the sun,
It is a sea; it shares nothing;
The sun no longer shares our works
And the earth is alive with creeping men,
Mechanical beetles never quite warm?
And shall I then stand in the sun, as now
I stand in the moon, and call it good,
The immaculate, the merciful good,
Detached from us, from things as they are?
Not to be part of the sun? To stand
Remote and call it merciful?
The strings are cold on the blue guitar.

Wallace Stevens

After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.

There may be stranger reasons for being alive. There are books There's interlibrary loan. There are books you can fall into and pull up over your head.

In the part of the night where it's quietest, around three or four o'clock, I started wondering where this black man's soul had disappeared to as it left his body. His thoughts, impressions, memories, whatever: the background noise we all have in our head that stops us from forgetting we're alive. It had to go somewhere: it couldn't just vaporize—it must have gushed, trickled or dripped onto some surface, stained it somehow. Everything must leave some kind of mark.

All progress in literary style lies in the heroic resolve to cast aside accretions and exuberances, all the conventions of a past age that were once beautiful because alive and are now false because dead.

He awoke. He was alive. He wasted no time on prayer or thanks but continued the business of survival.