Alive Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

It was always said of [Scrooge] that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us!

Charles Dickens

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading has opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

'E's all 'ot sand an' ginger when alive
An' 'e's generally shammin' when 'e's dead.

Rudyard Kipling

For once you must try not to shirk the facts:
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.

Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.

I also often hear the word 'evolution'. Repeatedly I am asked to explain how my painting evolved. To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was. Art does not evolve by itself, the ideas of people change and with them their mode of expression

We who engage in non-violent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying... but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, — a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbour, but my neighbour. For don't we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alive — who are with us in the same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture — almost the précis — we've made of him in our own minds? And he has to depart from it pretty widely before we even notice the fact.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.

For it is not meters, but a metermaking argument that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I will not say that your mulberry-trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive.

It would have amused you to see our progress. We went up by Sion Hill, and returned across the fields. In climbing a hill Mrs. Chamberlayne is very capital; I could with difficulty keep pace with her, yet would not flinch for the world. On plain ground I was quite her equal. And so we posted away under a fine hot sun, she without any parasol or any shade to her hat, stopping for nothing, and crossing the churchyard at Weston with as much expedition as if we were afraid of being buried alive.

The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.

Henry David Thoreau

Alive without breath, As cold as death; Never thirsty, ever drinking, All in mail never clinking.

J. R. R. Tolkien

I thought: I am perishing of cold and hunger, and here is a man thinking only of how to clothe himself and his wife, and how to get bread for themselves. He cannot help me. When the man saw me he frowned and became still more terrible, and passed me by on the other side. I despaired, but suddenly I heard him coming back. I looked up, and did not recognize the same man: before, I had seen death in his face; but now he was alive, and I recognized in him the presence of God.

Birmingham is very special for me because it is here that I found myself alive, seven days after I was shot... It is now my second home, after my beloved Pakistan.

Malala Yousafzai

The fire seven times tried this; seven times tried that judgement is that did never choose amiss some there be that shadows kiss; such have but a shadows bliss, there be fool alive, i wis silverd o'er, and so was this Take what wife you will to bed I will ever be your head. So be gone; you are sped.

William Shakespeare

I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way.

Ernest Hemingway

There is nothing alive more agonized than man / of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.

Fifteen birds in five firtrees, their feathers were fanned in a fiery breeze! But, funny little birds, they had no wings! O what shall we do with the funny little things? Roast 'em alive, or stew them in a pot; fry them, boil them and eat them hot?

J. R. R. Tolkien

So the bastard's dead? Too bad we didn't capture him alive!

But if the longing for the achievement of the goal is powerfully alive within us, then shall we not lack the strength to find the means for reaching the goal and for translating it into deeds.

Albert Einstein