Lives Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

But they were frightened at his survivant will, once a will to live, now become a will to die.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Neither the United States of America nor the world community of nations can tolerate deliberate deception and offensive threats on the part of any nation, large or small. We no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation's security to constitute maximum peril. Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift, that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace.

John F. Kennedy

So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

Henry David Thoreau

To live alone one must be an animal or a god - says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both - a philosopher.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I cannot live without books: but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.

Thomas Jefferson

I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage, aware that my parents' dreams live on in my precious daughters. I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.

The Quaestor turned back the pages until he found himself among the Pensées. We are not satisfied, he read, with the life we have in ourselves and our own being; we want to live an imaginary life in other people's idea of us. Hence all our efforts are directed to seeming what we are not. We labor incessantly to preserve and embellish this imaginary being, and neglect that which is really ours. The Quaestor put down the book, … and ruefully reflected that all his own troubles had arisen from this desire to seem what in fact he was not. To seem a man of action, when in fact he was a contemplative; to seem a politician, when nature had made him an introspective psychologist; to seem a wit, which God had intended him for a sage.

It seems to me that the most delightful walk of life is to be found in a household of moderate means, to live there with an obliging spouse and to be satisfied with little.

But I was thinking of a plan
To dye one's whiskers green,
And always use so large a fan
That they could not be seen.
So having no reply to give
To what the old man said,
I cried, Come, tell me how you live!
And thumped him on the head.

God always saves the world from the consequences of unintended errors of men who live in fear of Him.

No man can perform so little as not to have reason to congratulate himself on his merits, when he beholds the multitude that live in total idleness, and have never yet endeavoured to be useful.

We demand that big business give the people a square deal; in return we must insist that when any one engaged in big business honestly endeavors to do right he shall himself be given a square deal; and the first, and most elementary, kind of square deal is to give him in advance full information as to just what he can, and what he cannot, legally and properly do. It is absurd, and much worse than absurd, to treat the deliberate lawbreaker as on an exact par with the man eager to obey the law, whose only desire is to find out from some competent Governmental authority what the law is, and then to live up to it. Moreover, it is absurd to treat the size of a corporation as in itself a crime.

Theodore Roosevelt

It is only by frequent deaths of ourselves and our self-centered desires that we can come to live more fully.

When the Indians complain that the English have enslaved them it is as if drunkards complained that the spirit-dealers who have settled among them have enslaved them. You tell them that they might give up drinking, but they reply that they are so accustomed to it that they cannot abstain, and that they must have alcohol to keep up their energy. Is it not the same thing with the millions of people who submit to thousands or even to hundreds, of others — of their own or other nations? If the people of India are enslaved by violence it is only because they themselves live and have lived by violence, and do not recognize the eternal law of love inherent in humanity.

The truth is, being an American is hard. Being part of a democratic government is hard. Being a citizen is hard. It is a challenge. It's supposed to be. There's no respite from our ideals. All of us are called to live up to our expectations for ourselves — not just when it's convenient, but when it's inconvenient. When it's tough. When we're afraid. The tension throughout our history between welcoming or rejecting the stranger, it's about more than just immigration. It's about the meaning of America, what kind of country do we want to be. It's about the capacity of each generation to honor the creed as old as our founding: E Pluribus Unum — that out of many, we are one.

The promise, made when I am in love and because I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love. A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way. He might as well promise to never have a headache or always to feel hungry.

[New Jersey is like] a beer barrel, tapped at both ends, with all the live beer running into Philadelphia and New York.

Benjamin Franklin

We who advocate peace are becoming an irrelevance when we speak peace. The government speaks rubber bullets, live bullets, tear gas, police dogs, detention, and death.

We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles.

Mysticism: to dwell on the unseen, to withdraw ourselves from the things of sense into communion with God — to endeavour to partake of the Divine nature; that is, of Holiness. When we ask ourselves only what is right, or what is the will of God (the same question), then we may truly be said to live in His light.

Florence Nightingale

Reason unites us, not only with our contemporaries, but with men who lived two thousand years before us, and with those who will live after us.

There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life.

Henry David Thoreau

To write and to live are very different. Many who praise virtue, do no more than praise it.

Idleness, pleasure, what abysses! To do nothing is a dreary course to take, be sure of it. To live idle upon the substance of society! To be useless, that is to say, noxious! This leads straight to the lowest depth of misery.