Living Quotes

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I was dead. I was a woman who had divorced her soul. I was living apart from this self which you now see. I belonged to all men, and to none. They called me harlot, and a woman possessed of seven devils. I was cursed, and I was envied.
But when His dawn-eyes looked into my eyes all the stars of my night faded away, and I became Miriam, only Miriam, a woman lost to the earth she had known, and finding herself in new places.

Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility. In that case, you ask me, of what use is it? Of no use. Who will see it? No one. Which does not prevent it from being an outrage to modesty, though its exhibitionism is squandered on the blind. It is enough for poetry to express a personal ethic, which can then break away in the form of a work. It insists on living its own life. It becomes the pretext for a thousand misunderstandings that go by the name of glory...

And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren't any other people living in the world.

Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough.

Michel de Montaigne

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.

If there is anything that can bind the heavenly mind of man to this dreary exile of our earthly home and can reconcile us with our fate so than one can enjoy living, — then it is verily the enjoyment of the mathematical sciences and astronomy.

Johannes Kepler

We are underexercised as a nation. We look instead of play. We ride instead of walk. Our existence deprives us of the minimum physical activity essential for healthy living.

John F. Kennedy

There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries....

If I can help somebody as I pass along, if I can cheer somebody with a word or song, if I can show somebody he's traveling wrong, then my living will not be in vain.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Oh come, please come, to the Poor Mouth Fair
Where the Saints kneel round in their underwear
And say out prayers that most need saying
For needful sinners who've forgotten praying;
And in every alcove and niche you spy
The living dead who envy the long since gone
Who never wished to die.

All work undertaken should be useful — not just for a day, or a year, but useful in the sense that it affords permanent improvement in living conditions or that it creates future new wealth for the Nation.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.

If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Since I am I, I must make an act of self-surrender, however small or however easy, in living to God rather than to my self.

Faith is a living, daring confidence in God's grace, so sure and certain that a man could stake his life on it a thousand times.

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii if a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision.

Every living faith must have within itself the power of rejuvenation if it is to live

There is a saying in Tibetan that at the door of the miserable rich man sleeps the contented beggar. The point of this saying is not that poverty is a virtue, but that happiness does not come with wealth, but from setting limits to one's desires, and living within those limits with satisfaction.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

This we can all bear witness to, living as we do plagued by unremitting anxiety. It becomes more and more imperative that the life of the spirit be avowed as the only firm basis upon which to establish happiness and peace.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

I believe in one thing—that only a life lived for others is a life worth living.

Albert Einstein

Behold! human beings living in a underground den…Like ourselves…they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave.

If it is true to say of the lazy that they kill time, then it is greatly to be feared that an era which sees its salvation in public opinion, this is to say private laziness, is a time that really will be killed: I mean that it will be struck out of the history of the true liberation of life. How reluctant later generations will be to have anything to do with the relics of an era ruled, not by living men, but by pseudo-men dominated by public opinion.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Freedom is never dear at any price. It is the breath of life. What would a man not pay for living?

I could have never have known so well how paltry men are, and how little they care for really high aims, if I had not tested them by my scientific researches. Thus I saw that most men only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and that they worship even error when it affords them a substance.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A teacher can never truly teach unless he is still learning himself. A lamp can never light another lamp unless it continues to burn its own flame. The teacher who has come to the end of his subject, who has no living traffic with his knowledge but merely repeats his lesson to his students, can only load their minds, he cannot quicken them....

Rabindranath Tagore