WELCOME TO THE LONGEST, SQUISHIEST section of this book, devoted to life. From day-to-day living to the cradle-to-grave arc of our lives, from poetic statements about significance to brass-tacks pieces of advice, from ways of viewing life to survival strategies, these quotes look at how to live in the immediate now, how to live until you go to bed tonight, and how to live until you die. I believe life has inherent meaning—and if not, each individual can imbue it with meaning—but in any case, at the very least these tidbits give us great pointers for having a good time and helping others make it through. Scattered throughout are clusters about happiness, anger, work, aging, death, carpe diem, failure, and experience. (Two of the most important parts of life—love and sex—get their own section, coming up next.)
When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul—then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness!
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.
Every day of our lives we are on the verge of making those changes that would make all the difference.
Everything in life is just for a while.
—Philip K. Dick
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how.
The most decisive actions of our life—I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future—are, more often than not, unconsidered.
All is pattern, all life, but we can't always see the pattern when we're part of it.
Dare to be naïve.
I want to make a poem of my life.
Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartedness that requires the true courage—however often we are hurt as a result of it.
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
The great art of life is sensation; to feel that we exist, even in pain.
Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted.
To look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.
—Betty Smith
wanderer, there is no path,
the path is made by walking.
Do one thing every day that scares you.
If you don't become the ocean you'll be seasick every day.
All of our miseries are nothing but attachment.
I should be suspicious of what I want.
A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
Life is something that happens to you while you're making other plans.
Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.
My life is my message.
The best way out is always through.
To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice.
Study nothing except in the knowledge that you already knew it. Worship nothing except in adoration of your true self. And fear nothing except in the certainty that you are your enemy's begetter and its only hope of healing.
—Clive Barker
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.
It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.
The problem is not to find the answer; it's to face the answer.
All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.
It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
I think I don't regret a single excess of my responsive youth—I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.
Many an attack of depression is nothing but the expression of regret at having to be virtuous.
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.
—Colette
Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care about knowledge? All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or what-not.
Don't postpone joy until you've learned all your lessons. Joy is your lesson.
About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Between two evils, I generally like to pick the one I never tried before.
There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.
Saintliness is also a temptation.
The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.
For how can I be sure
I shall see again
The world on the first of May
Shining after the rain?
Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. . . . How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
Each
small task
of everyday life is part of the
total harmony
of the universe.
—Saint Thérèse de Lisieux
There are two ways to wash the dishes.
The first is to wash the dishes
in order to have clean dishes,
and the second is to wash the dishes
in order to wash the dishes.
—Thich Nhat Hanh
Your daily life is your temple and your religion.
Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.
Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
Don't fear failure.
Not failure, but low aim, is the crime.
In great attempts
it is glorious even to fail.
—Bruce Lee
I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.
You miss 100% of the shots you never take.
The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it.
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
When we can begin to take our failures nonseriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them. It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves.
Where you stumble and fall, there you discover the gold.
Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Fall seven times; stand up eight.
One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.
I'm glad to be here. I'm glad to be anywhere.
You will recognize your own
path when you come upon it
because you will suddenly
have all the energy and
imagination you
will ever need.
—Sara Teasdale
I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
Good judgment comes from
experience.
Experience
comes from bad judgment.
Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
Experience is a hard teacher
because she gives the test first,
the lesson after.
There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
You live out the confusions until they become clear.
Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
The future is made of the same stuff as the present.
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
The thing that I have learned is that vulnerability is at the center of fear and shame, but it is also at the center of joy and gratitude and love and belonging.
It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous.
Much unhappiness has come
into the world because
of bewilderment and
things left unsaid.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
Each time we don't say what we want to say, we're dying.
I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
I have a very simple creed: that life and joy and beauty are better than dusty death.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is “Yes.”
There are only two mantras:
yum and yuck. Mine is yum.
I dwell in possibility.
The cave you fear to enter contains the treasure you seek.
You often meet your fate on the road you take to avoid it.
Nature loves courage. . . . You make the commitment, and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream, and the world will not grind you under; it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. It's done by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering that it's a feather bed.
I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse.
I don't like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself.
To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations.
Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.
There is as much dignity
in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
Get fired. If you're not pushing hard enough to get fired, you're not pushing hard enough.
What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.
Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
We don't understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but by then we realize it and admit it.
Having devoted the first half of my life to the dark, I feel obliged to revere any pinpoint of light now.
You show me anyone who's lived to over seventy, and you show me a fighter—someone who's got the will to live.
Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't.
Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.
It is sad to grow old but nice to ripen.
Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.
There is only one way to be prepared for death: to be sated. In the soul, in the heart, in the spirit, in the flesh. To the brim.
People living deeply have no fear of death.
—Anaïs Nin
To die will be an awfully big adventure.
We are born in simplicity but die of complications.
In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.
The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.
Death is something we shouldn't fear because, while we are, death isn't, and when death is, we aren't.
Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.
The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.
If life must not be taken too seriously—then so neither must death.
Obituaries are like near-death experiences for cowards. Reading them is a way for me to think about death while also keeping it at arm's length. Obituaries aren't really about death; they're about life. . . . Reading about people who are dead now and did things with their lives makes me want to get up and do something decent with mine. Thinking about death every morning makes me want to live.
I had a lover's quarrel with the world.
There is a determined though unseen bravery, which defends itself foot to foot in the darkness against the fatal invasions of necessity and dishonesty. Noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye sees, which no renown rewards, which no flourish of triumph salutes. Life, misfortunes, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields which have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes.
You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.
Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events not of words. Trust movement.
The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.
A multitude of small delights constitutes happiness.
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That's what it's all finally about.
Be happy. It's one way of being wise.
For all that has been—thanks.
For all that will be—yes.
Seek not happiness too greedily, and be not fearful of unhappiness.
Man is unhappy because he doesn't know he's happy. It's only that.
Truth is not always the best basis for happiness. There are certain lies which may constitute a far better and more secure foundation of happiness. There are people who perish when their eyes are opened.
If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.
I cannot believe the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.
One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.
Happiness
is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
—Mohandas Gandhi
There are short-cuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.
Although the world is very full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.
To live is an aggression. You're involved with aggressions on all levels when you move around the world, you're occupying a space that other people can't occupy, you're stepping on flora, fauna, and little creatures as you walk. So there is a normal aggression that is part of the rhythm of living.
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
You live your life as if it's real.
Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value.
Waste no more time arguing about what a good person should be. Be one.
If you wish to live, you must first attend your own funeral.
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.
There is nothing to find, only to realize. There is nothing to become, only to be. There is nothing to fear, only to love.
Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.
Believe in the holy contour of life.
Evil is boring. Cynicism is pointless. Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy. Hopelessness is self-indulgent. On the other hand: Joy is fascinating. Love is an act of heroic genius. Pleasure is our birthright. Chronic ecstasy is a learnable skill.
