Lives Quotes

“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.”
― William Martin, The Parent's Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for Modern Parents

“Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“We survived. You and I. And those who survive have a duty. Our duty is to do our best to keep on living. Even if our lives are not perfect.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“A complete stranger has the capacity to alter the life of another irrevocably. This domino effect has the capacity to change the course of an entire world. That is what life is; a chain reaction of individuals colliding with others and influencing their lives without realizing it. A decision that seems miniscule to you, may be monumental to the fate of the world.”
― J.D. Stroube, Caged by Damnation

“The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.”
― Frank Herbert

“Adventure works in any strand—it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“But then, didn’t everyone only tell their lives – truly tell their lives – to one person?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Maybe love at first sight isn’t what we think it is. Maybe it’s recognising a soul we loved in a past life and falling in love with them again.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Love has the power to create an inviting space in the lives of people. But if daily routine kills dreamy or passionate thoughts, the constraint of the room may become oppressive and the emptiness unbearable. The room loses then its original fullness and turns into a place of nothingness. ( " Another empty room" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“People said that video games were bad because they made you numb to death, made you register entrails splattering across a screen as a sign of success. In that moment, Val thought that the real problem with games was that the player was suppossed to try everything. If there was a cave, you went in it. If there was a mysterious stranger, you talked to him. If there was a map, you followed it. But in games, you had a hundred million billion lives and Val only had this one.”
― Holly Black, Valiant

“War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Erotic longing is really a longing to merge with something greater than oneself. For every kind of love is a force that holds the promise of taking us beyond the limitations of our individual lives.”
― Julianne Davidow

“September 11… I will never forget feeling scared and vulnerable… I will never forget feeling the deep sad loss of so many lives… I will never forget the smell of the smoke that reached across the water and delivered a deep feeling of doom into my gut… I will never forget feeling the boosted sense of unity and pride… I will never forget seeing the courageous actions of so many men and women… I will never forget seeing people of all backgrounds working together in community… I will never forget seeing what hate can destroy… I will never forget seeing what love can heal…”
― Steve Maraboli

“It makes me wonder, Do we spend most of our days trying to remember or forget things? Do we spend most of our time running towards or away from our lives? I don't know.”
― Markus Zusak, Fighting Ruben Wolfe

“In our rushing, bulls in china shops, we break our own lives.”
― Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are

“Pristine river of lives
is swallowed by the crowd--
Human getting lost into humans.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“In this vagueness,
might a story of lives--
lives that have been crushed themselves
while crushing rocks into pieces--
be written.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“Every time I think that it’s not worth it – that the people in it deserve the misery of their lives – I come across someone who makes me rethink that.”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, Invincible

“If we live our lives looking for the excitement and exhilaration that change can bring, we will be much happier than when we are eventually forced to accept it anyways.”
― Daniel Willey

“Everyone thinks that the old days were better, or that they were harder, and the modern times are chaotic and complex, or easier all around, but I think people's hearts have always been the same, happy and sad, and that hasn't changed at all. It's just the shapes of lives that change, not the lives themselves.”
― Brian Doyle, Mink River

“If only our lives had background music.”
― Abhaidev, The Gods Are Not Dead

“… "That at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what´s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That´s the world´s greatest lie." - The Alchemist, Paulo Cohelo -”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“An act of kindness may take only a moment of our time, but when captured in the heart the memory lives forever.”
― Molly Friedenfeld, The Book of Simple Human Truths

“Murderers don't get forgiven just because we promise to be good from now on. We have to earn our way back. One hundred is the price. One hundred lives for each we took. That seems fair. That's how we get whole again and that's our work, from now until as long as it takes.”
― Bill Willingham, Fables, Vol. 18: Cubs in Toyland

“For their lives, for their children's lives, they will give up what little freedom they had left.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen

“There are only two lives we might live: our dream or our destiny. Sometimes they are one in the same, and sometimes they're not. Often our dreams are just a path to our destinies.”
― Glennon Melton, Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed

“I’m fighting a losing battle. I can’t tell this story the way it should be told. This whole hotchpotch of characters, events, dates, and the infinite branching of cause and effect - and these people, these real people who actually existed. I’m barely able to mention a tiny fragment of their lives, their actions, their thoughts. I keep banging my head against the wall of history. And I look up and see, growing all over it - ever higher and denser, like a creeping ivy - the unmappable pattern of causality ... How many forgotten heroes sleep in history's great cemetery?”
― Laurent Binet, HHhH

“Strong lives are motivated by dynamic purposes.”
― Kenneth Hildebrand