Life

“Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall.”

― Jodi Picoult

“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.”

― Émile Zola

“The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.”

― E.E. Cummings

“The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.”

― Peter Shaffer, Five Finger Exercise: A Play

“People come, people go – they’ll drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book. When you finally close the cover, the characters have told their story and you start up again with another book, complete with new characters and adventures. Then you find yourself focusing on the new ones, not the ones from the past.”

― Nicholas Sparks, The Rescue

“I've got nothing to do today but smile.”

― Simon and Garfunkel

“We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think that yours is the only path.”

― Paulo Coelho

“I'm killing time while I wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness.”

― Bill Watterson

“No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention.

Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.

This is all practice.”

― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”

― Anaïs Nin

“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.”

― Groucho Marx

“Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”

― Abraham Lincoln

“Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

― William Goldman, William Goldman: Four Screenplays

“Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn't stop for anybody.”

― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth.”

― Jess C. Scott, The Intern

“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”

― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“The most important thing is to enjoy your life—to be happy—it's all that matters.”

― Audrey Hepburn

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.”

― Arundhati Roy

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum LP

“The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all.”

― Walt Disney Company, Mulan (Pictureback

“Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.”

― Alan Moore

“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.”

― Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I DON'T CARE!" Harry yelled at them, snatching up a lunascope and throwing it into the fireplace. "I'VE HAD ENOUGH, I'VE SEEN ENOUGH, I WANT OUT, I WANT IT TO END, I DON'T CARE ANYMORE!"

"You do care," said Dumbledore. He had not flinched or made a single move to stop Harry demolishing his office. His expression was calm, almost detached. "You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.”

― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

“Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you.”

― Stephanie Klein, Straight Up and Dirty: A Memoir

“Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man ... living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money.”

― George Carlin

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

― Søren Kierkegaard

“Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.”

― Margaret Mitchell

“Albus Severus," Harry said quietly, so that nobody but Ginny could hear, and she was tactful enough to pretend to be waving to Rose, who was now on the train, "you were named for two headmasters of Hogwarts. One of them was a Slytherin and he was probably the bravest man I ever knew.”

― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“How many slams in an old screen door? Depends how loud you shut it. How many slices in a bread? Depends how thin you cut it. How much good inside a day? Depends how good you live 'em. How much love inside a friend? Depends how much you give 'em.”

― Shel Silverstein

“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.”

― Emily Dickinson

“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.”

― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.”

― Maya Angelou

“Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.”

― Mark Twain

“If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember.”

― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

“It's all in the view. That's what I mean about forever, too. For any one of us our forever could end in an hour, or a hundred years from now. You never know for sure, so you'd better make every second count.”

― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.”

― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”

― Albert Camus

“Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.”

― H. Jackson Brown Jr.

“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”

― Emily Dickinson

“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”

― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“Don't be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don't have to live forever, you just have to live.”

― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

“Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened.”

― Dr. Seuss

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”

― Marilyn Monroe

“You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,

Love like you'll never be hurt,

Sing like there's nobody listening,

And live like it's heaven on earth.”

― William W. Purkey

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”

― Mae West

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”

― Robert Frost

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”

― Albert Einstein

“Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.”

― John Lennon

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

― Oscar Wilde

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

― Albert Einstein

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”

― André Gide, Autumn Leaves

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”

― Mark Twain

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”

― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one’s self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived—this is to have succeeded.”

― Bessie Anderson Stanley, More Heart Throbs Volume Two in Prose and Verse Dear to the American People And by them contributed as a Supplement to the original $10,000 Prize Book HEART THROBS

“Life is an opportunity, benefit from it.

Life is beauty, admire it.

Life is a dream, realize it.

Life is a challenge, meet it.

Life is a duty, complete it.

Life is a game, play it.

Life is a promise, fulfill it.

Life is sorrow, overcome it.

Life is a song, sing it.

Life is a struggle, accept it.

Life is a tragedy, confront it.

Life is an adventure, dare it.

Life is luck, make it.

Life is too precious, do not destroy it.

Life is life, fight for it.”

― Mother Teresa

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”

― Dr. Seuss

“I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.”

― Woody Allen

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

― Dr. Seuss, Happy Birthday to You!

“This life is what you make it. Not matter what, you're going to mess up sometimes, it's a universal truth. But the good part is you get to decide how you're going to mess it up. Girls will be your friends - they'll act like it anyway. But just remember, some come, somg go. The ones that stay with you through everything - they're your true best friends. Don't let go of them. Also remember, sisters make the best friends in the world. As for lovers, well, they'll come and go too. And babve, I hate to say it, most of them - actually pretty much all of them are going to break your heart, but you can't give up becuase if you give up, you'll never find your soul mate. You'll never find that half who makes you whole and that goes for everything. Just because you fail once, doesn't mean you're gonna fail at everything. Keep trying, hold on, and always, always, always believe in yourself, because if you don't, then who will, sweetie? So keep your head high, keep your chin up, and most importantly, keep smiling, because life's a beautiful thing and there's so much to smile about.”

― Marilyn Monroe

“Everything you can imagine is real.”

― Pablo Picasso

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Reality continues to ruin my life.”

― Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

“I'm the one that's got to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.”

― Jimi Hendrix

“Who are you to judge the life I live?

I know I'm not perfect

-and I don't live to be-

but before you start pointing fingers...

make sure you hands are clean!”

― Bob Marley

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”

― Albert Einstein

“Just when you think it can't get any worse, it can. And just when you think it can't get any better, it can.”

― Nicholas Sparks, At First Sight

“Sometimes people are beautiful.

Not in looks.

Not in what they say.

Just in what they are.”

― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

― Lewis Carroll

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”

― Mark Twain

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”

― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

― George Bernard Shaw

“The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.”

― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university.”

― Albert Einstein

“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

― E.B. White

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

― Anne Frank

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

― Margaret Mead

“Life's hard. It's even harder when you're stupid.”

― John Wayne

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.

Delicious Ambiguity.”

― Gilda Radner

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”

― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“But better to be hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.”

― Khaled Hosseini

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”

― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”

― Gustave Flaubert

“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”

― May Sarton

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

― Isaac Asimov

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”

― Virginia Woolf

“Dumbledore watched her fly away, and as her silvery glow faded he turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears.

"After all this time?"

"Always," said Snape.”

― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Where there is love there is life.”

― Mahatma Gandhi

“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.”

― John Greenleaf Whittier, Maud Muller - Pamphlet

“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”

― Oscar Wilde

“We're all human, aren't we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.”

― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.”

― Lemony Snicket, The Grim Grotto

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”

― Stephen King, The Shawshank Redemption

“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”

― John Lennon

“May you live every day of your life.”

― Jonathan Swift

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”

― George Bernard Shaw

“I don't know the question, but sex is definitely the answer.”

― Woody Allen

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.”

― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into instant flame by an encounter with another human being.”

― Albert Schweitzer

“Life is to be enjoyed, not endured”

― Gordon B. Hinckley

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”

― John Lennon

“Don't you think it's better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?”

― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“The more I see, the less I know for sure.”

― John Lennon

“Life, he realize, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it's in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile.”

― Nicholas Sparks, The Last Song

“If my life is going to mean anything, I have to live it myself.”

― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“Unbeing dead isn't being alive.”

― E.E. Cummings

“A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.”

― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

“This is your life and its ending one moment at a time.”

― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“People aren't born good or bad. Maybe they're born with tendencies either way, but its the way you live your life that matters.”

― Cassandra Clare, City of Glass

“No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.”

― François de La Rochefoucauld

“Live to the point of tears.”

― Albert Camus

“Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.”

― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it's reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you, and it just hits you all over again, that shocking.”

― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

“These woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.”

― Robert Frost

“Life is for the living.

Death is for the dead.

Let life be like music.

And death a note unsaid.”

― Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems

“Simplicity, patience, compassion.

These three are your greatest treasures.

Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.

Patient with both friends and enemies,

you accord with the way things are.

Compassionate toward yourself,

you reconcile all beings in the world.”

― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED

FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

WAS MUSIC”

― Kurt Vonnegut

“The best index to a person's character is how he treats people who can't do him any good, and how he treats people who can't fight back.”

― Abigail Van Buren

“It hurts to let go. Sometimes it seems the harder you try to hold on to something or someone the more it wants to get away. You feel like some kind of criminal for having felt, for having wanted. For having wanted to be wanted. It confuses you, because you think that your feelings were wrong and it makes you feel so small because it's so hard to keep it inside when you let it out and it doesn't coma back. You're left so alone that you can't explain. Damn, there's nothing like that, is there? I've been there and you have too. You're nodding your head.”

― Henry Rollins, The Portable Henry Rollins

“People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.”

― Jim Morrison

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”

― Stephen King

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”

― Hunter S. Thompson

“I like flaws. I think they make things interesting.”

― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

“The things you do for yourself are gone when you are gone, but the things you do for others remain as your legacy.”

― Kalu Kalu

“The saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all. Passion and satisfaction go hand in hand, and without them, any happiness is only temporary, because there's nothing to make it last.”

― Nicholas Sparks, Dear John

“If you can't change your fate, change your attitude.”

― Amy Tan

“One of the advantages of being disorganized is that one is always having surprising discoveries.”

― A.A. Milne

“You can have it all. Just not all at once.”

― Oprah Winfrey

“There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be...”

― John Lennon

“If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.”

― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.”

― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.”

― Anaïs Nin

“Maybe everyone can live beyond what they're capable of.”

― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.”

― Terry Pratchett

“Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.”

― Elie Wiesel

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”

― Lao Tzu

“I'll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure.”

― Mae West

“A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.”

― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.”

― Lily Tomlin

“sometimes you don't need a goal in life, you don't need to know the big picture. you just need to know what you're going to do next!”

― Sophie Kinsella, Undomestic Goddess, The

“Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.”

― Woody Allen

“And I learned what is obvious to a child. That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered. But most of all, I learned that life is about sitting on benches next to ancient creeks with my hand on her knee and sometimes, on good days, for falling in love.”

― Nicholas Sparks

“Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong'.

Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.”

― Charles M. Schulz

“Tis' better to live your own life imperfectly than to imitate someone else's perfectly.”

― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”

― Tom Clancy

“why are trying so hard to fit in, when you're born to stand out”

― Oliver James

“If you care about something you have to protect it – If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.”

― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.”

― John Burroughs, Studies in Nature and Literature