What Is Life Quotes (page 8)
Should a man, to preserve his life, pay everything that gives life colour, scentand excitement? Can one accept a life of digestion, respiration, muscularand brain activity-and nothingmore? 'Become a walking blueprint? Is this not anexorbitant price? Is it not a mockery? Should one pay? Seven years in the army and seven years in the camp, twice seven years twice that mythical or biblical term, then to be deprived of the ability to tell what is a man and what is a woman--is not a price...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The first law of reason is that what exists, exists; what is, is, and that from this ineducible, bedrock principle, all knowledge is built...that is the foundation from which life is embraced... thinking is a choice...wishes and whims are not facts, nor are they a means to discover them... reason is our only way of grasping reality--it's our basic tool of survival. We are free to evade the effort of thinking--to reject reason--but we are not free to avoid the penalty of the abyss we refuse to...
Terry Goodkind
Mornings at Blackwater"For years, every morning, I drankfrom Blackwater Pond. It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt, the feet of ducks. And always it assuaged mefrom the dry bowl of the very far past. What I want to say isthat the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capableof choosing what that will be, darling citizen. So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And liveyour...
Mary Oliver
we live everything as it comes, without warning , like an actor going on cold. and what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? that is why life is always like a sketch. No , "sketch" is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the ground for nothing, an outline with no picture
Milan Kundera
So that's it. I've told you everything I know. Think clearly and think for yourself. Learn to use language to express those thoughts. Love somebody with all your heart. And with everyone, whether you love them or not, find out if you can be helpful. But really, it's even simpler than that. After all this time, and all these talks in public and in private, I think I get it now. If I were taking my friend Arnold's suggestion and spoke from my deathbed, I think I know what I'd say. I see now...
Alan Alda
Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living? And then what strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our most treasured possessions without our willing it? Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is...
Virginia Woolf
So far, 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 and judged by these standards, which I do not defend, the bullfight is very normal to me because I feel very fine while it is going on and have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality, and after it is over I feel very sad but also very fine.
Ernest Hemingway
Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is... The only problem in your life is your mind's resistance to life as it unfolds.
Dan Millman
There is no formula to relationships. They have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like. In business, people negotiate to win. They negotiate to get what they want. Maybe you’re too used to that. Love is different. Love is when you are as concerned about someone else’s situation as you are about your own.
Morrie Schwartz
I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters...
Terence McKenna
Stop what? Cheering you up? Or is life supposed to stop because you did something horrible? I'll tell you the real horrible truth, Anita. No matter what you do or how bad you feel about it, life just goes on. Life doesn't give a fuck that you're sorry or upset or deranged or tormented. Life just goes on, and you gotta go on with it, or sit in the middle of the road and feel sorry for yourself. And I don't see you doing that.
Laurell K. Hamilton