Life At Its Best Quotes

“If you are lying in bed now lamenting life, remember this: If I hadn't been harassed at work by people who lacked professionalism, given bad news by a doctor that saved my life, gone nearly broke, lost girlfriends for stupid reasons, had terrible bosses, made mistakes, and been lonely I never would have started my company or be grateful for every moment in the present. I used all of the above as fuel for my fire. Go to bed tonight knowing that its the tough times that prepare us for the best times. And the tough times teach us to stay up later, get up earlier, and surround ourselves with awesome people!”

— Robert J. Braathe

“Optimism hopes for the best without any guarantee of its arriving and is often no more than whistling in the dark. Christian hope, by contrast, is faith looking ahead to the fulfillment of the promises of God, as when the Anglican burial service inters the corpse 'in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.' Optimism is a wish without warrant; Christian hope is a certainty, guaranteed by God himself. Optimism reflects ignorance as to whether good things will ever actually come. Christian hope expresses knowledge that every day of his life, and every moment beyond it, the believer can say with truth, on the basis of God's own commitment, that the best is yet to come.”

— J.I. Packer

“If one takes meaning into consideration, happiness might best be described as "a zest for life in all its complexity," as Sissela Bok writes in her book. To achieve it means to "attach our lives to something larger than ourselves." To be happy, one must do. It could be something as simple as teaching Sunday school or as grand as leading nonviolent protests. It could be as cerebral as seeking the cure for cancer or as physical as climbing mountains. It could be creating art. And it could be raising a child-my "best piece of poetrie," as Ben Jonson said in his elegy for his seven-year-old son.”

— Jennifer Senior

“We can, and must, develop dialogue and relatedness with our body because it's talking to us all the time. And please remember, your body loves you. It does everything it can to keep you alive and functioning. You can feed it garbage, and it will take it and digest it for you. You can deprive it of sleep, but still it gets you up and running next morning. You can drink too much alcohol, and it will eliminate it from your system. It loves you unconditionally and does its best to allow you to live the life you came here for. The real issue in this relationship is not whether your body loves you, but whether you love your body. In any relationship, if one partner is loving, faithful and supportive, it's easy for the other to take that person for granted. That's what most of us do with our bodies. It is time for you to shift this, and working to understand your cravings is one of the best places to begin. Then you can build a mutually loving relationship with your own body.”

— Joshua Rosenthal

“Life, at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed.”

— Carl Rogers

“The same view you look at every day, the same life, can become something brand new by focusing on its gifts rather than the negative aspects. Perspective is your own choice and the best way to shift that perspective is through gratitude, by acknowledging and appreciating the positives.”

— Bronnie Ware

“If I die tonight it will be with every single thing unfinished (like, I suppose, any other night), and yet, what a gift to die on the verge of tears. I have spent my life trying to understand the way this rock and this ache go together, why a granite peak is more dramatic half dressed in clouds ... ,why sunlight under fog is better than the sum of its parts, why my best days and my worst days are always the same days, why (often) leaving seems like the only solution to the predicament of loving (each other) the world.”

— Pam Houston

“America today is in danger of drifting from its best traditions. We have allowed false prophets of selfishness to obscure our vision. We have grown numb to a creeping cynicism about progress and public life. We crave human connection yet hide behind walls. We worship the money chase yet decry the toll it exacts on us. We allow the market to dominate our lives, relationships, yearnings and aspirations. We indulge in nostalgia and irony and addictive entertainment, then purge from our hearts any true idealism or passion, any notion that being American should mean something more than "everyday low prices" or "every man for himself." In the midst of this dislocation and disorientation, so many Americans today yearn for higher purpose, for calling
for some assurance that life matters. We wish to believe there is more to our days than is revealed on our screens. Make no mistake: this is a spiritual crisis.”

— Eric Liu

“The symbol of the Lotus flower gives a precious teaching that can inspire us to deal with life in the best possible way. Its roots take nourishment from muddy waters and yet bloom in full delicacy and beauty on the surface. Similarly, to have a positive mindset is a beautiful quality; nonetheless to be transformational it needs to be rooted firmly in reality to then blossom with the value which can be created from the muddy problem(s)”

— Dorotea Brandin

“Live a life abundant in love and rich in spirit, these are the seeds of a fulfilling existence. Be the safe harbor you seek in the world. Follow your dreams, not your fear.
Go into the New Year with an open mind and hopeful heart. Don't let the chains of unforgiveness weigh you down. Life is too short to live in a prison of past hurts. The futures is yours for the taking and creating.
Life is bittersweet, when we can let darkness and light co-exist as illumination, we can live in true happiness. When we live life at its best, it is a symphony of feelings, of high and low notes, of tragedy and comedy, love and loss, magic and the sublime. It can be quite a spectacular journey when we fully embrace and accept it.”

— Jaeda DeWalt

“In my late thirties the dream of disappointment and exhaustion had been the dream of the exploding head: the dream of a noise in my head so loud and long that I felt with the brain that survived that the brain could not survive; that this was death. Now, in my early fifties, after my illness, after I had left the manor cottage and put an end to that section of my life, I began to be awakened by thoughts of death, the end of things; and sometimes not even by thoughts so specific, not even by fear rational or fantastic, but by a great melancholy. This melancholy penetrated my mind while I slept; and then, when I awakened in response to its prompting, I was so poisoned by it, made so much not a doer (as men must be, every day of their lives), that it took the best part of the day to shake it off. And that wasted or dark day added to the gloom preparing for the night.”

— V.S. Naipaul

“The best proof adduced of the wretchedness of life is that derived from contemplating its glory.”

— Søren Kierkegaard

“In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are at its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of people be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved integrity. Do not lose your knowledge that our proper estate is an upright posture,
an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it's yours.”

— Ayn Rand

“When I was a child, the lessons my father taught me had been about perseverance, never to accept limitations that stood in my way. As an adult, watching him in his final years, I also saw how to come to terms with limits that couldn't simply be wished away. When to shift from pushing against limits to making the best of them is not often readily apparent. But it is clear that are times when the cost of pushing exceeds its value. Helping my father through the struggle to define that moment was simultaneously among the most painful and most privileged experiences of my life. Part of the way my father handled the limits he faced was by looking at them without illusion. Though his circumstances sometimes got him down, he never pretended they were better than they were. He always understood that life is short and one's place in the world is small. But he also saw himself as a link in a chain of history.”

— Atul Gawande

“You ask yourself: where are your dreams now? And you shake your head and say how swiftly the years fly by! And you ask yourself again: what have you done with your best years, then? Where have you buried the best days of your life? Have you lived or not? Look, you tell yourself, look how cold the world is becoming. The years will pass and after them will come grim loneliness, and old age, quaking on its stick, and after them misery and despair. Your fantasy world will grow pale, your dreams will fade and die, falling away like the yellow leaves from the trees ... Ah, Nastenka! Will it not be miserable to be left alone, utterly alone, and have nothing even to regret - nothing, not a single thing ... because everything I have lost was nothing, stupid, a round zero, all dreaming and no more!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“You can't stop loving or wanting to love because when its right it's the best thing in the world. When you're in a relationship and its good, even if nothing else in your life is right, you feel like your whole world is complete.”

— Keith Sweat

“Since in Heaven we'll finally experience life at its best, it would be more accurate to call our present existence the beforelife rather than to call what follows the afterlife.”

— Randy Alcorn

“Man's best efforts seem utterly fallible without appeal to something higher for justification, some conceptual support for the meaning of one's life from a transcendental dimension of some kind. As this belief has to absorb man's basic terror, it cannot be merely abstract but must be rooted in the emotions, in an inner feeling that one is secure in something stronger, larger, more important than one's own strength and life. It is as though one were to say: "My life pulse ebbs, I fade away into oblivion, but "God" (or "It) remains, even grows more glorious with and through my living sacrifice." At least, this feeling is belief at its most effective for the individual.”

— Ernest Becker

“We love a saint, though he has many personal failings. There is no perfection here. In some, rash anger prevails; in some, inconstancy; in some, too much love of the world. A saint in this life is like gold in the ore, much dross of infirmity cleaves to him, yet we love him for the grace that is in him. A saint is like a fair face with a scar: we love the beautiful face of holiness, though there be a scar in it. The best emerald has its blemishes, the brightest stars their twinklings, and the best of the saints have their failings. You that cannot love another because of his infirmities, how would you have God love you?”

— Thomas Watson

“My dear friend, what is this our life? A boat that swims in the sea, and all one knows for certain about it is that one day it will capsize. Here we are, two good old boats that have been faithful neighbors, and above all your hand has done its best to keep me from "capsizing"! Let us then continue our voyage-each for the other's sake, for a long time yet, a long time! We should miss each other so much! Tolerably calm seas and good winds and above all sun-what I wish for myself, I wish for you, too, and am sorry that my gratitude can find expression only in such a wish and has no influence at all on wind or weather!”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“If my life had to be a song I would name it, 'Live every day like its your best day ever', because it pretty much is.”

— Haley Reinhart

“My extensive career, with its victories and defeats, championships, etc., has been well documented. My entire life has been focused on being the best race car driver I can be.”

— Scott Pruett

“To break up the superstition and worship of legality should be our aim. Nothing would please me more than to see Inspector Heat and his likes take to shooting us down in broad daylight with the approval of the public. Half our battle would be won then; the desintegration of the old morality would have set in in its very temple. That is what you ought to aim at. But you revolutionists will never understand that. You plan the future, you lose yourselves in reveries of economical systems derived from what is; where as what's wanted is a clean sweep and a clear start for a new conception of life. That sort of future will take care of itself if you will only make room for it. Therefore I would shovel my stuff in heaps at the corners of the streets if I had enough for that; and as I haven't, I do my best by perfecting a really dependable detonator.”

— Joseph Conrad

“Every act has both good and evil results. Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, toward the harmonious relationships that come from compassion with suffering, from understanding the other person.”

— Joseph Campbell

“Of this our true individual life, our present life is a glimpse, a fragment, a hint, and in its best moments a visible beginning.”

— Josiah Royce

“The cathedral, at its noblest, is the best outward symbol of the spiritual nature of man, as it is also the most suggestive measure and prophecy of the corporate life of man.”

— Jenkin Lloyd Jones

“Fear is the greatest form of oppression.
The best way to rise up in protest is to live your life to
its fullest!”

— Megan McCafferty

“But life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

“We often pity the poor, because they have no leisure to mourn their departed relatives, and necessity obliges them to labor through their severest afflictions: but is not active employment the best remedy for overwhelming sorrow
the surest antidote for despair? It may be a rough comforter: it may seem hard to be harassed with the cares of life when we have no relish for its enjoyments; to be goaded to labor when the heart is ready to break, and the vexed spirit implores for rest only to weep in silence: but is not labor better than the rest we covet? and are not those petty, tormenting cares less hurtful than a continual brooding over the great affliction that oppresses us? Besides, we cannot have cares, and anxieties, and toil, without hope
if it be but the hope of fulfilling our joyless task, accomplishing some needful project, or escaping some further annoyance.”

— Anne Brontë

“Happiness is created and not found, it's a state of mind and in its best form, it stands independent of life circumstances.”

— Jaeda DeWalt

“In theory, I would like to lead a transparent life. I wold like my life to be as clear as a new pane of glass, without anything shameful and no dark shadows. I would like that. But if I am completely honest, I have to acknowledge secrets too painful to even tell myself. There are things I consider in the deep dark of night, secret terrors. Why are they secrets? I could easily tell either of my parents how I feel, but what would they say? Don't worry, darling, we will do our best never to die? We will never ever leave you, never contract cancer or walk in front of a bus or collapse of old age? We will not leave you alone, not ever, to navigate the world and all of its complexities without us?”

— Meg Rosoff

“Best listened to in a windowless room, better than best in an airless room-correctly speaking, a bunker sealed forever and enwrapped in tree-roots-the Eighth String Quartet of Shostakovich (Opus 110) is the living corpse of music, perfect in its horror. Call it the simultaneous asphyxiation and bleeding of melody. The soul strips itself of life in a dusty room.”

— William T. Vollmann

“Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, who, with bleeding hands and hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time.”

— Richard Huelsenbeck

“To describe heaven it is not necessary to transport the materials of earth there. One must leave earth & its materials where they are, so as to beautify life with its ideal. To address Elohim familiarly is an unseemly buffoonery. The best way of showing him gratitude is not by yelling in his ears that he is mighty, that he created the world, that we are wormlets compared to his greatness. He knows it better than we. Men may excuse themselves of informing him of that. The best way of showing him gratitude is to console humanity, to restore all to it, take it by the hand & treat it like a brother. This is more genuine.”

— Comte De Lautréamont

“Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles
In children's circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books,
But time has set its maggot on their track.
Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
What's never known is safest in this life.
Under the skysigns they have no arms
Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.”

— Dylan Thomas

“Thus the growing complications of our everyday life, which might have been an affliction, proved to be a blessing in disguise. Indeed, had not the epidemic, as already mentioned, spread its ravages, all would have been for the best.”

— Albert Camus

“Sometimes I think no matter how one is born, no matter how one acts, there is something out of gear with one somewhere, and that must be changed. Life at its best is a grand corrective.”

— Jessie Redmon Fauset

“The national park idea has been nurtured by each succeeding generation of Americans. Today, across our land, the National Park System represents America at its best. Each park contributes to a deeper understanding of the history of the United States and our way of life; of the natural processes which have given form to our land, and to the enrichment of the environment in which we live.”

— George B. Hartzog, Jr.

“At this point the self has obviously outworn its function; it is no longer needed or useful, and life can go on without it. we are ready to move on, to go beyond the self, beyond even its most intimate union with God, and this is where we enter yet another new life- a life best categorized, perhaps, as a life without a self.”

— Bernadette Roberts

“Generally speaking, an Indian university must regard itself as one of the living organs of national reconstruction. It must discover the best means of blending together both the spiritual and the material aspects of life. It must equip its alumni irrespective of caste, creed or sex, with individual fitness, not for its own sake, not for merely adorning varied occupations and professions, but in order to teach them how to merge their individuality in the common cause of advancing the progress and prosperity of their motherland and upholding the highest traditions of human civilisation.”

— Syama Prasad Mukherjee

“If I could get the ear of every young man but for one word, it would be this: make the most and best of yourself. There is no tragedy like a wasted life
a life failing of its true end, and turned to a false end.”

— Thornton T. Munger

“Time ripens the substance of a life as the seasons mellow and perfect its fruits. The best apples fall latest and keep longest.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“We have a right to expect that the best trained, the best educated men on the Pacific slope, the Rocky Mountains, and great plains States will take the lead in the preservation and right use of forests, in securing the right use of waters, and in seeing that our land policy is not twisted from its original purpose, but is perpetuated by amendment, by change when such change is necessary in the life of that purpose, the purpose being to turn the public domain into farms each to be the property of the man who actually tills it and makes his home in it.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

“The best methods are those which help the life energy to
resume its inner work of healing”

— Paramahansa Yogananda

“I simply accept that technology is stronger and more powerful than me: it works when it wants to, and when it doesn't its best to go for a walk, and just wait until the cables and telephone links are in a better mood and the computer decides to work again. I am not, I have discovered, my computers master: it has a life of its own.”

— Paulo Coelho

“Anxiety is the rust of life, destroying its brightness and weakening its power. A childlike and abiding trust in Providence is its best preventive and remedy.”

— Tryon Edwards

“Love doesn't have to be perfect. Even perfect, it is still the best thing there is, for the simple reason that it is the most common and constant truth of all, of all life, all law and order, the very thing which holds everything together, which permits everything to move along in time and be its wonderful or ordinary self.”

— William Saroyan

“Here life itself, life at its best and healthiest, awaits the caprice of the bullet. Let us see the development of the day. All else may stand over, perhaps for ever. Existence is never so sweet as when it is at hazard.”

— Winston Churchill