Life Blocks Quotes

“One of the Secrets in Life is to Make Stepping Stones out of Stumbling Blocks.”

— Jack Penn

“The result of mindful awareness is the development of our virtues, which are the basic positive building blocks of our life.”

— Janet Gallagher Nestor

“When you're born a light is switched on, a light which shines up through your life. As you get older the light still reaches you, sparkling as it comes up through your memories. And if you're lucky as you travel forward through time, you'll bring the whole of yourself along with you, gathering your skirts and leaving nothing behind, nothing to obscure the light. But if a Bad Thing happens part of you is seared into place, and trapped for ever at that time. The rest of you moves onward, dealing with all the todays and tomorrows, but something, some part of you, is left behind. That part blocks the light, colours the rest of your life, but worse than that, it's alive. Trapped for ever at that moment, and alone in the dark, that part of you is still alive.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

“To be conservative in politics is to take one's bearings not from the latest bright idea about how to make a better world, but by looking carefully at what the past reveals both about the kind of people we are and the problems that concern us. As we get older, we often become conservative in our habits, in our family practices, and in our recognition of the richness of our civilization, but this evolution of our character into a set of habits in no way blocks adventurousness. The old no less than the young may be found starting new enterprises, sailing around the world, and solving arcane academic questions. But it is in the ordinary business of life that we find our excitement, not in foolish collective dreams of political perfection.”

— Kenneth Minogue

“Life is going to throw you some blocks. You will decide if they are going to be your stumbling blocks or your building blocks”

— Saji Ijiyemi

“Alas! Alas! Life is full of disappointments; as one reaches one ridge there is always another and a higher one beyond which blocks the view.”

— Fridtjof Nansen

“The only thing you have to know is that opening allows energy in, and closing blocks it out. Now you have to decide whether or not you want this energy. How high do you want to get? How much love do you want to feel? How much enthusiasm do you want to have for the things you do? If enjoying a full life means experiencing high energy, love, and enthusiasm all the time, then don't ever close.”

— Michael A. Singer

“BOB DIAMOND: "Being from earth as you are and using as little of your brain as you do, your life has pretty much been devoted to dealing with fear.
DAN MILLER: "It has?"
BOB DIAMOND: "Everybody on earth deals with fear. That's what little brains do."
BOB DIAMOND: "Did you ever have friends whose stomach hurt?"
DAN MILLER: "Every one of them."
BOB DIAMOND: "It's fear. Fear is like a giant fog. It sits on your brain and blocks everything. Real feeling, true happiness, real joy, they can't get through that fog. But you lift it and buddy you're in for the ride of your life."
(From the movie 'Defending Your Life')”

— Alex Pattakos

“Did you know that the fundamental building blocks of life are not cells, are not DNA are not even carbon but language yeah 'cause DNA is just a four-character language and binary code is a two-character language and what these languages are saying is the very act of revealing, so you reach an X-point when language attains a level of complexity where it begins to fold in upon itself trying to understand itself and this is sentience. Did you know that the entire Library of Congress can be encoded in our DNA because all you have to do is translate a binary system into a four-character system to where you can decode the genes like you're searching a microfiche and if you were to genetically engineer the corpus of human knowledge into our DNA then we'd be able to genetically pass the entire library along from generation to generation like frickin' disease, man.”

— Ryan Boudinot

“When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.”

— Carl Sagan

“I don't want to be alone," she whispered. "You won't be, through any of this." "It feels very alone. Death is like a cloud coming near that shadows and blocks the color from life." "I'll be here, Rae. Whatever you need. And God promised He would never leave you. He meant it. For the rest of eternity you will never be alone.”

— Dee Henderson

“How good it felt to be alone, stacking blocks. That's what came to him again, a kind of weight solidifying in his chest: how much he had loved to be alone - to be outside of his own life, a giant, sentient cloud looming over his imaginary city, hovering above it. There was a certain kind of blank omniscience that felt like his true self, at last.”

— Dan Chaon

“We shot 'Dharma & Greg' six blocks from my house for five years. I had a Dodge Durango that I sold after five years, and it only had like 12,000 miles on it. My whole life was within eight square blocks of my house. There was a golf course across the street. In my downtime, I was on the driving range.”

— Joel Murray

“All the way down the creek, perched in the windows of the office blocks and department stores, the iguanas watched them go past, their hard frozen heads jerking stiffly ... Without the reptiles, the lagoons and the creeks of office blocks half-submerged in the immense heat would have had a strange dream-like beauty, but the iguanas and basilisks brought the fantasy down to earth. As their seats in the one-time board-rooms indicated, the reptiles had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant form of life.”

— J.G. Ballard

“My mother's desire to reach those waves, touch her feet to another ocean on the other side of the country, was all she was thinking of
the pure baptismal goal of it. Whoosh and you can start all over again. Or was life more like the horrible game in gym that has you running from one side of an enclosed space to another, picking up and setting down wooden blocks without end?”

— Alice Sebold

“As my mind can conceive of more good, the barriers and blocks dissolve. My life becomes full of little miracles popping up out of the blue.”

— Louise L. Hay

“Every Maryland family wants financial security, schools that work, quality healthcare, safer neighborhoods, and ever-expanding economic opportunity. These are the building blocks of a superior quality of life.”

— Bob Ehrlich

“Charles Darwin's only mistake was in not being a physicist, because the entire process of evolution started before our planet formed, with the event called the big bang, at this point our knowledge is such that I can hazard this further observation, all of the building blocks of life started at that moment, and that is how far we can back track this process of evolution.”

— Steve Merrick

“A few Paris blocks away I led a completely normal life with my sister & grandparents. And here I was sword fighting with dead guys.”

— Amy Plum

“For someone like me who's lived in the same place her whole life - I mean, I lived three blocks from where I was born, and I met my future husband in the eighth grade - there are always family stories and legends passed down.”

— Susan Straight

“Sorel's basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy. It was as good as sealing yourself into a dungeon. Walled in, with nowhere to go but your own doom.
Walls.
A world completely surrounded by walls.”

— Haruki Murakami

“Human settlements are like living organisms. They must grow, and they will change. But we can decide on the nature of that growth - on the quality and the character of it - and where it ought to go. We don't have to scatter the building blocks of our civic life all over the countryside, destroying our towns and ruining farmland.”

— James Howard Kunstler

“Most of the time, people look at a piece of art online when it is just a few blocks from their house. Changing the way you walk home everyday fills life with surprises.”

— JR

“She lived just three blocks away, in a faded brick building whose limitations and malfunctions she'd come to understand as the texture of her life, to be distinguished from a normal day's complaints.”

— Don DeLillo

“If you experience any emotion like frustration, hesitation or anger, while planning your dream life , means you need to clear some mental blocks.”

— Hina Hashmi

“In the production of a good play with a good cast and a knowing director a kind of banding-together occurs; there is formed a fraternity whose members share a mutual sense of destiny. In these five blocks, where the rapping of the tap-dancer's feet and the bawling of the phonographs in the record-shop mix with the roar of the Broadway traffic; where the lonely, the perverted, and the lost wander like souls in Dante's hell and the life of the spirit seems impossible, there are still little circles of actors in the dead silence of empty theaters, with a director in their center, and a new creation of life taking place”

— Arthur Miller

“When somebody follows you 20 blocks to the pharmacy, where they watch you buy toilet paper, you know your life has changed.”

— Jennifer Aniston

“It's fear. Fear is like a giant fog. It sits on your brain and blocks everything. Real feeling, true happiness, real joy, they can't get through that fog. But you lift it and buddy you're in for the ride of your life.”

— Albert Brooks

“What's important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision that the commission made up. It's up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that.”

— Cheryl Strayed

“Remember the importance of small actions. They're the building blocks in the architecture of your life, the quiet victories you win for yourself each day.”

— Diane Dreher

“The AXA and New York Life settlements are important building blocks not only toward seeking financial recovery for the losses resulting from the Armenian Genocide but also in our ultimate goal, which is for Turkey and the US to officially acknowledge the genocide.”

— Mark Geragos

“What do little kids do? They crawl on the floor and they build with blocks. I just continued to do that for the rest of my life.”

— Carl Andre

“Your words are building blocks of which you construct your life and future.”

— Charles Capps

“Our time here on the earth is short, and our chance to make a difference is tiny. For me the grinding blocks of history came together in such a way that I was able to take what fragile defense I had and hold in place for seventy-six days. If I was able to give much it was only because I had some useful things from my life to give. I am a hotel manager ... my job never changed, even in a sea of fire.”

— Paul Rusesabagina

“The myth of self-sufficiency blinds us to the workings of other forces in family life. For families are not now, nor were they ever, the self-sufficient building blocks of society, exclusively responsible, praiseworthy, and blamable for their own destiny. They are deeply influenced by broad social and economic forces over which they have little control.”

— Kenneth Keniston

“A grass blade believes that men build palaces for it to grow in. Grass wedges its way between the closest blocks of marble and it brings them down. This power of feeble life which can creep in anywhere is greater than that of the mighty behind their cannons.”

— Honore De Balzac

“The vast silence of Buddha overtakes
and overrules the oncoming roar
of tragic life that fills alleys and avenues;
it blocks the way of pedicabs, police, convoys.”

— Denise Levertov

“Fiction
at least for me
requires long, relatively uninterrupted time stretches in which to bring it to fruition. I've never been a two-hour-in-the-morning writer, who could put in another six hours on Sunday afternoon. For me, a novel requires weeks of living in a largely mental and wholly internal landscape. Everything else has to be relegated to the odd hour here, the bit of time there. Sadly, however, uninterrupted time blocks are not what life doles out today to any of us with regularity.”

— Samuel R. Delany

“Each and every incomplete thing in your life or work exerts a draining force on you, sucking the energy of accomplishment and success out of you as surely as a vampire stealing your blood. Every incomplete promise, commitment and agreement saps your strength, because it blocks your momentum, inhibits your ability to move forward, to progress and improve. Incomplete things keep calling you back to the past to take care of them.”

— Jeff Olson

“For decades, we've been trying to cook up the building blocks of life, in the lab, and recreate the origins of it all, but the parts didn't seem to fit together, until now.”

— Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“To make every little thing special is to grant a magical quality to your life. Once your life becomes charmed in such a way, whatever blocks you may have experienced in the past melt in the light of that inner energy pouring from your heart. From a businessman's point of view, this is beautiful, for everything you touch turns to gold. Further, it helps you to believe in yourself. In seeing worth all around, you make your every act an affirmation of your strength.”

— Stuart Wilde

“While non of us understands the Grand Design, we can commit to using all our experiences, good or bad, as the building blocks of a powerful and loving life. Then it is, indeed, all happening perfectly.”

— Susan Jeffers

“The world has so many lessons to teach you. I consider the world, our earth, to be like a school, and our life, the classrooms. Sometimes on our planet life school, the lessons often come dressed up as detours and road blocks and sometimes as full blown crises. And the secret I've learned to getting ahead is being open to the lessons.”

— Oprah Winfrey

“There was our house in New Orleans. Two blocks in front of us were these beautiful mansions and two blocks behind us were the ghetto, projects, and that's where I had to go to school, but I would always pattern my life looking forward. It was almost literal.”

— Tyler Perry

“I think creative blocks come from people's life journeys. If you don't know who you are or what you're about or what you believe in it's really pretty impossible to be creative.”

— Rainn Wilson

“Laziness is the one common deficiency in mankind that blocks the establishment of a perfect world in which everyone leads a happy life.”

— William Feather

“I am happy with my past, my present and my future. All three are miraculous building blocks of my beloved, wonderful life.”

— Robert Muller