Life In Motion Quotes

“A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

“The best teachers have showed me that things have to be done bit by bit. Nothing that means anything happens quickly
we only think it does. The motion of drawing back a bow and sending an arrow straight into a target takes only a split second, but it is a skill many years in the making. So it is with a life, anyone's life. I may list things that might be described as my accomplishments in these few pages, but they are only shadows of the larger truth, fragments separated from the whole cycle of becoming. And if I can tell an old-time story now about a man who is walking about, waudjoset ndatlokugan, a forest lodge man, alesakamigwi udlagwedewugan, it is because I spent many years walking about myself, listening to voices that came not just from the people but from animals and trees and stones.”

— Joseph Bruchac

“The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibilities or aspirations.  He wishes and longs as earnestly as ever to realize what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of power to attempt.  He lies under the weight of incubus and nightmare; he lies in sight of all that he would fain perform, just as a man forcibly confined to his bed by the mortal languor of a relaxing disease, who is compelled to witness injury or outrage offered to some object of his tenderest love: he curses the spells which chain him down from motion; he would lay down his life if he might but get up and walk; but he is powerless as an infant, and cannot even attempt to rise. I”

— Thomas De Quincey

“I've since come to believe that the world is populated by multitudes of women sitting at windows, inseparable from their surroundings. I myself spent many hours at a window on the Zattere, waiting for my father's return, waiting for my life to appear like one of those great ships that came into the harbor, broad sails filled with the wind of providence ... I'd grown transparent as the glass through which I peered, dangerously invisible even to myself. It was then I knew I must set my life in motion or I would disappear.”

— Regina O'Melveny

“This beginning motion, this first time when a sail truly filled and the boat took life and knifed across the lake under perfect control, this was so beautiful it stopped my breath ...”

— Gary Paulsen

“Outside the seasons passed: sun, snow, spring green, October storms ... was this a vision of my future? When would the shunning hero come, to set the clock if my life in motion again? Would he come some morning, or in the night? In April or December? This year? Next year? I shuddered. No, I wouldn't just sit and wait. I wanted to go out. 
Maybe there were new men out there, better men, men who'd just been waiting for me. Somewhere someone is always waiting for someone.”

— Eva Heller

“Life
luscious wet life bereft of
death, loss of empty shell
minus absent of nothing
exploding star cell
amoeba sweet algae
oxygen,
hydrogen flowering
in the vacuum of
space and magnetic motion.”

— H. Raven Rose

“One nice thing about heaven is that you can relive all your favorite moments and memories pretty much as many times as you want-sort of like a DVD of your whole life. Pause, rewind, fast-forward, slowwww motion, all day, every day.”

— Jess Rothenberg

“You simply will not be the same person two months from now after consciously giving thanks each day for the abundance that exists in your life. And you will have set in motion an ancient spiritual law: the more you have and are grateful for, the more will be given you”

— Sarah Ban Breathnach

“My senses are consumed by their chatter, the sound of sneakers on the floor, laughter. These people are always in motion, always full of a life I lack, no matter how much I pretend.”

— Kelsey Sutton

“There are only a few reasons why Delores Warren would want to talk to me at this point in my life. None of them are pleasant.
I motion toward my office. "Come on in."
This is how it must feel to invite a vampire into your house.”

— Emma Chase

“What are we?" he asked. "Why, we are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts. Creation turns in its abyss. We have bothered it, dreaming ourselves to shapes. The void is filled with slumbers; ten billion on a billion on a billion bombardments of light and material that know not themselves, that sleep moving and move but finally to make an eye and waken on themselves. Among so much that is flight and ignorance, we are the blind force that gropes like Lazarus from a billion-light-year tomb. We summon ourselves. We say, O Lazarus Life Force, truly come ye forth. So the Universe, a motion of deaths, fumbles to reach across Time to feel its own flesh and know it to be ours. We touch both ways and find each other miraculous because we are One.”

— Ray Bradbury

“She took another step. The simple motion of her moving leg was like a dance, the unexaggerated shifting of her hip entrancing as a fire. The arch of her bare foot said more of sex than anything I'd seen in my young life.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

“Without a purpose, life is motion without meaning, activity without direction and events without reason. Without a purpose life is trivial, petty, and pointless.”

— Rick Warren

“The Historian and the Man of Science alike may be said to traffic with the dead. Cuvier has imparted flesh and motion and appetites to the defunct Megatherium, whilst the living ears of M.M. Michelet and Renan, of Mr. Carlyle and the Brothers Grimm, have heard the bloodless cries of the vanished and given them voices. I myself, with the aid of the imagination, have worked a little in that line, have ventriloquised, have lent my voice to, and mixt my life with, those past voices and lives whose resuscitation in our own lives as warnings, as examples, as the life of the past persisting in us, is the business of every thinking man and woman.”

— A.S. Byatt

“I understood that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-changed.”

— Patti Smith

“Robert had little patience with these introspective bouts of mine. He never seemed to question his artistic drives, and by his example, I understood that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-charged.”

— Patti Smith

“It is through action that you set the wheels of life in motion to get what you want and be who you want to be.”

— Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

“All religions are branches of one big tree. It doesn't matter what you call Him just as long as you call. Just as cinematic images appear to be real but are only combinations of light and shade, so is the universal variety a delusion. The planetary spheres, with their countless forms of life, are naught but figures in a cosmic motion picture. One's values are profoundly changed when he is finally convinced that creation is only a vast motion picture and that not in, but beyond, lies his own ultimate reality.”

— George Harrison

“You've already decided what you're going to do, and all that's left is to set the wheels in motion. I mean, it's your life. Basically, you gotta go with what you think is right.”

— Haruki Murakami

“Exercise is life in motion. MOVE to LIVE!”

— Toni Sorenson

“Start changing your reality today by setting your desires in motion by connecting to the heart consciousness - mould your life to suit what you want to experience.”

— Steven Redhead

“Life is a physics problem. Bodies in motion.”

— Robin Wasserman

“Our minds, like our bodies, are in continual flux; something is hourly lost, and something acquired ... Do not suffer life to stagnate; it will grow muddy for want of motion: commit yourself again to the current of the world.”

— Samuel Johnson

“Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.”

— Samuel Johnson

“Stop-motion is sort of twitchy; you can feel the life in it. If we were to remove that completely, there'd be no point in it.”

— Henry Selick

“Now air is the cause and spirit of every life and motion in the world, be it in flesh or in any of the vegetables; all whatever is hath its life from the air, and nothing whatsoever that moveth and is in this world can subsist without air.”

— Jakob Bohme

“Kendra stared out the side window of the SUV, watching foliage blur past. When the flurry of motion became too much, she looked up ahead and fixed her gaze on a particular tree, following it as it slowly approached, streaked past, and then gradually receded behind her. Was life like that? You could look ahead to the future or back at the past, but the present moved too quickly to absorb. Maybe sometimes. Not today. Today they were driving along an endless two-lane highway through the forested hills of Connecticut.”

— Brandon Mull

“Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion, and he whose real wants are supplied must admit those of fancy.”

— Samuel Johnson

“Comedians are sociologists. We're pointing out stuff that the general public doesn't even stop to think about, looking at life in slow-motion and questioning everything we see.”

— Steven Wright

“Suddenly I realized that a cell's life is controlled by the physical and energetic environment and not by its genes. Genes are simply molecular blueprints used in the construction of cells, tissues, and organs. The environment serves as a "contractor" who reads and engages those genetic blueprints and is ultimately responsible for the character of a cell's life. It is a single cell's "awareness" of the environment, not its genes, that sets into motion the mechanisms of life.”

— Bruce H. Lipton

“When you become successful in any type of life, there are people who are not contributing to the motion.”

— Tom Cruise

“Until now I have never really lived! Life on earth is a creeping, crawling business. It is in the air that one feels the glory of being a man and of conquering the elements. There is an exquisite smoothness of motion and the joy of gliding through space. It is wonderful!”

— Gabriele D'Annunzio

“A myth is a fantasy, a preferred lie, a foundational story, a hypnotic trance, an identity game, a virtual reality, one that can be either inspirational or despairing. It is a story in which I cast myself; it is my inner cinema, the motion picture of my inner reality - one that moves all the time. No diagnosis can fix the myth, no cure can settle it, because our inner life is precisely what, in us, will not lie still.”

— Ginette Paris

“I tell you to keep going, not because it's easy. Not because it doesn't hurt. I tell you to keep going because there's no other way. To stop is to die. Life is in motion. In growth. In change. Life is in seeking and in finding. Life is in redemption. Each moment is a new birth. A new chance to come back, to get it right.
A new chance to make it better.”

— Yasmin Mogahed

“There is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest, for there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.”

— Christopher Smart

“Ancient poets and sages have called the earth the mother of all things. They could hardly have chosen a more attractive name, or one that was more appropriate. From her lap springs everything that possesses life and motion, everything that flourishes, fades, and has its fated day, and she tirelessly provides material for the countless varied bodies that are created
and then abandoned
by the life force in its unending, hidden progress through nature.”

— Jonas Hallgrimsson

“The ability to portray people in still life and in motion requires the highest measure of intuition and talent.”

— Albert Einstein

“I've always had two principles throughout all my life in motion-pictures: never do before the camera what you would not do at home and never do at home what you would not do before the camera.”

— Evelyn Waugh

“Understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change.”

— Robert Charles Wilson