Life Worth Living Quotes

“It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.”

— Stephen Fry

“It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

“Wounds heal. Scars fade. Awful memories can be overwritten with better ones if given the chance. The little imperfections of our psyches become overshadowed by the people whose love we cherish because they cherish us despite our faults; physical, emotional, spiritual, or otherwise. This thing we call the human condition with all its bittersweet blind corners and senseless humor evolves from within ourselves and not because of some pre-ordained reverie we desire to cast in the constellations.
All in all it is what makes life worth living.”

— August Clearwing

“It's not arrogant to say that you can't figure out the answers to the universe with your internal faith. It's not arrogant to know that there's no omniscient, omnipotent prime mover in the universe who loves you personally. It's not sad to feel that life and the love of your real friends and family is more than enough to make life worth living. Isn't it much sadder to feel that there is a more important love required than the love of the people who have chosen to spend their limited time with you?”

— Penn Jillette

“Is life worth living simply because you live, or is it worth more if you make life happen?”

— Jaycee Dugard

“When it comes down to it; it was never the fortune, the fame, the glory, the things and possessions that one accumulates during ones lifetime, but rather the people. It was the people that made the difference in your life, the people who lent a hand when one was needed, the people who were there when others weren't, the people that stood by you in the best of times and the worst, the people who you could laugh with, and the people you could cry with. In the end it's about these individuals. It's these people who make life worth living, and these people which cherish, represent, and define you the most.”

— Brett Jackson

“Mistakes can be very beautiful. Mistakes lead to surprises. Even joy. And joy makes life worth living.”

— Ryan Winfield

“The dedicated life is the life worth living. You must give with your whole heart.”

— Annie Dillard

“May you listen to the voice within the beat even when you are tired. When you feel yourself breaking down, may you break open instead. May every experience in life be a door that opens your heart, expands your understanding, and leads you to freedom. If you are weary, may you be aroused by passion and purpose. If you are blameful and bitter, may you be sweetened by hope and humor. If you are frightened, may you be emboldened by a big consciousness far wiser than your fear. If you are lonely, may you find love, may you find friendship. If you are lost, may you understand that we are all lost, and still we are guided-by Strange Angels and Sleeping Giants, by our better and kinder natures, by the vibrant voice within the beat. May you follow that voice, for This is the way-the hero's journey, the life worth living, the reason we are here.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

“It is the encounters with people that make life worth living.”

— Guy De Maupassant

“The only thing that makes life worth living is the possibility of experiencing now and then a perfect moment. And perhaps even more than that, it's having the ability to recall such moments in their totality, to contemplate them like jewels.”

— Paul Bowles

“And keep in mind that the you that makes life worthy of living today won't be the same you that makes life worth living this time next year. Identities aren't meant to be permanent. They're like cars: they take us from one place to another. We work, travel, and seek adventure in them until they break down beyond repair. At that point, living well means finding a new model that better suits us for a new moment.”

— Kate Bornstein

“You can have great autonomy in the things you choose to learn and pursue on your own time. When you're learning things that interest you, challenge you, and make life worth living, getting an education can be blissful and stimulating.”

— Kate Bornstein

“Death is not the ultimate tragedy of life. The ultimate tragedy is depersonalization
dying in an alien and sterile area, separated from the spiritual nourishment that comes from being able to reach out to a loving hand, separated from the desire to experience the things that make life worth living, separated from hope.”

— Norman Cousins

“Love makes life worth living, not money”

— Giovanna Fletcher

“Somentimes challenging and different and risky is what makes life worth living.”

— Jennifer Archer

“Solitude is a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.”

— Coleman Barks

“The only life worth living is the one we take responsibility for choosing.”

— Alexandra Stoddard

“But, back of this, still broods silently the deep religious feeling of the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and are seeking in the great night a new religious ideal. Some day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of 10,000,000 souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living - Liberty, Justice and Right - is marked "For White People Only".”

— W.E.B. Du Bois

“In the horrible places, the battle for control escalates until you get tied down or locked into your Geri-chair or chemically subdued with psychotropic medications. In the nice ones, a staff member cracks a joke, wags an affectionate finger, and takes your brownie stash away. In almost none does anyone sit down with you and try to figure out what living a life really means to you under the circumstances, let alone help you make a home where that life becomes possible. This is the consequence of a society that faces the final phase of the human life cycle by trying not to think about it. We end up with institutions that address any number of societal goals-from freeing up hospital beds to taking burdens off families' hands to coping with poverty among the elderly-but never the goal that matters to the people who reside in them: how to make life worth living when we're weak and frail and can't fend for ourselves anymore.”

— Atul Gawande

“Self-doubt was a luxury, as, perhaps, was the examined life. And yet the examined life, as the adage had it, was the only life worth living.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

“Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink. Get to San Francisco. Get to San Francisco in defiance of your geography, your ancestry and the lonely change rattling sad excuses in your pocket. Fuel up on pie and diner coffee and mystic visions and the freedom of not knowing what's coming next except that you're burning the road to outrun it.”

— Jack Kerouac

“Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living.”

— T.S. Eliot

“If we were always given a choice as to every path presented us in life, a multitude of roads leading to priceless treasures would forever go untraveled.
Be grateful for your adversities.
From toil and triumph evolves a life worth living."
-from "Brahna A'Mahr”

— Richelle E. Goodrich

“And so the great battle begins in earnest: the battle for your heart, the battle to find a life worth living, the battle not to lose heart as you find a life worth living.”

— John Eldredge

“A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.”

— James Broughton

“Uncertainty doesn't make life worth living, quite, but it does make striving and gambling worth attempting.”

— Walter Kirn

“Imagine choosing a job not on money or even on career advancement, but as part of a life worth living.”

— Dale Dauten

“By half-past one the last drop of pleasure had evaporated, leaving nothing but headaches. We perceived that we were not splendid inhabitants of a splendid world, but a crew of underpaid workmen grown squalidly and dismally drunk. We went on swallowing the wine, but it was only from habit, and the stuff seemed suddenly nauseating ...
Most of my Saturday nights went in this way. On the whole, the two hours when one was perfectly and wildly happy seemed worth the subsequent headache. For many men in the quarter, unmarried and with no future to think of, the weekly drinking-bout was the one thing that made life worth living.”

— George Orwell

“Without being aware, I think I was being indoctrinated into what was called Vitalism, the idea that what makes life worth living, the good life, consists of accepting challenges, solving problems, discovery, personal growth, personal change.”

— Edmund Phelps

“An orgasm is like the big bang, the explosion that creates life and makes life worth living.”

— Chloe Thurlow

“Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.”

— Gustave Flaubert

“So far as he was concerned, this had been a bang-up night. Dynamite, a nice brawl, free brandy, and getting to scare the piss out of someone. It was the simple things that made his life worth living.”

— Brandon Sanderson

“No victory is irreversible, no defeat is definitive. That is what makes life worth living.”

— Leszek Kolakowski

“Free will," she agreed, "our greatest gift, the thing that makes life worth living, in spite of all the anguish it brings.”

— Dean Koontz

“Progress, in the sense of acquisition, is something; but progress in the sense of being, is a great deal more. To grow higher, deeper, wider, as the years go on; to conquer difficulties, and acquire more and more power; to feel all one's faculties unfolding, and truth descending into the soul,
this makes life worth living.”

— James Freeman Clarke

“This is the only thing that makes life worth living. If you have succeeded in doing something you wanted to do, something that seemed impossible-well, then, make the most of it, with all your heart, to the very brim.”

— Ivan Turgenev

“A few years ago I wrote two versions of my obituary, the one I wanted and the one I was heading for. They were very different. I realized I needed to make some big changes if I was going to look back and be proud of my life. I am making those changes, and now I have a life worth living.”

— Roz Savage

“If we fail to nourish our souls, they wither, and without soul, life ceases to have meaning ... The creative process shrivels in the absence of continual dialogue with the soul. And creativity is what makes life worth living.”

— Marion Woodman

“I can't say this too often - that a little humor can make life worth living. That has always been my credo. Somebody once asked me, 'What would you like your epitaph to be?' I've always said that I'd like it to be: He left people a little happier than they were when he came into the room.”

— Bennett Cerf

“When things get tough, there are two things that make life worth living: Mozart, and quantum mechanics”

— Victor Frederick Weisskopf

“Is life worth living? Aye, with the best of us, Heights of us, depths of us- Life is the test of us!”

— Corinne Roosevelt Robinson

“Friendships, along with love, make life worth living.”

— Mike Krzyzewski

“The arts are what makes life worth living. You've got food, you've got shelter, yeah. But the things that make you laugh, make you cry, make you connect - make you love are communicated through the arts. They aren't extras.”

— Barack Obama

“Desire, both the whispers and the shouts, is the map we have been given to find the only life worth living.”

— John Eldredge

“Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living.”

— Carl Jung

“[For] men to whom nothing seems great but reason ... nature ... is a cosmos, so admirable, that to penetrate to its ways seems to them the only thing that makes life worth living. These are the men whom we see possessed by a passion to learn ... Those are the natural scientific men; and they are the only men that have any real success in scientific research.”

— Charles Sanders Peirce

“I have found that life persists in the midst of destruction and, therefore, there must be a higher law than that of destruction. Only under that law would a well-ordered society be intelligible and life worth living.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

“Leisure consists in all those virtuous activities by which a man grows morally, intellectually, and spiritually. It is that which makes a life worth living.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Between the marketplace and government there exists all of that which makes life worth living-family life, spiritual life, the art and culture that make our spirits soar ...”

— Hillary Clinton