Quotes About Life Wasted

“I'm rambling again. Wandering off the point. But this is the true story of my wasted life ...”

— Mordecai Richler

“Your life is far too valuable to be wasted on the life that everyone else is choosing.”

— Joshua Becker

“People who work out are so gullible. They think they'll live longer. Well, good luck to them. It's a shame most of them aren't bright enough to realise that the extra time added to their life when they're eighty and too old to do anything productive with it is roughly equal to all the time wasted in the gym when they're young and capable of having fun.”

— Toni Jordan

“I'm sorry you don't want to know me anymore. I will spend the rest of my life regretting the fact that I wasted my second chance to know you. And I will always be conscious of your absence.- Gabriel to Julia.”

— Sylvain Reynard

“The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”

— Muhammad Ali

“If I wasted my time worrying, I would be deprived of all the simple joys of life!”

— Jen Selinsky

“I'm sorry, but I have this fear that someday you're going
to
wake up a dried-out, bitter old hag with plenty of science awards
but no personal life whatsoever. And you'll sit there at night and
sob about
how you've wasted your life.”

— Robin Brande

“I don't know why people are so shy about expressing openly in front of the world their longing for each other, the most powerful and tender natural attraction, but they pretend to be proud or indifferent and they don't consider, especially if they're young, that the sands of our life have been measured by God unto the last grain and that every carelessly wasted second of love sinks irreversibly into eternity.”

— Angel Wagenstein

“She laughed for her wasted, difficult life that never had to be wasted or difficult in the first place.”

— Leslye Walton

“Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can't see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by , and nothing is done. It isn't as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn't: it's just a waste.”

— Philip Larkin

“He believed that he must, that he could and would recover the good things, the happy things, the easy tranquil things of life. He had made mistakes, but he could overlook these. He had been a fool, but that could be forgiven. The time wasted
must be relinquished. What else could one do about it? Things were too complex, but they might be reduced to simplicity again. Recovery was possible.”

— Saul Bellow

“He'd wasted his entire life. Such people were very dear to those of us who'd only wasted a few years.”

— Denis Johnson

“Silence.
What's this what's this oh my god can a men ever get lower can a man ever be less?
Weariness and gasping convulsive exhaustion. All life dead all life wasted and becoming nothing less than nothing only the germ of nothing. A kind of sickness that comes from shame. A weakness like dying weakness and faintness and a prayer. God give me rest take me away hide me let me die oh god how weary how much already dead how much gone and going oh god hide me and give me peace.”

— Dalton Trumbo

“This is my fear, of a life wasted, of a cause misbegotten, of a belief that is, in the end, an empty and unattainable ideal, the foolish designs of an innocent child who believed there could be more.”

— R.A. Salvatore

“What is a life?" Scapegrace continued. "Is life merely living? Is it having a heartbeat? Or is life the effect you have on others? Is it the effect you have on the world around you? If so, what have I done with mine? How have I wasted it?”

— Derek Landy

“I have wanted to "make books" since around the sixth grade, and I published my first book when I was in my late thirties. My point is that the time in between was not wasted-submarine service, marriage, college, bringing up three kids, starting a school for them, and so forth. This kind of life experience is not distracting you from your appointed task of writing. It is, rather, the roundabout blessing of giving you something to say.”

— Douglas Wilson

“Mortal man! You've wasted your time mostly with wrong and empty beliefs! And now you have started understanding that most important thing in life is existence!”

— Mehmet Murat Ildan

“A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.”

— George Jean Nathan

“A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.”

— Muhammad Ali

“Sure, a surgeon can stand to look at a mutilated body," Crawford said, crumpling his cup and stepping on the pedal of the covered wastebasket. "But I don't think a doctor can stand to see a life wasted.”

— Thomas Harris

“Once I started trying to give positive reviews, though, I began to understand how much happiness I took from the joyous ones in my life
and how much effort it must take for them to be consistently good=tempered and positive. It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light. We nonjoyous types suck energy and cheer from the joyous ones; we rely on them to buoy us with their good spirit and to cushion our agitation and anxiety. At the same time, because of a dark element in human nature, we're sometimes provoked to try to shake the enthusiastic, cheery folk out of their fog of illusion
to make them see that the play was stupid, the money was wasted, the meeting was pointless. Instead of shielding their joy, we blast it.”

— Gretchen Rubin

“It's true that youth is wasted on the young and, if I had my life to live over again, I suppose I would pay more attention to my career. I would make better choices. But, in my defence, I would say that I have three wonderful children, and that's something I am very proud of.”

— Olivia Hussey

“The average american spends six months of his or her life waiting for red lights to turn green. six months wasted, waiting for permission to move on.”

— Megan McCafferty

“All the time God ever spent on you was wasted, an' your mother's had the same luck. I s'pose God's used to having creatures 'at He's made go wrong, but I pity your mother. Goodness knows a woman suffers an' works enough over her children, an' then to fetch a boy to man's estate an' have him, of his own free will an' accord, be a liar! Young man, truth is the cornerstone o' the temple o' character. Nobody can put up a good buildin' without a solid foundation; an' you can't do solid character buildin' with a lie at the base. Man 'at's a liar ain't fit for anything! Can't trust him in no sphere or relation o' life; or in any way, shape, or manner. You passed out your word like a man, an' like a man I took it an' went off trustin' you, an' you failed me.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

“It isn't necessarily easier if you know what it is you're meant to do
but at least you don't waste time in questioning or doubting. If you're honest
well, that isn't necessarily easier, either. Though I suppose if you're honest with yourself and know what you are, at least you're less likely to feel that you've wasted your life, doing the wrong thing.”

— Diana Gabaldon

“Do you think I could bear to live on after you died? Oh, Lyra, I'd follow you down to the world of the dead without thinking twice about it, just like you followed Roger; and that would be two lives gone for nothing, my life wasted like yours. No, we should spend our whole lifetimes together, good long busy lives, and if we can't spend them together, we ... we'll have to spend them apart.”

— Philip Pullman

“And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“I thought I was so ugly for so long, and I wasted so much of my life on this dumb notion.”

— Margaret Cho

“[O]ne has to have endured a few decades before wanting, let alone needing, to embark on the project of recovering lost life. And I think it may be possible to review 'the chronicles of wasted time.' William Morris wrote in The Dream of John Ball that men fight for things and then lose the battle, only to win it again in a shape and form that they had not expected, and then be compelled again to defend it under another name. We are all of us very good at self-persuasion and I strive to be alert to its traps, but a version of what Hegel called 'the cunning of history' is a parallel commentary that I fight to keep alive in my mind.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“Ellie's head sinks into her hands, and she weeps for the unknown Boot, for Jennifer, for chances missed and a life wasted. She cries for herself, because nobody will ever love her like he loved Jennifer, and because she suspects that she is spoiling what might have been a perfectly good, if ordinary, life. She cries because she is drunk and in her flat and there are few advantages to living on your own except being able to sob uninhibitedly at will.”

— Jojo Moyes

“Life without risk is life wasted.”

— Santosh Kalwar

“Life comes in the form of opportunities, which are easy to recognize, after they have been wasted ...”

— Javan

“A life lived for art, is never a life wasted.”

— Macklemore

“The first aim of a good college is not to teach books, but the meaning and purpose of life. Hard study and the learning of books are only a means to this end. We develop power and courage and determination and we go out to achieve Truth, Wisdom and Justice. If we do not come to this, the cost of schooling is wasted.”

— John B. Watson

“The chief beauty about time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoiled, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your life. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.”

— Arnold Bennett

“I fished a little while ago with a man, not in his first youth, who had wasted the flower of his life on business and golf and gardening and motoring and marriage, and had in this way postponed his initiation (to fly fishing) far too long.”

— Arthur Ransome

“I have not wasted life, but life hath wasted me.”

— Bhartrhari

“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

“But to deny fate is arrogance, to declare that we are the sole shapers of our existence is madness;if you deny fate life becomes the series of missed opportunities, a regret for what never was and could have been, a remorse of what was not done and could have been done, and the present is wasted, twisted into another missed oppurtunity.”

— Oriana Fallaci

“If I'm wrong about God then I wasted my life. If you're wrong about God then you wasted your eternity.”

— LeCrae

“The first twenty years of my life were wasted ... I didn't fit my environment, and I didn't know any other.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

“A vast deal of ingenuity is wasted every year in evoking the undesirable, in the careful construction of objects which burden life. Frankenstein was a large rather than an isolated example.”

— Agnes Repplier

“I just went along for the ride. It was a God-given gift. It is. So you can't say well, you wasted your life because you spent all of it acting, but I think gosh, I've never been to China, I've never been to Japan. I've never been to Yellowstone Park.”

— Angela Lansbury

“One of the great events in my life was my first meeting with Edison. This wonderful man, who had received no scientific training, yet had accomplished so much, filled me with amazement. I felt that the time I had spent studying languages, literature and art was wasted; though later, of course, I learned this was not so.”

— Nikola Tesla

“You can get away with breaking all of the other rules at least once in a while, but you can't get away with breaking this one. Readers will accept almost anything from you if you don't make them feel they have wasted their time and money. Remember, you can bore readers in a lot of different ways. It doesn't necessarily take a dearth of action; too much action can get you the same result. Everything in writing, like in life, requires balance.”

— Terry Brooks

“We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship; but in your full manhood and womanhood you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed; and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted ... So any nation which in its youth lives only for the day, reaps without sowing, and consumes without husbanding, must expect the penalty of the prodigal whose labor could with difficulty find him the bare means of life.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

“I had one life. And what did I do? Wasted it in some palooka preliminaries in Spain, just before Hitler and Chamberlain warm up for the main event.”

— Billy Wilder

“I've been sleeping through my life Now I'm waking up And I want to stand in the sunshine I have never been ecstatic Had a flower but it never bloomed In the darkness of my wasted youth It was hiding in the shadows Learning to become invisible Uncover me”

— Juliana Hatfield

“Shouldn't we suppose that many of our most painful ordeals will look quite different a million years from now, as we recall them on the New Earth? What if one day we discover that God has wasted nothing in our life on Earth? What if we see that every agony was part of giving birth to an eternal joy?”

— Randy Alcorn

“Do I rue a life wasted doing crosswords? Yes, but I do know the three-letter-word for regret.”

— Robert Breault