Quotes About Lives

“The dialectical or ecological approach asserts that creating the world is involved in our every act. It is impossible for us to operate in our daily lives and not create the world that everyone must live in. What we desire arranges the genetic code in all of our major crops and livestock. We cannot avoid participating in the creation, and it is in agriculture, far and away our largest and most basic artifact, that human culture and the creation totally interpenetrate.”

— Wes Jackson

“Childhood is not a state which only applies to the first phase of our lives in the biological sense. Rather it is a basic condition which is always appropriate to a life that is lived aright.”

— Karl Rahner

“Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness, or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission, but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize-they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.”

— Charles Duhigg

“In this our life there are no beginnings but only departures entitled beginnings, wreathed in the formal emotions thought to be appropriate and often forced. Darkly rises each moment from the life which has been lived and which does not die, for each event lives in the heavy head forever, waiting to renew itself.”

— Delmore Schwartz

“Our lives change when our habits change.”

— Matthew Kelly

“It was a story of people who don't choose life over death until it's too late to know the difference, people whose goodness is forgotten, left behind like a child's toy in a dusty playroom, people who see many things and remember only a handful of the them and learn from even fewer, people who hurt themselves, who wreck their own lives and then go on to wreck the lives of those around them, who cannot be helped or assuaged by love or kindness or luck or charm, who forget kindness, the feeling and practice of it, and how it can save even the worst, most misshapen life from despair. It was just a story about despair.”

— Robert Goolrick

“Sweat saves blood, blood saves lives, but brains saves both.”

— Erwin Rommel

“Just remember, Every day of your lives, you must always be sure what you're fighting for.”

— Gail Tsukiyama

“The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism-an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.”

— Kathryn Schulz

“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”

— Edward Abbey

“Other dancers weave through our lives, sometimes stirring our deep soul's fires.”

— Jay Woodman

“We are now left to choose between danger and regret, neither of which can restore the lives we have lost.”

— Anne Fortier

“Then it was my turn. I was sixteen, I told them. I saw a few kids' eyes widen. Olive laughed in surprise. It was strange to them that I should be so young, but what was strange to me was how young they seemed. I knew plenty of eighty-year-olds in Florida, and these kids acted nothing like them. It was as if the constance of their lives here, the unvarying days-this perpetual deathless summer-had arrested their emotions as well as their bodies, sealing them in their youth like Peter Pan and his Lost Boys.”

— Ransom Riggs

“Though I was having a blissful moment of being happy and content, I had one of those stray ideas you get at odd moments. I thought,How nice it would be if Eric were here with me in the car. He'd look so good with the wind blowing his hair, and he'd enjoy the moment . Well, yeah, before he burned to a crisp.
But I realized I'd thought of Eric because it was the kind of day you wanted to share with the person you cared about, the person whose company you enjoyed the most. And that would be Eric as he'd been while he was cursed by a witch: the Eric who hadn't been hardened by centuries of vampire politics, the Eric who had no contempt for humans and their affairs, the Eric who was not in charge of many financial enterprises and responsible for the lives and incomes of quite a few humans and vampires. In other words, Eric as he would never be again.”

— Charlaine Harris

“What we pay for with our lives never costs too much.”

— Antonio Porchia

“All our lives long we might talk of Jesus, and yet we should never come to an end of the sweet things that might be said of Him. Eternity will not be long enough to learn all He is, or to worship Him for all He has done, but then, that matters not; for we shall be always with Him, and we desire nothing more.”

— A.W. Tozer

“Bettering the lives of others is the role of a person with a servant's heart.”

— Jim George

“Feminism isn't about hating men. It's about challenging the absurd gender distinctions that boys and girls learn from childhood and carry into their adult lives.”

— Robert Webb

“Despite constant vilifying by the media and congressional threats to take away the tools needed to uncover plots, FBI agents and CIA officers work silently around the clock and risk their own lives to keep us safe.”

— Ronald Kessler

“No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet. But it did not go far enough. It only reached one-third of the world.”

— Sylvia Mathews Burwell

“There is little we can point to in our lives as deserving anything but God's wrath. Our best moments have been mostly grotesque parodies. Our best loves have been almost always blurred wtih selfishness and deceit. But there is something to which we can point. Not anything that we ever did or were, but something that was done for us by another. Not our own lives, but the life of one who died in our behalf and yet is still alive. This is our only glory and our only hope. And the sound that it makes is the sound of excitement and gladness and laughter that floats through the night air from a great banquet.”

— Frederick Buechner

“Next time you face the unexpected, a moment of difficulty you really don't want to go through, remember that such a moment doesn't picture a God who has forgotten you, but one who is near to you and doing in you a very good thing. He is rescuing you from thinking that you can live the life you were meant to live while relying on the inadequate resources of your wisdom, experience, righteousness, and strength; and he is transforming you into a person who lives a life shaped by radical God-centered faith.”

— Paul David Tripp

“We need to have a purpose in this life. I'm pleading with you, I'm begging with you to do the right thing. And do it not for the sake of how it will impact your own lives, but only for the sake of doing the right thing.”

— James McGreevey

“It is only because we seek love as if it lives outside of us that we miss it, again and again.”

— Vironika Tugaleva

“The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. We must be open to all points of the compass; husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider's web to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“I've had a lot of highs in my life and a lot of lows, some pivotal experiences, and in ways I feel like I've already lived a couple of lives.”

— Jim Coleman

“There are two aspects to the life of every man: the personal life, which is free in proportion as its interests are abstract, and the elemental life of the swarm, in which a man must inevitably follow the laws laid down for him.
Consciously a man lives on his own account in freedom of will, but he serves as an unconscious instrument in bringing about the historical ends of humanity. An act he has once committed is irrevocable, and that act of his, coinciding in time with millions of acts of others, has an historical value. The higher a man's place in the social scale, the more connections has with others, and the more power he has over them, the more conspicuous is the inevitability and predestination of every act he commits. "The hearts of kings are in the hand of God." The king is the slave of history.”

— Leo Tolstoy

“You, Celaena Sardothien, are charged with the deaths of the following people ...
And then he began a long recitation of all those lives she'd taken. The brutal story of a girl who was now gone.”

— Sarah J. Maas

“We are what we do. Your schedule is your life. Far too many of us spend much of our lives in dreamland, waiting for a miracle, or in the past, looking for justification for being stuck right now. Or in a mindless frenzy, trying to keep up with too many commitments. We think that good intentions count, but they really don't. Don't waste any more time waiting for your happiness.”

— Anonymous.

“Traditions are a common part of our lives. They can be good, and not all traditions are wrong, but sometimes they can take the joy out of life.”

— Joyce Meyer

“I've been on tour since I was 16, and I always do meet-and-greets before and after shows, so you kind of build these friendships with people. I have girls come up to me and tell me exactly what's going on in their love lives.”

— Taylor Swift

“Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.”

— Gertrude Stein

“The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see aroundthem so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their children's future
fear that they'll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.”

— Lillian B. Rubin

“The grotto itself comprises its own slick universe, and inside this universe spin countless galaxies: here, in the upturned half of a single mussel shell, lives a barnacle and a tiny spindle shell occupied by a still smaller hermit crab. And on the shell of the crab? A yet smaller barnacle. And on that barnacle?”

— Anthony Doerr

“A man's message of Faith lies in the way he lives his life and not in the words he says.”

— Paulo Coelho

“It seemed to me at an early age that all human communication - whether it's TV, movies, or books - begins with somebody wanting to tell a story. That need to tell, to plug into a universal socket, is probably one of our grandest desires. And the need to hear stories, to live lives other than our own for even the briefest moment, is the key to the magic that was born in our bones.”

— Robert R. McCammon

“Dance training can't be separate from life training. Everything that comes into our lives is training. The qualities we admire in great dancing are the same qualities we admire in human beings: honesty, courage, fearlessness, generosity, wisdom, depth, compassion,and humanity.”

— Alonzo King

“We have the power to change our lives, and the world around us.”

— Serj Tankian

“International adoption does not begin to solve the problems of the world's orphaned children. It's truly not the answer. At the same time, it solves a problem for a few. I think it can be a brilliant solution to the problem of adults wanting a child in their lives or wanting more children in their lives and the problem of children who want parents in their lives.”

— Melissa Fay Greene

“You have incredible lives ahead of you. You have incredible things that you can accomplish. If you feel that, you will have an amazing life. Do not let anything build a wall too high for you to get over. And I know that might seem very cliche, but I've had alot of friends who had hurt themselves. And when you're younger, a lot of that stuff is so temporary. You can get through it. You're stronger than you think. You'll ALWAYS be stronger than you think. Feel with your heart and do what you want.”

— Corey Taylor

“May you always experience the joy that comes from putting Christ at the centre of your lives.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

“[Our goal] is to help revive America's traditional values: faith, family, neighborhood, work and freedom. Government has no business enforcing these values but neither must it seek, as it did in the recent past, to suppress or replace them. That only robbed us of our tiller and set us adrift. Helping to restore these values will bring new strength, direction and dignity to our lives and to the life of our nation. It's on these values that we'll best build our future.”

— Ronald Reagan

“Our impulses toward instant gratification aren't to be trusted. Hoarding our resources isn't a worthy goal. We're created with eternity in our hearts, and our lives have everlasting value.”

— David Jeremiah

“In moments of despair, we look on ourselves lead-enly as objects; we see ourselves, our lives, as someone else might see them and may even be driven to kill ourselves if the separation, the "knowledge," seems sufficiently final.”

— Mary McCarthy

“Anything from making a mistake on an experiment that would ruin some scientist on earth's experiment - career, potentially - to doing something wrong with the satellite that a country was depending on for its communications, to making some mistake that could actually cost you and the crew either a mission or your lives. So there is a lot of pressure that's put on every astronaut to just make sure that he or she understands exactly what to do, exactly when to do it, and is trained and prepared to carry it out.”

— Sally Ride

“The best work we can all do is create the highest vision possible for our lives and be led by that vision to the greatest good.”

— Oprah Winfrey

“Computer science is the most misunderstood field there is. You are being paid to solve puzzles. For a person who has practiced meditation in past lives, that is the way your mind works.”

— Frederick Lenz

“Not only does silence give us a chance to understand ourselves better, to get a truer and more balanced perspective on our own lives in relation to the lives of others: silence makes us whole if we let it. Silence helps draw together the scattered and dissipated energies of a fragmented existence.”

— Thomas Merton

“There is love in this world, and it lives within us as who we really are, not who we think we are.”

— Krishna Das

“There are so many noises and pulls and competing demands in our lives that many of us never find out who we are. Learn to be quiet enough to hear the sound of the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in other people.”

— Marian Wright Edelman