Quotes About The Days Of Our Lives

“If I could only keep up my spirit- if I could only play the game according to the sportsman's code which Rita had been trying to teach me so gravely and so sweetly- if I could only, I told myself, do that, then in the long run, all might be right between us- because I had not nagged her or wearied her, because I had proved myself her peer, as prompt to offer all for love and as brave to bear its passing. If I could only remember that the days were not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart, the fires which keep the poet alive as the citizen never lives, but which burn all the roofs of security!”

— Edmund Wilson

“
What the Bible does not mention, but what must be true is that, years later, Lazarus still died. The people Jesus healed were inevitably sick again at some point in their lives. The people Jesus fed miraculously were hungry again a few days later. More important than the very obvious might and power shown by Jesus' miracles is His love. He loved these people enough to do everything in His power to "make it better." He entered into their suffering and loved them right there.”

— Katie J. Davis

“Time was a dazzling lie, a magician worth a bird in his hat. The truth, I felt certain, was that everything happened at once. How old was I? I was every age at the same time. All the days of our lives were today.”

— Ramona Ausubel

“How we spend our days is how we spend our lives, and it's the rare person who can walk away from what feels like a sure thing.”

— Wes Moore

“But Eisenhower's advice was consistent, from his days as a general, to his years in the White House, to his role as veteran counselor: don't fight unless you are in it to win. Don't waste time and lives with half measures.”

— Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy

“He was a man who grew up on the fields surrounded by God's creation. He saw how five minutes of rain could spoil five months of hard work, but he also saw how the same five minutes of rain, at a different intensity, could feed the crops for five more days. Sometimes, people, too, had to choose the intensity and speed of living their lives. Sitting in the same spot never changed anything. Movement was the universal law of Nature.”

— Irina Serban

“By allowing God to take charge, each of our lives can be transformed beyond our wildest dreams. So enjoy the journey for you too can DREAM BIG for your GREATEST DAYS ARE JUST AHEAD!”

— Phyliss Todd

“Every day is important for us because it is a day ordained by God. If we are bored with life there is something wrong with our concept of God and His involvement in our daily lives. Even the most dull and tedious days of our lives are ordained by God and ought to be used by us to glorify Him.”

— Jerry Bridges

“In our part of the country, spring passes quickly. If you haven't been out for five days, you find the trees in bud. If you don't see the trees for another five days, you discover that they've put out leaves. In another five days, they're so green you wouldn't recognize them. It makes you wonder: Can these be the same trees I saw a few days before? And you answer yourself: Of course they are. That's how fast spring goes by. You can almost see it. From far away it comes racing toward you. And when it reaches you it whispers in your ear, 'I'm here,' and then runs swiftly on.
Spring - what a rush it's in. Every place seems to be urging it to come. If it delays its arrival a bit, the sunlight fades and the earth turns to stone. Trees especially can't endure any delay. Let spring dally even briefly on the way, and many lives are lost. ("Spring In A Small Town")”

— Xiao Hong

“Deep within everyone's heart there always remains a sense of longing for that hour, that summer, that one brief moment of blossoming. For several weeks or months, rarely longer, a beautiful young woman lives outside ordinary life. She is intoxicated. She feels as if she exists beyond time, beyond its laws; she experiences not the monotonous succession of days passing by, but moments of intense, almost desperate happinness.”

— Irène Némirovsky

“I don't know what your Company is feeling as of today about the work of Dr. Alice Hamilton on benzol [benzene] poisoning. I know that back in the old days some of your boys used to think that she was a plain nuisance and just picking on you for luck. But I have a hunch that as you have learned more about the subject, men like your good self have grown to realize the debt that society owes her for her crusade. I am pretty sure that she has saved the lives of a great many girls in can-making plants and I would hate to think that you didn't agree with me.”

— Bradley Dewey

“She was quite pretty too in those days; indeed, perhaps she still was. But for some reason none of her boyfriends remained boyfriends for long. She had a very decided personality and fairly soon took to telling them what they should do with their lives and studies and work. She began to mother them or perhaps brother them (since she was something of a tomboy) - and this sooner or later took the edge off their romantic excitement. They even began to find her vivacity over-powering, and sooner or later edged away from her - with guilt on their side and pain on hers. This was a great pity, for Kalpana Gaur was a lively, affectionate, and intelligent woman, and deserved some recompense for the help and happiness she gave others”

— Vikram Seth

“The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered ... We know that. And yes, there are certainly times when we aren't able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It's called being human. But I have found that in the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that I am grateful.”

— Elizabeth Edwards

“Dedicate the precious days of your lives to the betterment of the world”

— Bahaullah

“But the great compensation for being fifty in a culture that is not kind to older women is that you care less about criticism and you are less afraid of confrontation. In a world not made for women, criticism and ridicule follow us all the days of our lives. Usually they are indications that we are doing something right.”

— Erica Jong

“You have worked to build me what I asked for all the days of our lives. Even when the task seemed impossible, even when it would have been easier to give it up, you did not, but kept on going. You have kept me warm in winter, and cool in summer. You have laughed with me, and you have cried. You have given me children who are almost, but not quite, my greatest joy.
For the greatest joy of all is the way you held my wish in the center of your heart thorough all the days of our lives. That is where the room that you have built for me lies. Just as the room I built for you lies within mine. And in this way have all our wishes been granted. Together, we have made ourselves a home.”

— Cameron Dokey

“Days and months are travellers of eternity. So are the years that pass by. Those who steer a boat across the sea, or drive a horse over the earth till they succumb to the weight of years, spend every minute of their lives travelling. There are a great number of ancients, too, who died on the road. I myself have been tempted for a long time by the cloud-moving wind - filled with a strong desire to wander.”

— Matsuo Bashō

“In the crowded tension of the days that followed he never spoke to them, except of their work. They felt, entering the office in the morning, that they had no private lives, no significance and no reality save the overwhelming reality of the broad sheets of paper on their tables. The place seemed cold and soulless like a factory, until they looked at him; then they thought that it was not a factory, but a furnace fed on their bodies, his own first.”

— Ayn Rand

“For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is "I didn't get enough sleep." The next one is "I don't have enough time." Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don't have enough of ... Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we're already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn't get, or didn't get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack ... This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life.”

— Brené Brown

“What if we all carried little timers that counted down the days of our lives? Maybe the timer's a bit dramatic. Just the date would do. It could be tattooed on our foreheads like the expiration date on a milk bottle. It might be a good thing. Maybe we'd stop wasting our lives worrying about things that never happen or collecting things that we can't take with us. We'd probably treat people better. We certainly wouldn't be screaming at someone who had a day left. Maybe people would finally stop living like they're immortal. Maybe we could finally learn how to live.”

— Richard Paul Evans

“It's a stupid question, really, as we've all got an expiration date. I guess the real question is not if, but when. As I was walking through the South Dakota Badlands-before I knew something was wrong with me-I had this thought: What if we all carried little timers that counted down the days of our lives? Maybe the timer's a bit dramatic. Just the date would do. It could be tattooed on our foreheads like the expiration date on a milk bottle. It might be a good thing. Maybe we'd stop wasting our lives worrying about things that never happen, or collecting things that we can't take with us. We'd probably treat people better. We certainly wouldn't be screaming at someone who had a day left. Maybe people would finally stop living like they're immortal. Maybe we would finally learn how to live. I've wondered”

— Richard Paul Evans

“How would she fill the days? She had no idea. The trick of it, she told herself, is to be courageous and bold and make a difference. Not change the world exactly, just the bit around you. Go out there with your double first, your passion and your new Smith Corona electric typewriter and work hard at ... something. Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible. Eat sensibly. Stuff like that.”

— David Nicholls

“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

“And that's how it is in this world, boy. Start a tale, just a little tale that should fade and die-take your eye off it for just a moment and when you turn back it's grown big enough to grab you up in its teeth and shake you. That's how it is. All our lives are tales. Some spread, and grow in the telling. Others are just told between us and the gods, muttered back and forth behind our days, but those tales grow too and shake us just as fierce.”

— Mark Lawrence

“And it is sheer folly for a man who lives secluded from the world in his lowly hut, spending his days in idle delight in his garden, to pass off such matters as irrelevant to himself. Do you imagine that the enemy Impermanence will not come forcing its way into your peaceful mountain retreat? The recluse faces death as surely as the soldier setting forth to battle.”

— Yoshida Kenkō

“There is a Hindu school of philosophy that says that we are not the actors in our lives, but rather the spectators, and this is illustrated using the metaphor of a dancer. These days, maybe it would be better to say an actor. A spectator sees a dancer or an actor, or, if you prefer, reads a novel, and ends up identifying with one of the characters who is there in front of him. This is what those Hindu thinkers before the fifth century said. And the same thing happens with us. I, for example, was born the same day as Jorge Luis Borges, exactly the same day. I have seen him be ridiculous in some situations, pathetic in others. And, as I have always had him in front of me, I have ended up identifying with him.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

“When you're held underwater, you think only of air. I remember how I felt about Shanghai in the days after our lives changed - how streets that had once seemed exciting suddenly stank of nightsoil, how beautiful women suddenly were nothing more than girls with three holes, how all the money and prosperity suddenly rendered everything forlon, dissolute and futile. The way I see Los Angeles and Chinatown during these difficult and frightening days couldn't be more different.”

— Lisa See

“I have always been tormented by the image of multiplicity of selves. Some days I call it richness, and other days I see it as a disease, a proliferation as dangerous as cancer. My first concept about people around me was that all of them were coordinated into a WHOLE, whereas I was made up of multiple selves, of fragments. I know that I was upset as a child to discover that we had only one life. It seems to me that I wanted to compensate for this by multiplying experience. Or perhaps it always seems like this when you follow all your impulses and they take you in different directions. In any case, when I was happy, always at the beginning of a love, euphoric, I felt I was gifted for living many lives fully. It was only when I was in trouble, lost in a maze, stifled by complications and paradoxes that I was haunted or that I spoke of my "madness," but I meant the madness of the poets.”

— Anaïs Nin

“For me, the ability to use semiconductor sequencing to provide a medical diagnosis in just a few hours that once took days is a crucial step in saving the lives of patients. This is particularly significant for the treatment of sepsis, where every minute matters.”

— Chris Toumazou

“I can feel that the world this day is different than all the days of our lives before.”

— David O. Selznick

“Modern reality has got such a hold on us that ... when we attempt to reconstruct the ancient days in our thoughts ... the minor events of our lives tear us away from our meditations, and ... thrust us back into our personal [problems]”

— Vincent Van Gogh

“Nothing returns, nothing begins anew; it is never the same thing, and yet it seems always the same. For, if the days never return, every moment brings forth new beings whose destiny it will be to create for themselves, in the course of their lives, the same illusions that have companioned and at times illuminated ours. The fabric is eternal; eternal, the embroidery. A universe dies when we die; another is born when a new creature comes to earth with a new sensibility. If, then, it is very true that nothing begins all over again, it is very just to say, too, that everything continues. One may fearlessly advance the latter statement or the former, according to whether one considers the individual or the blending of generations. From this second point of view, everything is coexistent; the same cause produces contradictory, yet logical effects. All the colors and their shades are printed at a single impression, to form the wonderful image we call life.”

— Rémy De Gourmont

“It is hope
with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet
that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces.”

— Alain De Botton

“These moments of immersion, of engagement, of clear focus-moments that can last for hours, occasionally days-are some of the best times of our lives.”

— Eric Greitens

“When we truly fear God, our fear of other things and other people begins to wane. Big fears make little fears go away. We can spend our days worrying about a host of daily challenges, but let the word cancer be mentioned in the same sentence with our name, and all our daily anxieties disappear into the cloud of a bigger fear. God, of course, is not a malevolent force like cancer. This means that when our smaller fears are absorbed by fear of Him, our lives gain security rather than become debilitated by the terror of an uncertain future.”

— David Jeremiah

“The martyrologies are catalogues in which are to be found the names of the saints with the days and places of their deaths and, generally, with the distinctive character of their sanctity and with an historic summary of their lives.”

— Sabine Baring-Gould

“I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

“We went with the St. Lawrence Experience, which is run by Joe Babbitt, who is a close friend now. We went out there for 10 days and we had the best week of our lives, and we've been going back since. We've been back three times now.”

— Tom Felton

“For the first forty days a child
is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths,
a hundred small lessons
and then the past is erased.”

— Michael Ondaatje

“Women of the Gallagher Academy, who comes here?" she asked.
Just then, every girl at every table (even the newbies) stood and said in unison, "We are the sisters of Gillian."
"Why do you come?" my mother asked.
"To learn her skills. Honor her sword. And keep her secrets."
"To what end do you work?"
"To the cause of justice and light."
"How long will you strive?"
"For all the days of our lives," we finished and I felt a little like a character in one of my grandma's soap operas.”

— Ally Carter

“And I told him, I said: One day you're going to miss the subway because it's not going to come. One of these days, it's going to break down and it's not going to come around and everyone else will just wait for the next one or will take the bus, or walk, or run to the next station: they will go on with their lives. And you're not going to be able to go on with your life! You'll be standing there, in the subway station, staring at the tube. Why? Because you think that everything has to happen perfectly and on time and when you think it's going to happen! Well guess what! That's not how things happen! And you'll be the only one who's not going to be able to go on with life, just because your subway broke down. So you know what, you've got to let go, you've got to know that things don't happen the way you think they're going to happen, but that's okay, because there's always the bus, there's always the next station ... you can always take a cab.”

— C. JoyBell C.

“How can death become joyous? How can death become happiness? When Al-Hussein asked his nephew Al-Qassem, when he had not yet reached puberty: 'How do you like the taste of death, son?' He answered that it was sweeter than honey. How can the foul taste of death become sweeter than honey? Only through conviction, ideology, and faith, through belief, and devotion ... We do not want to ... leave our homeland to Israel ... Therefore, we are not interested in our own personal security. On the contrary, each of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake of Allah.”

— Hassan Nasrallah

“The force that has overcome Europe and destroyed entire states within days could cope with us, a handful of youngsters. It was an act of desperation ... We aspired to only one thing: to sell our lives for the highest possible price.”

— Mordechaj Tenenbaum

“My ideal world was the early days of Twitter, where everyone was curious about each other and everyone saw it as kind of a window into people's lives where we could be compassionate and curious and empathetic and we could tell each other secrets.”

— Jon Ronson

“We chase phantoms half the days of our lives. It is well if we learn wisdom even then, and save the other half.”

— Mark Twain

“We all sorely complain of the shortness of time, and yet have much more than we know what to do with. Our lives are either spent in doing nothing at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in doing nothing that we ought to do. We are always complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them.”

— Seneca The Younger

“Our lives are but specks of dust falling through the fingers of time. Like sands of the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”

— Socrates

“The way we live out our days is the way we will live our lives.”

— Francis Chan

“Unlike the transient days of our lives that constantly come and go, nirvana has always been, is now, and always will be.”

— Frederick Lenz

“The days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.”

— Penelope Lively