The Way We Live Quotes

“I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice.”

— Andre Dubus

“The painful after effects of emotional wounds permeate our souls, negatively impacting the choices we make and the way we live. The longer we push aside these wounds, the greater the chance they will become contaminated. Infected. These wounds then weep, leaking and spreading into other areas, requiring additional care and taking much longer to heal. Gone unchecked, these infections often become much worse than the original wound.”

— Jo Ann Fore

“We live in a world where everything is connected. We can not longer think in terms of us and them when it comes to the consequences of the way we live. Today it's all about WE.”

— Gregg Braden

“It's daring to be curious about the unknown, to dream big dreams, to live outside prescribed boxes, to take risks, and above all, daring to investigate the way we live until we discover the deepest treasured purpose of why we are here.”

— Luci Swindoll

“My view [is] that what morality boils down to is, 'Don't harm, and do help.' And now the question is, 'Can creatures like chickens and cows be harmed?' And the answer is, 'Of course they can.' Consequently, I think it's immoral to harm them. And that seems to me to provide a very strong moral reason to be vegetarian, to not wear leather ... it seems to me that our treatment of animals is morally appalling ... and that we ought to radically revise the way we live, precisely because they feel pain, they can be hurt, and we're constantly hurting these creatures!”

— Shelly Kagan

“On one of the evenings, apropos of nothing ('apropos' was another new word), when Dr Hunter and Reggie were giving the baby a bath, Dr Hunter turned to Reggie and said, 'You now there are no rules,' and Reggie said, 'Really?' because she could think of a lot of rules, like cutting grapes in half and wearing a cap when you went swimming, not to mention separating all the rubbish for the recycling bins. Unlike Ms MacDonald, recycling was something that Dr Hunter was very keen on. She said, 'No, not those kinds of things, I mean the way we live our lives. There isn't a template, a pattern that we're supposed to follow. There's no one watching us to see if we're doing it properly, there is no properly, we just make it up as we go along.”

— Kate Atkinson

“I learned a long time ago we've control of little in this world, Amanda. It doesn't belong to us. It's out of our hands. Like being born or being sold into prostitution at eight. All we can change is the way we think and the way we live.”

— Francine Rivers

“Fagan hated what his father was, but he still loved him. I reckon that's the way God is. Loving us enough to send Jesus but hating the way we live. Hating the sin, not the sinner.”

— Francine Rivers

“We all exhibit our faith commitments by the way we live, and those commitments are oriented around a value or set of values, a belief or set of beliefs, by which we guide our lives. We may posit reason as the highest good. Or pleasure. Or love and kindness. But no foundation is without an act of faith to sustain it.”

— Terryl L. Givens

“We all tell our own stories the way we live our lives. My story is: Life is too short to not believe in fresh voices. I don't have Hollywood stars. I have great American artists.”

— Kevin McCollum

“There is this tremendous body of knowledge in the world of academia where extraordinary numbers of incredibly thoughtful people have taken the time to examine on a really profound level the way we live our lives and who we are and where we've been. That brilliant learning sometimes gets trapped in academia and never sees the light of day.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

“Judaism has always been a strong interest of mine. My two sons speak Hebrew and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live.”

— Herman Wouk

“I've always been interested in an architecture of resistance - architecture that has some power over the way we live. Working under adversarial conditions could be seen as a plus because you're offering alternatives. Still, there are situations that make you ask the questions: 'Do I want to be a part of this?'”

— Thom Mayne

“One thing that was passed on from generation to generation in my family, over seven generations in 200 years, was never give up. That's the way we live.”

— Nik Wallenda

“So what this is is us, our personalities refined down on to a stage performance. In other words, the way we play is the end product of the way we live - we live in the cities, you see.”

— Alice Cooper

“If we say, 'I believe in Jesus,' but it doesn't affect the way we live, the answer is not that now we need to add hard work to our faith so much as that we haven't truly understood or believed in Jesus at all.”

— Timothy Keller

“We vote every day for companies, for people, and we put money toward 'campaigns.' We need to think of the faces behind the scenes. Who are the masters and Caesars that we pledge allegiance to by the way we live and through the things we put our trust in? We vote every day with our feet, our hands, our lips, and our wallets. We are the vote for the poor. We are to vote for the peacemakers. We are to vote for the marginalized, the oppressed, the most vulnerable of our society. These are the ones Jesus voted for, those whom every empire had left behind, those whom no millionaire politician will represent.”

— Shane Claiborne

“The way we live is changing. Each year, our free time shrinks a little more as computers clamor for an increasing percentage of our attention.”

— Ruth Reichl

“When you try to grasp the way the Western world is going, you see that we are on a ratchet towards a surveillance state, which is coming to include the whole population in its surveillance. This is our reward for accepting the restraints on the way we live now.”

— Tom Stoppard

“I think the point about ActionAid is what it's asking people to do is engage with poor people in developing countries and understand what their lives are like and understand how the way we live our lives impacts on theirs.”

— Emma Thompson

“Religion is rarely mentioned in current prime-time dramas or sitcoms that supposedly reflect the way we live now.”

— Dan Wakefield

“So this is the way we live now: conditioned by the awareness that no North Korean provocation, however egregious, can be confronted, lest it furnish the occasion or pretext for something truly barbarous and insane.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“Be a good witness by the way you live. The way we live is often more convincing than the words we say.”

— Billy Graham

“We act as if it doesn't matter how we live or what we think or say. We have moved in with the world, and we have allowed the world to penetrate the way we live. So the things that we used to call sin no longer seem to be sin to us.”

— Billy Graham

“The revolution here is from hierarchical to lateral power. That's the power shift. So increasingly a younger generation that's grown up on the internet and now increasingly distributing renewable energies, they're measuring politics in terms of a struggle between centralized, hierarchical, top-down and closed and proprietary, versus distributed, open, collaborative, transparent. This shift, from hierarchical to lateral power, is going to change the way we live, the way we educate our children, and the way we govern the world.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“We all obsess about what we are doing and accomplishing. What if we let it go and simply made the way we live our lives our accomplishment?”

— Maria Shriver

“If you ask me what I believe in today, I believe in feminism. I believe that all human beings are equal. I believe that no one has the right to authority over anyone else. Feminism has to do with everything in the world, a vision of how the world can be. I have great doubts about Utopias, but I just keep on thinking there is a better way to live than the way we live now.”

— Marilyn French

“We will always want films ... that basically are centred on young people, because young people is the way we live on, we older people, insofar as we live on.”

— Vanessa Redgrave

“Embracing a low carbon economy will be as momentous as the previous industrial revolutions. As the shift from coal to oil did. And the shift from gas light to electric light. It has the potential to give us the competitive edge in the new global economy. The scale of the challenge is extraordinary. We will need to reinvent in the way we live our lives, the way our world works”

— Charles Hendry

“I think people do look to writers to tell the truth in a way that nobody else quite will, not politicians or ministers or sociologists. A writer's job, is to, by way of fiction, somehow describe the way we live. And to me, this seems an important task, very worth doing, and I think also, to the reading public, it seems, even though they might not articulate it, it seems to them something worth doing also.”

— John Updike

“Worship does not become worship until it changes the way we live”

— Perry Noble

“Our evangelical culture tends to take the awesome reality of a transcendent god who is worthy to be feared and downsize Him so He could fit into our "buddy system." The way we talk about Him, the way we pray, and, more strikingly, the way we live shows that we have somehow lost our sense of being appropriately awestruck in the presence of a holy and all-powerful God. It's been a long time since we've heard a good sermon on the "fear of God." If God were to show up visibly, many of us think we'd run up to Him and high-five Him for the good things He has done.”

— Joseph Stowell

“As we, the world, and the way we live have become more complex, we've moved further away from living in alignment with our human spirit and with the earth.”

— Lauren Mackler

“I thought a lot about how the way we perceive Jesus affects the way we live, and how expectantly we face our daily lives. If we have a huge and uncompromising view of Him, it'll lead to adventurous and exciting lives of faith.”

— Matt Redman

“There's a fundamental disconnection in society in the way we live, this way we live that we take so for granted, and we've become very separate from one another and we don't really take lot of time to realize that. And the math is overwhelming to the point of despair, but the answers could be so simple.”

— Amanda Palmer

“We say it is idealistic to think we can continue to live the way we live - with 5% of the world using half the world's resources, with $20,000 a second being spent on war.”

— Shane Claiborne

“The way we live ought to manifest the truth of what we believe. A messy life speaks of a messy and incoherent faith.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

“An empowering mission statement has to become a living document, part of our very nature, so that the criteria we've put into it are also in us, in the way we live our lives day by day.”

— Stephen Covey

“I think love is the most misunderstood emotion in the universe. I don't think half the people know what real love is. And I don't think half the people on this planet have ever experienced it. If people experienced for one moment what real love is, we could never live the way we live with each other. We couldn't do to each other what we're doing. We couldn't ignore what we're ignoring. We couldn't allow it to be the way it is.”

— Neale Donald Walsch

“We have all heard of the web of life. The way we live threatens to trap us in a web of death.”

— Ban Ki-moon

“Each moment is magical, precious and complete and will never exist again. We forget that now is the moment we are in, that the next one isn't guaranteed. And if we are blessed with another moment, any joy, creativity or wisdom it brings will ensue from the way we live in the present one.”

— Susan L. Taylor

“The way we live our daily lives is what most effects the situation of the world. If we can change our daily lives, then we can change our governments and can change the world. Our president and governments are us. They reflect our lifestyle and our way of thinking. The way we hold a cup of tea, pick up the newspaper or even use toilet paper are directly related to peace.”

— Nhat Hanh

“The way we view death determines, to a surprising degree, the way we live our lives.”

— Billy Graham

“Does Christ get a good reputation because of the way we live? Is the excellence of Christ displayed in our lives? That should matter to us, not whether we ourselves are praised.”

— John Piper

“I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.”

— Toni Morrison

“Let's change the way we eat, let's change the way we live, and let's change the way we treat each other.”

— Tupac Shakur

“What I really think is going to happen over time is technology is going to change the way we live for the good for the environment.”

— George W. Bush

“I think that the way we begin our day is really the way we live our day and the way we live our lives; and that not enough of us are really aware of it.”

— Louise Hay

“Cars are the most central thing in America, in a lot of ways. They've probably influenced the way we live more than anything else, and yet every really big problem - whether it's the environment or who dictates the international economy because of oil - is all tied to cars. Ultimately, cars are bad for civilization. I don't know if they'll end us.”

— Chuck Klosterman

“The virus in the movie 'Contagion' is based on the bird flu which came out of nowhere back in 2008. Everyone thought it was going to change the way we live and it just faded away. Wait a minute, I'm talking about President Obama.”

— Craig Ferguson