This Single Life Quotes

“My dogs have been the reason I have woken up every single day of my life with a smile on my face.”

— Jennifer Skiff

“It is a fact of life that oversimplified accounts of the development of science are often necessary in its teaching. Most scientific progress is a messy, complex and slow process; only with the hindsight of an overall understanding of a phenomenon can a story be told pedagogically rather than chronologically. This necessitates the distilling of certain events and personalities from the melee: those who are deemed to have made the most important contributions. It is inevitable therefore that the many smaller or less important advances scattered randomly across hundreds of years of scientific history tend to be swept up like autumn leaves into neat piles, on top of which sit larger-than-life personalities credited with taking a discipline forward in a single jump. Sometimes this is perfectly valid, and one cannot deny the genius of an Aristotle, a Newton, a Darwin or an Einstein. But it often leaves behind forgotten geniuses and unsung heroes.”

— Jim Al-Khalili

“We appealed to the conscience of the world. The world has no conscience. We have no one but ourselves.
The fight. The struggle. The historic destiny. The return of the people. The cause: life therefore having a meaning and shape that eludes the rest of us in the endless wash of 'What the hell are we doing here?' In a single day, says an Israeli friend, he experiences events and emotions that would keep a Swede going for a year.”

— David Hare

“Life is fleeting. Don't waste a single moment of your precious life. Wake up now! And now! And now!”

— Ruth Ozeki

“But my mother's life was a never-ending round of maintenance. Not one single thing did she ever achieve but that it had to be done all over again, one day or one week or one season later. Oh, the monotony.”

— Jacqueline Kelly

“The most important thing in defining child sexual abuse is the experience of the child. It takes very little for a child's world to be devastated. A single experience can have a profound impact on a child's life. A man sticks his hand in his daughter's underpants, or strokes his son's penis once, and for that child, the world is never the same again.”

— Laura Hough

“Yes, Soteria. I have. I assure you, my life has never been an easy one and you should be grateful every day you live that you can't imagine what kind of childhood I had. (Acheron)
I'm sorry, Ash. I didn't know. (Tory)
It's easy to look at people and make quick judgments about them, their present, and their past, but you'd be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceberg hidden from sight. And more often than not, it's lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundations of their soul. (Acheron)”

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

“They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.”

— Edith Wharton

“Nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment - maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.”

— Robin Sloan

“An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.”

— E. F. Schumacher

“Allow me to give you some advice from the heart: don't give up art, and even give yourself over to it even more than so far. [ ... ] Living in solitude and embittering your soul with recollections, you can make your life very gloomy. There is a single refuge, a single medicine: art and creative work.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us-albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human's efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

“For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.”

— Stephen King

“The seventh key is that you must have a major definite purpose for your life. You must have one goal that, if you accomplish it, can do more to help you improve your life than any other single goal.”

— Brian Tracy

“My husband calls me a ginger every single day of my life, so that I'm completely used to it, and I've come to see it as a term of endearment.”

— Jayma Mays

“There are still times in my life where I pull back from being totally honest, and I can't imagine a single straight person who would understand that.”

— Ian Mckellen

“Do things you've always wanted to do. You are the single most influence on your life.”

— Oprah Winfrey

“Not a fan of spiders. I saw the movie 'Arachnophobia,' which was single-handedly rated in the top three worst choices of my life.”

— Chris Pine

“A single name of a multitude of practices centered about the auto-driven auto. Flashing across the country in the sure hands of an invisible chauffeur, windows all opaque, night dark, sky high, tires assailing the road below like four phantom buzzsaws-and starting from scratch and ending in the same place, and never knowing where you are going or where you have been-it is possible, for a moment, to kindle some feeling of individuality in the coldest brainpan, to produce a momentary awareness of self by virtue of an apartness from all but a sense of motion. This is because movement through darkness is the ultimate abstraction of life itself-at least that's what one of the Vital Comedians said, and everybody in the place laughed.”

— Roger Zelazny

“Suddenly I realized that a cell's life is controlled by the physical and energetic environment and not by its genes. Genes are simply molecular blueprints used in the construction of cells, tissues, and organs. The environment serves as a "contractor" who reads and engages those genetic blueprints and is ultimately responsible for the character of a cell's life. It is a single cell's "awareness" of the environment, not its genes, that sets into motion the mechanisms of life.”

— Bruce H. Lipton

“The more money you get, the bigger target you become. That's true. It's sad but it's true that you have to be aware of every person that comes to you with the next greatest deal. You just have to look at every single person with a fine lens. That's the way my life is going to be from here on out.”

— Reggie Bush

“Books seem the most potent source: each one is the sum total of a life that can be inhaled in a single day. I read fast, so I'm hoovering up lives at a ferocious pace, six or seven or eight in a week. I particularly love autobiographies: I can eat a whole person by sundown.”

— Caitlin Moran

“He glanced over at Luthar, sneering down into his bowl as though it was full of piss. No respect. He glanced over at Ferro, staring yellow knives at him through narrowed eyes. No trust. He shook his head sadly. Without trust and respect the group would fall apart in a fight like walls without mortar.
Still, Logen had won over tougher audiences, in his time. Threetrees, Tul Duru, Black Dow, Harding Grim, he'd fought each one in single combat, and beaten them all. Spared each man's life, and left him bound to follow. Each one had tried their best to kill him, and with good reasons too, but in the end Logen had earned their trust, and their respect, and their friendship even. Small gestures and a lot of time, that was how he'd done it. 'Patience is the chief of virtues,' his father used to say, and 'you won't cross the mountains in a day.' Time might be against them, but there was nothing to be gained by rushing. You have to be realistic about these things.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“Feminism is the single most powerful social movement of our time, one that addresses every aspect of human and social life.”

— Richard Allen Epstein

“We belong to that order of mammals, the primates, distinguished by its propensity for repeated single litters, intense parental care, long life-spans, late sexual maturity, and a complex and extensive social existence ... Our protracted biological and psychological helplessness, which extends well into the third year of life, intensifies the bond between infant and parents, making possible a sense of generational continuity. In contrast to other primates these bonds are not obliterated after sexual maturity.”

— Louise J. Kaplan

“Since the days of Descartes it has been a conception familiar to philosophers that every visible event in nature might be explained by previous visible events, and that all the motions, for instance, of the tongue in speech, or of the hand in painting, might have merely physical causes. If consciousness is thus accessory to life and not essential to it, the race of man might have existed upon the earth and acquired all the arts necessary for its subsistence without possessing a single sensation, idea, or emotion. Natural selection might have secured the survival of those automata which made useful reactions upon their environment. An instinct would have been developed, dangers would have been shunned without being feared, and injuries avenged without being felt.”

— George Santayana

“By what incomprehensible mechanism are our organs held in subjection to sentiment and thought? How is it that a single melancholy idea shall disturb the whole course of the blood; and that the blood should in turn communicate irregularities to the human understanding? What is that unknown fluid which certainly exists and which, quicker and more active than light, flies in less than the twinkling of an eye into all the channels of life,-produces sensations, memory, joy or grief, reason or frenzy,-recalls with horror what we would choose to forget; and renders a thinking animal, either a subject of admiration, or an object of pity and compassion?”

— Voltaire

“The dog [in Pavlov's experiments] does not continue to salivate whenever it hears a bell unless sometimes at least an edible offering accompanies the bell. But there are innumerable instances in human life where a single association, never reinforced, results in the establishment of a life-long dynamic system. An experience associated only once with a bereavement, an accident, or a battle, may become the center of a permanent phobia or complex, not in the least dependent on a recurrence of the original shock.”

— Gordon Allport

“I tell you, to be honest, every single one of us, without any exaggeration, every single one of us was 100 percent sure that we would all be ... all be martyred, but you know, Allah chooses to take a person's life when he chooses. And we have no control over.”

— John Walker Lindh

“The linear-programming was - and is - perhaps the single most important real-life problem.”

— Keith Devlin

“Isn't the small and common the field we live our life in? The large comes into a life through small-paned windows. A breath is small, but everything depends on it. A person looks at you a single, brief moment longer than is necessary, and everything is changed. The smaller the clue, the larger the meaning, it sometimes feels.”

— Jane Hirshfield

“A ship should not be held by a single anchor; neither should life depend upon a single hope.”

— Epictetus

“Every single day, you're trading your life for who you're working with and what you do.”

— John Assaraf

“Every single life only becomes great when the individual sets upon a goal or goals which they really believe in, which they can really commit themselves to, which they can put their whole heart and soul into.”

— Brian Tracy

“And of course, in my writing, there is the constant theme of music, love of, preoccupation with, music. Music is the single thread making my life into a coherency.”

— Philip K. Dick

“Nowhere on the shore is the relation of a creature to its surroundings a matter of a single cause and effect; each living thing is bound to its world by many threads, weaving the intricate design of the fabric of life.”

— Rachel Carson