|
a1b53ae
|
He woke up and fought another battle and won. Then he went to bed and slept again and dreamed again and then he woke up and won again and slept again and he hardly noticed when waking became sleeping. Nor did he care.
|
|
ender
genius
life
purpuse
sleep
truth
|
Orson Scott Card |
|
099f5d3
|
Life is all arrivals and departures.
|
|
departures
life
|
Karen Joy Fowler |
|
a9bdadf
|
The precious gift of life must be preserved no matter now painful and pointless it seemed. Peace, I told them, is a gift so perfect that only God should grant it. I told people, only God's most selfish children would steal God's greatest gift, His only gift greater than life. The gift of death. This lesson is to the murderer, I said. This is to the suicide. This is to the abortionist. This is to the suffering and sick. Only God has the right to surprise His children with death.
|
|
god
life
peace
suicide
|
Chuck Palahniuk |
|
7895879
|
Then they wondered if there were men in the stars. Why not? And as creation is harmonious, the inhabitants of Sirius ought to be huge, those of Mars middle-sized, those of Venus very small. Unless it is the same everywhere. There are businessmen, police up there; people trade, fight, dethrone their kings. Some shooting stars suddenly slid past, describing a course in the sky like the parabola of a monstrous rocket. 'My Word,' said Bouvard, 'look at those worlds disappearing.' Pecuchet replied: 'If our world in its turn danced about, the citizens of the stars would be no more impressed than we are now. Ideas like that are rather humbling.' 'What is the point of it all?' 'Perhaps there isn't a point.' 'Yet...' and Pecuchet repeated the word two or three times, without finding anything more to say.
|
|
earth
life
outer-space
science
|
Gustave Flaubert |
|
83bf74c
|
"I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood." "Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?" "How else? Though not till I'm done reading."
|
|
history
life
reading
|
George R.R. Martin |
|
9e5e480
|
You had once asked me if I was afraid of death. I said I was afraid of not living. I don't want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.
|
|
life
self
selfishness
timidity
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
5417134
|
I could do a good imitation of a competent young woman.
|
|
life
womanhood
women
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
e8e046a
|
She ordered a martini and encouraged me to, but said she couldn't drink it with her medication. She just liked seeing it in front of her, like the old days, all set to do its little magic.
|
|
life
memories
nostalgia
siblings
|
Richard Ford |
|
8f81b22
|
We saw the same sunset.
|
|
life
unity
universe
|
S.E. Hinton |
|
7e999ef
|
In diversity is life and where there's life there's hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest one to be sure.
|
|
hope
inspirational
life
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
582e59a
|
What, after all, is so special about genes? The answer is that they are replicators. The laws of physics are supposed to be true all over the accessible universe. Are there any principles of biology which are likely to have similar universal validity? When astronauts voyage to distant planets and look for life, they can expect to find creatures too strange and unearthly for us to imagine. But is there anything which must be true of all life, wherever it is found, and whatever the basis of its chemistry? If forms of life exist whose chemistry is based on silicon rather than carbon, or ammonia rather than water, if creatures are discovered which boil to death at -100 degrees centigrade, if a form of life is found which is not based on chemistry at all, but on electronic reverberating circuits, will there still be any general principle which is true of all life? Obviously I do not know but, if I had to bet, I would put my money on one fundamental principle. This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity which prevails on our own planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process.
|
|
evolution
life
science
|
Richard Dawkins |
|
1131d64
|
I don't know who I am any more. I have no bloody idea. ... I don't know who I am. Or what my goal is...or where I'm headed in life. Or anything
|
|
hard
hard-life
life
tough
|
Sophie Kinsella |
|
8b86655
|
You speak as if this is a good world with a little evil in it. Rubbish. It's a hellish one where the best a man can do is put a little sanity back and look after his own.
|
|
life
self
|
A.J. Hartley and David Hewson |
|
ac4dfac
|
In my father's last letter he said that the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.
|
|
father
government
helpless
helplessness
impotence
impotent
law
letter
life
responsibility
streets
willing
willingness
world
|
Cormac McCarthy |
|
12680c5
|
If you remembered somebody was as real as yourself, how could you kill anybody?
|
|
life
nonviolence
violence
|
Sena Jeter Naslund |
|
9397687
|
I know we didn't accomplish anything, but it felt great to sit there and talk about our place in things.
|
|
existence
existentialism
friends
life
life-roles
|
Stephen Chbosky |
|
97c92e6
|
He is the earth and sunlight, the leaves of trees, the eagle's flight. He is alive. And all who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an end.
|
|
life
rebirth
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
02e60e3
|
From this day forward, I vowed to myself, I was in control of my life. Not fate, not God, not even Chris was ever again going to tell me what to do, or dominate me in any way. From this day forward, I was my own person, to take what I would, when I would, and I would answer only to myself.
|
|
control
domination
fate
life
vow
vows
|
V.C. Andrews |
|
8882f49
|
Love is bitter, death is sweet.
|
|
life
love
poetry
|
Jack Kerouac |
|
12766c3
|
And though I've lived to be an old man with my very own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.
|
|
life
reflection
|
Tim Winton |
|
9447bf5
|
I wasn't thanking him for the coin, or even for the trouble he'd taken in stopping to help me. I was thanking him for... well, for something I'm not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.
|
|
life
love
signs
|
Arthur Golden |
|
cc0250b
|
Character? I should have thought it needed a good deal of character to throw up a career after half an hour's meditation, because you saw in another way of living a more intense significance. And it required still more character never to regret the sudden step. I wondered if Abraham really had made a hash of life. Is to do what you most want, to live under the conditions that please you, in peace with yourself, to make a hash of life; and is it success to be an eminent surgeon with ten thousand a year and a beautiful wife? I suppose it depends on what meaning you attach to life, the claim which you acknowledge to society, and the claim of the individual. But again I held my tongue, for who am I to argue with a knight?
|
|
decisions
life
self-fulfillment
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
f65b159
|
But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life.
|
|
convictions
life
philosophy
sex
|
Ayn Rand |
|
ca87f59
|
He brooded on how close destruction always was to all creatures, animals as well as humans, and he realized that there is nothing we can predict or know for certain in this world except death.
|
|
death
life
wisdom
|
Hermann Hesse |
|
99e0704
|
There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough.
|
|
inspirational
life
love
soul
the-notebook
|
Nicholas Sparks |
|
bf17eb2
|
Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one--that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.
|
|
christianity
life
needs
nourishment
nurturing
religion
soul
|
Alain de Botton |
|
fd254b1
|
I wonder how much the general population of this country know that the legal system has far more to do with playing a good hand of poker than it does with justice.
|
|
justice
justice-system
legal-system
life
reality
reality-of-life
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
8da9480
|
Death is not a release, but an incentive. The more focused you are on your death, the more righteously you live your life.
|
|
life
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
b657a28
|
It is possible to be struck by a meteor or a single-engine plane while reading in a chair at home. Safes drop from rooftops and flatten the odd pedestrian mostly within the panels of the comics, but still, we know it is possible, as well as the flash of summer lightning, the thermos toppling over, spilling out on the grass. And we know the message can be delivered from within. The heart, no valentine, decides to quit after lunch, the power shut off like a switch, or a tiny dark ship is unmoored into the flow of the body's rivers, the brain a monastery, defenseless on the shore. This is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow, and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatiens-- the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick to burrow back under the loam. Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white, and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone, the small plants singing with lifted faces, and the click of the sundial as one hour sweeps into the next.
|
|
life
living
poetry
|
Billy Collins |
|
b64913e
|
Having begun to feel, people's desire to feel grew. They wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how it sometimes hurt. People became addicted to feeling. They struggled to uncover new emotions.
|
|
feelings
life
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
8dda2bd
|
Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.
|
|
life
writing
|
Ray Bradbury |
|
845f831
|
Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
|
|
fortitude
inspirational
life
motivational
resilience
|
Herman Melville |
|
7f89d46
|
Bad people very often do one good thing.
|
|
life
people
|
Emma Forrest |
|
b047119
|
There is no alternative to action, and that requires faith. The issue is how we are to mold for ourselves a belief system that is worthy of life.
|
|
belief-systems
life
|
Naguib Mahfouz |
|
49ee4f9
|
In happiness or unhappiness, living is a duty, and must be done thoroughly.
|
|
duty
inspirational
life
|
Ellis Peters |
|
8aaf2aa
|
Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech--and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives--he called them enemies!--hidden out of sight somewhere.
|
|
hypocrisy
life
thinking
|
Joseph Conrad |
|
0562c0c
|
You do right by me, I'll show you a life most suckers can't even dream of.
|
|
book
jacob
laugh
life
live
love
marlena
quote
water-for-elephants
|
Sara Gruen |
|
dbd289e
|
It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.
|
|
capture
life
moments
painting
|
John Fowles |
|
c0ac46a
|
We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [...] My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.
|
|
build-up
chronology
development
existentialism
family
generation-gap
history
life
modernity
past
present
time
|
Wallace Stegner |
|
515c08d
|
<> he said. <> <> the Alien said.
|
|
choice
life
volition
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
363d818
|
What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret its loss nevertheless.
|
|
life
mourning
regrets
|
John Steinbeck |
|
6d43345
|
What's important is the ambition that results from our weakness.
|
|
life
weakness
|
Sharon Creech |
|
861a234
|
Who indeed knows the secret of the earthly pilgrimage? Who knows for what we live, and struggle, and die? Who knows what keeps us living and struggling, while all things break about us? Who knows why the warm flesh of a child is such comfort, when one's own child is lost and cannot be recovered? Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wisdom.
|
|
cry-the-beloved-country
life
|
Alan Paton |
|
307cab0
|
To make the most of your life, you must keep the vision of eternity continually in your mind and the value of it in your heart.
|
|
fulfillment
life
|
Rick Warren |
|
06c4079
|
Shiroyama's heart stops. The earth's pulse beats against his ear. An inch away is a go clamshell stone, perfect and smooth ... ... a black butterfly lands on the white stone, and unfolds its wings.
|
|
life
|
David Mitchell |
|
084ff2e
|
"Don't make fun of me!" Ender said. "I'm afraid I'm going crazy."
|
|
crazyness
ender
genius
life
truth
|
Orson Scott Card |
|
f6b6417
|
...she did not believe that the world was a vale of tears but rather a joke that God had played and that it was idiotic to take it seriously if He himself never had.
|
|
life
life-philosophy
|
Isabel Allende |
|
d260cd8
|
"There is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment and to non-human forms of life, broadly considered. This mode of social ontology (for which no absolute distinction between social and ecological exists) has concrete implications for how we re-approach the issues of reproductive freedom and anti-war politics. The question is not whether a given being is living or not, nor whether the being in question has the status of a "person"; it is, rather, whether the social conditions of persistence and flourishing are or are not possible. Only with this latter question can we avoid the anthropocentric and liberal individualist presumptions that have derailed such discussions."
|
|
butler
individualism
life
personhood
social
social-ontology
|
Judith Butler |
|
55b50f2
|
I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and then make the choice to share it with other people. You can't just sit there and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love.
|
|
life
live
love
share
|
Stephen Chbosky |
|
7a3383f
|
There are a lot of things I can't control. I don't know what's going to happen in the next few days.I don't want what I am going to face, what kind of choices I am going to have to make. I can't predict it. I can't control it. It's too big.' I nodded at my shovel. 'But that, I can predict. I know that if I pick up that shovel and clear the snow from the walkways, it's going to make my neighbors safer and happier.' I glanced at him and shrugged. 'It's worthwhile to me.
|
|
humor
life
|
Jim Butcher |
|
f436abb
|
Look around. It's almost gone. If only someone had told me that before. About life. If only I had understood.
|
|
inspirational
life
life-is-short
understanding
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
cec2912
|
Who you allow into the circle of your life will make the difference in the quality of your life.
|
|
friendship
happiness
life
philosophy
zen
zen-and-the-art-of-happiness
|
Chris Prentiss |
|
49d0095
|
Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself.
|
|
daughters
family
generations
life
london
love
mothers
mothers-and-daughters
repel
urgency
|
Zadie Smith |
|
07c7c22
|
"It's one of these juvenile therapy scams," he went on, sprinkling a pinch of the Golden Virginia tobacco along the rolling paper. "They advertise help for your troubled teen by staring at the stars and singing 'Kumbaya'. Instead, it's a bunch of bearded nutjobs left in charge of some of the craziest kids I've ever seen in my life--bulimics, nymphos, cutters trying to saw their wrists with the plastic spoons from lunch. You wouldn't believe the shit that went on." He shook his head. "Most of the kids had been so mentally screwed by their parents they needed more than twelve weeks of . They needed reincarnation. To and just come back as a grasshopper, as a fucking . be preferable to the agony they were in just by being alive."
|
|
depression
life
mental-health
suicide
teenagers
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
51ea090
|
Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.
|
|
life
news
tragedy
|
Tom Perrotta |
|
79f1f84
|
Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I've more knowledge of life than you, I've lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is bursting with ideals. You think that because I can sometimes see what's trivial and what's important in art that I ought to be more virtuous. But I don't want to be virtuous. My charm (if there is any) for you is simply frankness. And experience. Not goodness. I'm not a good man. Perhaps morally I'm younger even than you are. Can you understand that?
|
|
betray
betrayal
betrayed
bursting
charm
experience
frank
frankness
good
goodness
ideal
ideals
important
knowledge
life
old
older
trivial
understand
virtue
virtuous
years
young
younger
|
John Fowles |
|
cde1dae
|
"Poor little girl. Poor little girl," Nan says, and at first I think she is speaking of the baby, perhaps it is a girl after all. But then I realize she is speaking of me, a girl of thirteen years, whose own mother has said that they can let her die as long as a son and heir is born."
|
|
history
life
personhood
women
|
Philippa Gregory |
|
1ee3672
|
She never had much in this life, but with the simplest things, she made her corner of the world as beautiful as any king's palace. We may lack riches, but the greatest fortune is what lies in our hearts.
|
|
heart
life
love
material-possessions
simplicity
stormy-lewellyn
|
Dean Koontz |
|
6659a53
|
You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.
|
|
john-galt
life
morals
philosophy
sacrifice
values
|
Ayn Rand |
|
5c93c37
|
You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives.
|
|
life
living
reason
|
Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
|
235d371
|
Allow God to use the difficulties and disappointments in life as polish to transform your faith into a glistening diamond that takes in and reflects His love.
|
|
daily
diamond
difficult
disappointments
faith
god
life
love
polish
reflective
transform
walk
women
|
Elizabeth George |
|
435d7f5
|
Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped living things to thrive on the stuff and, indeed, suffocate without it.
|
|
life
natural-selection
oxygen
|
Richard Dawkins |
|
e6ab4a2
|
"Our days are numbered in the book of days, Most High," Gorgon murmurs as the garden comes once more into view. "That is what gives them sweetness and purpose."
|
|
life
purpose
|
Libba Bray |
|
8a90d5a
|
However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.
|
|
life
|
Iris Murdoch |
|
e5a5cb0
|
The death of Nighteyes gutted me. I walked wounded through my life in the days that followed, unaware of just how mutilated I was. I was like the man who complains of the itching of his severed leg. The itching distracts from the immense knowledge that one will forever after hobble through life.
|
|
death
denial
effect
forever
itch
knowledge
life
mutilated
pain
result
unimaginable
wound
|
Robin Hobb |
|
c1e8d93
|
It's good if you can accept your life--you'll notice Your face has become deranged trying to adjust To it. Your face thought your life would look Like your bedroom mirror when you were ten. That was a clear river touched by mountain wind. Even your parents can't believe how much you've changed.
|
|
changing
coming-of-age
life
|
Robert Bly |
|
71c6e5b
|
What these people were trying to create or re-create here in this new world is beyond me. I can't put myself in their minds or their hearts, but I can sympathize with their struggle for an identity, with their puzzlement, which has troubled Americans from the very beginning - Who are we, where do we fit in, where are we going?
|
|
experience
life
|
Nelson DeMille |
|
885ea6e
|
But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then--all the combinations made--they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.
|
|
drawing
inspiration
life
perception
writing
|
Leo Tolstoy |
|
cca2b67
|
Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide--one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave--of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.
|
|
abu-musab-al-zarqawi
al-qaeda
al-qaeda-in-iraq
arab-spring
death
death-of-osama-bin-laden
exorcism
feminism
iraq
islamism
life
literature
music
osama-bin-laden
pakistan
secularism
september-11-attacks
sunni-islam
terrorism
theocracy
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
3a71a5f
|
Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it--that no substitute can do your thinking--that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.
|
|
evil
good
happiness
independence
john-galt
life
man
mind
morality
morals
objectivism
pain
philosophy
pursuit-of-happiness
rational
reason
think
thinking
truth
values
virtue
wisdom
|
Ayn Rand |
|
1a14c6c
|
Tomorrow and tomorrow come creeping in and always will. We're fools trapped in a mechanism of our own unconscious making. Shadows strutting and fretting for one brief hour upon a stage, then heard no more. I'll weep an ocean in my heart, if the world would give me time. But not now.
|
|
grief
insignificance
life
tomorrow
|
David Hewson |
|
ce2a8de
|
Morning seems to come earlier every year I live.
|
|
life
time
|
John Steinbeck |
|
347c822
|
Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms...
|
|
life
love
respect
truth
wisdom
|
Simone de Beauvoir |
|
dd763dc
|
What infinite heart's-ease Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy! And what have kings, that privates have not too, Save ceremony, save general ceremony? And what art thou, thou idle ceremony? What kind of god art thou, that suffer'st more Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers? What are thy rents? what are thy comings in? O ceremony, show me but thy worth! What is thy soul of adoration? Art thou aught else but place, degree and form, Creating awe and fear in other men? Wherein thou art less happy being fear'd Than they in fearing. What drink'st thou oft, instead of homage sweet, But poison'd flattery? O, be sick, great greatness, And bid thy ceremony give thee cure! Think'st thou the fiery fever will go out With titles blown from adulation? Will it give place to flexure and low bending? Canst thou, when thou command'st the beggar's knee, Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream, That play'st so subtly with a king's repose; I am a king that find thee, and I know 'Tis not the balm, the sceptre and the ball, The sword, the mace, the crown imperial, The intertissued robe of gold and pearl, The farced title running 'fore the king, The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp That beats upon the high shore of this world, No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony, Not all these, laid in bed majestical, Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave, Who with a body fill'd and vacant mind Gets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread; Never sees horrid night, the child of hell, But, like a lackey, from the rise to set Sweats in the eye of Phoebus and all night Sleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn, Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse, And follows so the ever-running year, With profitable labour, to his grave: And, but for ceremony, such a wretch, Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep, Had the fore-hand and vantage of a king. The slave, a member of the country's peace, Enjoys it; but in gross brain little wots What watch the king keeps to maintain the peace, Whose hours the peasant best advantages.
|
|
burdens
ceremony
emptiness
empty-form
equality
exaltation
feudal-society
flattery
fulfillment
honors
humanity
kings
life
mankind
meaninglessness
peasants
pomp
purpose-in-life
royalty
satisfaction
society
values
work
|
William Shakespeare |
|
9b0f875
|
One of the greatest advantages of singleness is the potential for greater focus on Christ and accomplishing work for Him.
|
|
calling
christian
god
life
love
marriage
potential
single
singleness
work
young
|
Elizabeth George |
|
1a0ccf3
|
"My feet," said Montag. "I can't move them. I feel so damn silly. My feet won't move!" "Listen. Easy now," said the old man gently. "I know, I know. You're afraid of making mistakes. be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn." --
|
|
fahrenheit-451
growth
guy-montag
ignorance
learning
life
|
Ray Bradbury |
|
35ec3d5
|
Miss Abbott, don't worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. I'm one of them.
|
|
forster
life
philosophy
where-angels-fear-to-tread
|
E.M. Forster |
|
598b29e
|
I walked home, seeing all my doubt from the other side. Have you ever seen that? Like when you go on holiday. On the way back, everything is the same but it looks a little different than it did on the way. It's because you're seeing it backwards.
|
|
life
perception
view
|
Markus Zusak |
|
3508352
|
And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.
|
|
life
|
Gregory Maguire |
|
f275130
|
I had not been prepared for the simple charm of watching someone you love grow.
|
|
life
love
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
543894a
|
Perhaps the price of comfort is that life passes more rapidly. But for anyone who has lived in uneasiness, even for a short, memorable duration, it's a trade-off that will gladly be made.
|
|
life
|
Arthur Nersesian |
|
18b4bdc
|
Este incredibil cat de completa este iluzia care ne face sa credem ca frumusetea este in genere bunatate.
|
|
life
truth
|
Leo Tolstoy |
|
66331b0
|
... the only thing that makes life worthwhile is loving orher people and being loved by them. - Pia Obrian
|
|
life
life-lessons
love
loving
|
Susan Mallery |
|
f537e95
|
By day I am nothing, by night I am I.
|
|
life
|
Fernando Pessoa |
|
359905f
|
They are so very cultivated, so very rich and so utterly charming. At the end of each day, they all ask themselves: 'Is it time I stopped?' And they all reply: 'If I did, there would be no meaning to my life.' As if they actually knew what the meaning of life was.
|
|
life
meaning
|
Paulo Coelho |
|
ea74f04
|
You may not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. ... The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity--it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.
|
|
life
|
Yann Martel |
|
52330aa
|
She is here. And she comes to you, and she does not speak, and the others do not notice her, and she takes your hand, and you ready yourself to die, eyes open, aware this is all an illusion, a last aroma cast up by the chemical stew that is your brain, which will soon cease to function, ad there will be nothing, and you are ready, ready to die well, ready to die like a man, like a woman, like a human, for despite all else you have loved, you have loved your father and your mother and your brother and your sister and your son and, yes, your ex-wife and you have loved the pretty girl, you have been beyond yourself, and so you have courage, and you have dignity, and you have calmness in the face of terror, and awe, and the pretty girl holds your hand, and you contain her, and this book, and me writing it, and I too contain you, who may not even be born, you inside me inside you, though not in a creepy way, and so may you, may I, may we, so may all of us confront the end.
|
|
death
inspirational
life
love
old-age
poignant
self-help
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
ca517bb
|
The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, narrow crannies. In the leaves, the toad's pulse. The delicate cellular warfare in a waterdrop. A dextrocardiac, said the smiling doctor. Your heart's in the right place. Weathershrunk and loveless. The skin drawn and split like an overripe fruit.
|
|
cellular
heart
life
loveless
nature
overripe
pump
warfare
|
Cormac McCarthy |
|
16c281c
|
"One of the greatest tragedies of growing up is the discovery that your parents- and your teachers, and your sports heroes, and your favorite actors, singers, YouTube sensations- are fallible. Adults don't know all, and what they do know, they often won't tell you- because they've got their own agendas, or because they want to shield you from the hard truths "for your own good." Adults lie, they betray, they screw up in every way possible..."
|
|
childhood
growing-up
life
|
Robin Wasserman |
|
3ab87bc
|
Rudeness affected Margaret like a bitter taste in the mouth. It poisoned life. At times it is necessary, but woe to those who employ it without due need.
|
|
howards-end
life
manners
rude
rudeness
unpleasant
|
E.M. Forster |
|
98a01e0
|
- Vzemete koito shchete moriak, gazil v d'lboki vodi i sreshchal sm'rtta tolkova p'ti, kolkoto men, drasnete go s nok't po kozhata i otdolu shche namerite filosof. Zasukanite dumi shche sa mu chuzhdi, garantiram vi, no shche namerite d'lbok i traen uset za miastoto mu v sveta.
|
|
амос
българия
български
бард
bulgaria
bulgarian
feist
фийст
философ
filosofia
life
магьосник
майстор
място
more
philosopher
philosophy
place
raymond
разлом
реймънд
saga
sea
война
world
живот
|
Raymond E. Feist |
|
4fc767e
|
Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.
|
|
life
|
Annie Dillard |
|
eb420cb
|
The speech of God's beautiful woman is a fountain of life to those around her.
|
|
christian
eyes
faith
fountain
girl
god
her
lady
lady-like
life
nice
pretty
speech
woman
|
Elizabeth George |
|
d2c007e
|
Diligence and Application have their due Encouragement, even in the remotest Parts of the World, and that no Case can be so low, so despicable, or so empty of Prospect, but that an unwearied Industry will go a great way to deliver us from it, will in time raise the meanest Creature to appear again in the World, and give him a new Case for his Life.
|
|
diligence
life
|
Daniel Defoe |
|
330e88d
|
The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.
|
|
dreams
expectancy
hope
idleness
life
repetition
|
Vladimir Nabokov |
|
4f99ae2
|
I hope you had fun, I hope you had a nice, nice time being happy, Ender. It might be the last time in your life.
|
|
life
|
Orson Scott Card |
|
c765b4b
|
A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living': so too with the biography of that self. And just as lives don't stay still, so life-writing can't be fixed and finalised. Our ideas are shifting about what can be said, our knowledge of human character is changing. The biographer has to pioneer, going 'ahead of the rest of us, like the miner's canary, testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions'. So, 'There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation'. She is talking about the story of Shelley, but she could be talking about her own life-story. (Virginia Woolf, p. 11)
|
|
life
woolf
|
Hermione Lee |
|
f2fd91b
|
Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.
|
|
life
soul
struggle
truth
|
Herman Melville |
|
38e2e5f
|
Sometimes when you get older--and I'm not talking about you, I'm talking generally, because everyone ages differently--things you think on and wish on start to seem real. And then you believe them, and before you know it they're a part of your history, and if someone challenges you on them and says they're not true--why, then you get offended.
|
|
belief
challenge
history
life
offended
truth
|
Sara Gruen |
|
c8ee363
|
lqd `rf kyf ymwt , km `rf kyf y`ysh
|
|
life
|
Isabel Allende |
|
3297c43
|
Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness--to value the failure of your values--is an insolent negation of morality.
|
|
evil
good
happiness
john-galt
life
man
mind
morality
morals
objectivism
philosophy
pursuit-of-happiness
rational
reason
think
thinking
values
virtue
|
Ayn Rand |
|
bdc4243
|
The best way for you to get that new experience is to change your response to what happens.
|
|
happiness
life
philosophy
zen
zen-and-the-art-of-happiness
|
Chris Prentiss |
|
182e490
|
One day you discover you are alive. Explosion! Concussion! Illumination! Delight! You laugh, you dance around, you shout. But, not long after, the sun goes out. Snow falls, but no one sees it, on an August noon.
|
|
death
life
summer
|
Ray Bradbury |
|
bb2fc86
|
I have no emotions. I just stand there, in the rubble of my life. This... this was my home. If it were a person, this would be a gaping chest wound, the kind no one can recover from.
|
|
feelings
home
life
rubble
wounds
|
Beth Revis |
|
021f2a2
|
En los momentos mas terribles de la vida solemos caer en una suerte de irresponsabilidad protectora y en vez de pensar en lo que nos ocurre dirigimos la atencion a trivialidades.
|
|
irresponsibility
life
procrastination
trauma
|
Adolfo Bioy Casares |
|
e658818
|
What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one's glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins
|
|
courage
existence
growth
life
narrow-mindedness
open-mindedness
perspective
society
|
Alice Walker |
|
ed603a0
|
those who are ignorant naturally consider everything possible.
|
|
ignorance
life
possibility
|
Franz Kafka |
|
968819c
|
insanin butun eylemleri kendisine yoneliktir, butun hizmetleri kendine hizmettir, butun sevgisi kendini sevmesindendir.
|
|
life
|
Irvin D. Yalom |
|
96fd4c2
|
Just because something isn't good doesn't mean it's bad.
|
|
book
characters
crime
depth
ethics
evil
good
life
literary
lonely
misunderstood
novel
sad
spooky
truth
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
1563b75
|
Here some one thrust these cards into these old hands of mine, swears that I must play them, and no others. And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right, live in the game, and die in it.
|
|
game-theory
hunts
life
|
Herman Melville |
|
5f8c42d
|
After the gratifications of brutish appetites are past, the greatest pleasure then is to get rid of that which entertained it.
|
|
battle-of-the-sexes
don-quixote
dorothea
humor
life
love
lust
pleasure
sex
truth
|
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra |
|
ccbebd0
|
No matter what night preceded it, she had never known a morning when she did not feel the rise of a quiet excitement that became a tightening energy in her body and a hunger for action in her mind--because this was the beginning of day and it was a day of her life.
|
|
dagny-taggart
life
|
Ayn Rand |
|
6984399
|
"Pa said, "Won't you say a few words? Ain't none of our folks ever been buried without a few words." Connie led Rose of Sharon to the graveside, she reluctant. "You got to," Connie said. "It ain't decent not to. It'll jus' be a little. The firelight fell on the grouped people, showing their faces and their eyes, dwindling on their dark clothes.All the hats were off now. The light danced, jerking over the people. Casy said, It'll be a short one." He bowed his head, and the others followed his lead. Casy said solemnly, "This here ol' man jus' lived a life an' just died out of it. I don't know whether he was good or bad, but that don't matter much. He was alive, an' that's what matters. An' now his dead, an' that don't matter. Heard a fella tell a poem one time, an' he says 'All that lives is holy.' Got to thinkin', an' purty soon it means more than the words says. An' I woundn' pray for a ol' fella that's dead. He's awright. He got a job to do, but it's all laid out for'im an' there's on'y one way to do it. But us, we got a job to do, an' they's a thousan' ways, an' we don' know which one to take. An' if I was to pray, it'd be for the folks that don' know which way to turn. Grampa here, he got the easy straight. An' now cover 'im up and let'im get to his work." He raised his head."
|
|
death
funeral
last-words
life
|
John Steinbeck |
|
ce95a04
|
Our souls are but leaves in a storm, and only the gods know where we will come to rest.
|
|
fait
gods
life
people
prophecy
|
David Gemmell |
|
6889189
|
The classes were valuable, but the real education was the game.
|
|
game
genius
life
live
truth
war
world
|
Orson Scott Card |
|
336bad4
|
Why are my sons followed thus by darkness?' ...'Because they were born in the house of flesh, therefore death follows at their heels.
|
|
dying
inevitability
life
living
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
ba2547d
|
Hope could be a wonderful thing. But hope could crush you anew every single day. Hope could be the cruelest thing in the world.
|
|
life
|
Harlan Coben |
|
fa9be41
|
At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.
|
|
life
|
Matt Ridley |
|
b779264
|
My mother? My own mother told my lady governess that if the baby and I were in danger then they should save the baby.
|
|
history
life
personhood
women
|
Philippa Gregory |
|
286bfb2
|
"If life were a movie, we'd have had what they call a "meet cute"."
|
|
life
love
meet-cute
|
James Patterson |
|
d4aa10e
|
Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking--that the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide of action--that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise--that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality--that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind--that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one's consciousness.
|
|
evil
good
happiness
john-galt
life
man
mind
morality
morals
objectivism
pain
philosophy
pursuit-of-happiness
rational
reason
think
thinking
truth
values
virtue
wisdom
|
Ayn Rand |
|
6b2527f
|
You do it how you can do it, so long as it's getting done, you're okay.
|
|
inspirational
life
|
Emma Forrest |
|
2d9d85e
|
Survival often demands our courage.
|
|
life
survival
|
David Mitchell |
|
f319a87
|
The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.
|
|
beliefs
bigotry
fear
inferiority
life
race-relations
racism
superiority
white-people
|
James Baldwin |
|
320ac14
|
There's no comfort, it seems, in the world of objects.
|
|
alienation
life
melancholy
|
Michael Cunningham |
|
c7ae766
|
"The voice came from the night all around him, in his head and out of it. "What do you want?' it repeated. He wondered if he dared to turn and look, realised he did not. 'Well? You come here every night, in a place where the living are not welcome. I have seen you. Why?' 'I wanted to meet you,' he said, without looking around. 'I want to live for ever.' His voice cracked as he said it. He had stepped over the precipice. There was no going back. In his imagination, he could already feel the prick of needle-sharp fangs in his neck, a sharp prelude to eternal life. The sound began. It was low and sad, like the rushing of an underground river. It took him several long seconds to recognise it as laughter. 'This is not life,' said the voice. It said nothing more, and after a while the young man knew he was alone in the graveyard."
|
|
life
vampires
|
Neil Gaiman |
|
f2a9b73
|
Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?
|
|
life
|
Joseph Conrad |
|
1b6d740
|
If he's like any other man I've ever met, it's not my smile he's going to be looking at.
|
|
brad-thor
fiction
humor
life
men
scot-harvath
thriller
|
Brad Thor |
|
dd781c8
|
Believe me, once you have tasted worship--the kind of worship that captures your heart and rivets your full attention on the living Lord--nothing less satisfies. Nothing else even comes close. Once you have tasted true worship, you will never want to play church again.
|
|
life
religion
|
Charles R. Swindoll |
|
a11454c
|
We do our job and go. See? That is what Death is for. We work out all our little brains and all our little emotions, and then this lot begins afresh. Fresh and fresh! Perfectly simple. What's the trouble?
|
|
life
mortality
|
H.G. Wells |
|
1af4461
|
We pimp our precious lives to the infernal gnashing babble - Follow me! Friend me! Like me! But don't ever know me.
|
|
follow
know
knowledge
life
like
social-network
society
|
Patrick Marber |
|
385f872
|
Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By most astounding stroke of luck and infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist. For endless eons there was no you. Before you know it, you will cease to be again. And in between you have this wonderful opportunity to see and feel and think and do. Whatever else you do with your life, nothing will remotely compare with the incredible accomplishment of having managed to get yourself born. Congratulations. Well done. You really are special.
|
|
inspirational
life
living
|
Bill Bryson |
|
df42bcb
|
"My dear Mrs Casaubon," said Farebrother, smiling gently at her ardour, "character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do." "Then it may be rescued and healed," said Dorothea."
|
|
life
positive-thinking
|
George Eliot |
|
a043896
|
You don't have to want to be in a relationship for a little bow-chicka-bow-wow.
|
|
life
love
|
Jennifer L. Armentrout |
|
fe66d87
|
A real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things that can be named.
|
|
humble
life
mercy
|
James Baldwin |
|
10822cb
|
"The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide"s reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the Page | 49 . state which paid the coroner? And then, since you had been declared temporarily mad, your reasons for killing yourself were also assumed to be mad. So I doubt anyone paid much attention to Adrian"s argument, with its references to philosophers ancient and modern, about the superiority of the intervening act over the unworthy passivity of merely letting life happen to you."
|
|
law
life
society
society-individualism
suicide
|
Julian Barnes |
|
c384a57
|
Who's to say? Life is not, as we are taught, a matter of seeking answers, but rather learning which are the questions we should ask.
|
|
life
questions
|
Kate Mosse |
|
3a16c34
|
Only one life, it will soon be past, only what's done for Christ will last.
|
|
christ
christian
done
faith
god
jesus
last
life
one
past
soon
|
Elizabeth George |
|
c2baa1a
|
"But, Mameha-san, I don't want kindness!" "Don't you? I thought we all wanted kindness. Perhaps what you mean is that you want something more than kindness. And that is something you're in no position to ask."
|
|
kindness
life
love
|
Arthur Golden |
|
9dafa6b
|
Onzi, shcho biaga ot uchastta si, mozhe niakoi den da otkrie, che samo e izbral po-priaka p'teka.
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inspirational
journey
life
path
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J.R.R. Tolkien |
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3b9f197
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I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn't resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink (...) That was a very different thing from wanting to die.
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freedom
life
wild
wilderness
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Jon Krakauer |
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b2506c7
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Precariousness and precarity are intersecting concepts. Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed
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life
precariousness
precarity
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Judith Butler |
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8771415
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lmr'@ hy lHy@, lmwt nfsh ykll bjll@ lHq byn ydyh.
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life
woman
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Naguib Mahfouz |
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8932a6b
|
I wish life was like banking,' I said. 'I don't mean it's straightforward. Some of it's incredibly complicated. But you can understand it in the end, if you try hard enough. Or there's someone, somewhere, who understands it, even if only afterwards, after it's too late. The trouble with life, it seems to me, is that it can turn out to be too late and you still haven't understood it.
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life
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Julian Barnes |