Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?
You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.
It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. … The life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.
There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.
Life is nothing without a little chaos to make it interesting.
Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life
Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a
listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all
of which have the potential to turn a life around.
Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
It’s not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What’s hard, she said, is figuring out what you’re willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.
I don’t want to live, I want to love first and live incidentally.
Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall
If you live each day as it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right
I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.
Live life fully while you’re here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You’re going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process. Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it. Don’t try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human.
Magic
Sandra’s seen a leprechaun,
Eddie touched a troll,
Laurie danced with witches once,
Charlie found some goblins gold.
Donald heard a mermaid sing,
Susy spied an elf,
But all the magic I have known
I’ve had to make myself.
Sometimes I just think depression’s one way of coping with the world. Like, some people get drunk, some people do drugs, some people get depressed. Because there’s so much stuff out there that you have to do something to deal with it.
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love.
You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude
toward what happens to you, and in that, you will be mastering change rather
than allowing it to master you.
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
People die, I think, but your relationship with them doesn’t. It continues and is ever-changing.
There was a moment in my life when I really wanted to kill myself. And there was one other moment when I was close to that. . . . But even in my most jaded times, I had some hope.
I am convinced that most people do not grow up…We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
We’d met at a carefree time, a moment full of promise, in its place now were the harsh lessons of the real world.
Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?
I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.
You can’t just plan a moment when things get back on track, just as you can’t plan the moment you lose your way in the first place.
After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die.
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.
Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. – Amir
It’s everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I don’t know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much only in a different way.
But I have learned that you make your own happiness, that part of going for what you want means losing something else. And when the stakes are high, the losses can be that much greater.
Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.
You can live your whole life not realizing that what you’re looking for is right in front of you.
If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.
But I don’t believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or to make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.
If you only shine light on your flaws, all your perfects will dim.
To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is…at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away…
Breathe. Let go. And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure.
How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That’s what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul – would you understand why that’s much harder?
You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.
I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
I don’t think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.
In the end, it wasn’t death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.
Hollowness: that I understand. I’m starting to believe that there isn’t anything you can do to fix it. That’s what I’ve taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mold yourself through the gaps