Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.
Sadly enough, the most painful goodbyes are the ones that are left unsaid and never explained.
They know that tragedy is not glamorous. They know it doesn’t play out in life as it does on a stage or between the pages of a book. It is neither a punishment meted out nor a lesson conferred. Its horrors are not attributable to one single person. Tragedy is ugly and tangled, stupid and confusing.
Life isn’t meant to be lived perfectly…but merely to be LIVED. Boldly, wildly, beautifully, uncertainly, imperfectly, magically LIVED.
I’d found out that if you pushed people away hard enough, they tended to go.
The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.
But what are loyalty and caring really worth?”
“To me? Everything.
Life’s like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.
An ability to look into the confusing mess of life and see things for what they are.
Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational.
All women, whatever be their position, should demand political equality as a means of a freer life, and one calculated to yield rich blessings to society.
It was like when you ripped a piece of paper into two: no matter how you tried, the seams never fit exactly right again.
Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.
Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”
[Stanford University commencement speech, 2005]
Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.
The sharpest minds often ruin their lives by overthinking the next step, while the dull win the race with eyes closed.
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
But I think we both knew, even then, that what we had was something even more rare, and even more meaningful. I was going to be his friend, and was going to show him possibilities. And he, in turn, would become someone I could trust more than myself.
Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don’t last your whole life.
I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Life is so full of unpredictable beauty and strange surprises. Sometimes that beauty is too much for me to handle. Do you know that feeling? When something is just too beautiful? When someone says something or writes something or plays something that moves you to the point of tears, maybe even changes you.
What were you before you met me?”
“I think I was drowning”
“And what are you now?”
“Water
Numbers do not feel. Do not bleed or weep or hope. They do not know bravery or sacrifice. Love and allegiance. At the very apex of callousness, you will find only ones and zeros.
People who keep stiff upper lips find that it’s damn hard to smile.
The best index to a person’s character is how he treats people who can’t do him any good, and how he treats people who can’t fight back.
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.
I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.
CALVIN:
When I grow up I want to be an inventor. First I will invent a time machine. Then I’ll come back to yesterday and take myself to tomorrow and skip this dumb assignment.
In order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did and why you no longer need to feel it.
People are unhappy when they get something too easily. You have to sweat–that’s the only moral they know.
I scream for everything that has gone wrong. I scream for everything broken in our lives.
Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
I have lost and loved and won and cried myself to the person I am today.
He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one’s waking life was spent watching one’s feet.
I must die. Must I then die lamenting? I must be put in chains. Must I then also lament? I must go into exile. Does any man then hinder me from going with smiles and cheerfulness and contentment?
The rain fluctuates between drizzle and torrential. It messes with your mind. It makes you think things will always be like this, never getting better, always letting you down right when you though the worst was over.
Nobody is so busy that they can’t make time for the people they really care about.
Dreams are hopeful because they exist as pure possibility. Unlike memories, which are fossils, long dead and buried deep.
Decide what you want to be….
Pay the Price …
And be what you want to be.
This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.
The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.
It’s easy to look back and see it, and it’s easy to give the advice. But the sad fact is, most people don’t look beneath the surface until it’s too late.
Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.
Communication is a skill that you can learn. It’s like riding a bicycle or typing. If you’re willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of evry part of your life.
Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.
Never stop smiling not even when you’re sad, someone might fall in love with your smile.
Sometimes you have to kind of die inside in order to rise from your own ashes and believe in yourself and love yourself to become a new person.
Learn to drive?”
“Never,” said Quentin. “My mission in life is to be a passenger.
Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.
Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.
She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
Of her life, and weaves them gratefully
Into a single cloth –
It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
And clears it for a different celebration.
For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live –moreover, the only one.