America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.
If I have accomplished anything in life, it is because I have been willing to work hard.
It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one’s germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!
That’s how I know they are dreams. Because the simple and plain and everyday things are the ones that we can never have. (Cassia Reyes)
We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
I am afraid because I can so clearly foresee my own life rotting away of itself, like a leaf that rots without falling, while I pursue my round of existence from day to day.
Learning how to be still, to really be still and let life happen – that stillness becomes a radiance.
Don’t ever doubt yourselves or waste a second of your life. It’s too short, and you’re too special.
The apartment below mine had the only balcony of the house. I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in the pool of autumn twilight. She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.
The span of three or four minutes is pretty insignificant in the scheme of things. People lose hundreds of minutes everyday, squandering them on trivial things. But sometimes in those fragments of time, something can happen you’ll remember the rest of your life.
Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.
Part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles, but in avoiding them. A masterly retreat is in itself a victory.
Life makes fools of all of us sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor and you’ll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, its our own expectations that crush us.
My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.
Better to die fighting for freedom then be a prisoner all the days of your life.
I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I’ve got.
I believe that God put us in this jolly world to be happy and enjoy life.
But to believe that getting stuff is the purpose and aim of life is madness.
No one is the same, and we all have different life experiences. It’s not my place to judge them or for them to judge me. We should all be accountable for our own lives.
Disappointment came to me,
and booted me,
and bruised and hurt me,
but that’s how people grow up.
Stay hungry, stay young, stay foolish, stay curious, and above all, stay humble because just when you think you got all the answers, is the moment when some bitter twist of fate in the universe will remind you that you very much don’t.
You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don’t want to understand you.
When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.
Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.
One day can change your life. One day can ruin your life. All life is is three or four big days that change everything.
He died that day because his body had served its purpose. His soul had done what it came to do, learned what it came to learn, and then was free to leave.
If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
The way you give your name to others is a measure of how much you like and
respect yourself.
Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretence.
It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life.
Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, dont you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don’t try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.
Life doesn’t make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy’s job is to point out that it doesn’t make sense, and that it doesn’t make much difference anyway.
It didn’t make you noble to step away from something that wasn’t working, even if you thought you were the reason for the malfunction. Especially then. It just made you a quitter. Because if you were the problem, chances were you could also be the solution. The only way to find out was to take another shot.
I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.
The most important thing is to enjoy your life—to be happy—it’s all that matters.
I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give.
Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.
I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live as if there isn’t and to die to find out that there is.
Dreams do not come true just because you dream them. It’s hard work that makes things happen. It’s hard work that creates change.
What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this — two things: I crave truth. And I lie.
Just when you think it can’t get any worse, it can. And just when you think it can’t get any better, it can.
No matter what has happened to you in the past or what is going on in your life right now, it has no power to keep you from having an amazingly good future if you will walk by faith in God. God loves you! He wants you to live with victory over sin so you can possess His promises for your life today!