At a pivotal time in my life, Barack Obama gave me hope that a boy who grew up like me could still achieve the most important of my dreams. For that, I’ll miss him and the example he set.
He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.
Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.
Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.
Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.
It’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.
In life, it is important to not be afraid to put yourself out there, win or lose. It is all about the spirit of challenging yourself to be open to realizing your highest potential.
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led to nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.
People who say that yesterday was better than today are ultimately devaluing their own existence.
Good things don’t wait until you’re ready. Sometimes they come right before, when you’re almost there. And I figured when that happens, you can let them pass by like a bus not meant for you. Or you can get ready. So I got ready.
The lessons from the peace process are clear; whatever life throws at us, our individual responses will be all the stronger for working together and sharing the load.
I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine—it always keeps the way beyond open—always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake—after a wrong guess.
In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.
Life is an intricate play with actors waiting for an explanation. Each added act confers a new interpretation of the story. ( “Waiting for the pieces to fall into place” )
Knowledge, like air, is vital to life. Like air, no one should be denied it.
Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
So, what if, instead of thinking about solving your whole life, you just think about adding additional good things. One at a time. Just let your pile of good things grow.
The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.
Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.
Never stop just because you feel defeated. The journey to the other side is attainable only after great suffering.
I wonder if that’s how darkness wins, by convincing us to trap it inside ourselves, instead of emptying it out.
I don’t want it to win.
If cats looked like frogs we’d realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That’s what people remember.
And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.
Yeah, sometimes life really sucks,” she says. “But you know what I’m holding on for?”
I raise my eyebrows.
She raises hers, too, mimicking me.
“The moments that don’t suck,” she says. “The trick is to notice them when they come around.
Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.
To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.
No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.
Remember how it was when we kissed? Armfuls and armfuls of light thrown right at us. A rope dropping down from the sky. How can the word love and the word life even fit in the mouth?
Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
The hardest thing about the road not taken is that you never know where it might have led.
You might be tempted to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness. This of course would be an attachment to stillness, and like any strong attachment, it leads to delusion. It arrests development and short-circuits the cultivation of wisdom.
Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
There are two ways to live a life either forget everything or, remember nothing.
You define your own life. Don’t let other people write your script.
I do not forget any good deed done to me & I do not carry a grudge for a bad one.
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.
You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.
Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.
I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it.
There is no better teacher than history in determining the future… There are answers worth billions of dollars in 30$ history book.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.
Water is life’s matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water.
Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness–how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I’ve got!
There are so many things I can’t believe. That people deserve what they get, both bad and good. That one day I’ll live in a world where people are judged by what they do instead of who they are. That happy endings don’t have contingencies and conditions.
I’ve come to believe that in everyone’s life, there’s one undeniable moment of change, a set of circumstances that suddenly alters everything.
Faith gives you an inner strength and a sense of balance and perspective in life.
There are more important things in life than winning or losing a game.
A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body – the wishbone.
I want to drag knives over my skin, just to feel something other than shame, but I’m not even brave enough for that
People make mistakes in life through believing too much, but they have a damned dull time if they believe too little.