I wonder why I don’t go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live.
Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I’m alive, I must live and be happy.
If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
When I look in the mirror, I know I’m looking at someone who isn’t sure she deserves to be loved at all.
Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn’t understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn’t much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.
I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
It is a very funny thing that the sleepier you are, the longer you take about getting to bed.
What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven.
After all, it’s all kinds of things that make up a life, right? The big, like falling in love and spending time with your family, and the little….like blow drying your hair, applying concealer, and cursing those magazine inserts. It all counts. It has to.
There are no random acts…We are all connected…You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind…
After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.
You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips.
All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Death and life have their determined appointments; riches and honors depend upon heaven.
Without health life is not life; it is only a state of langour and suffering – an image of death.
There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one’s own in the midst of abundance.
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
Life is a journey that must be traveled no matter how bad the roads and accommodations.
You can’t make positive choices for the rest of your life without an environment that makes those choices easy, natural, and enjoyable.
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.
Even though human life may be the most precious thing on earth, we always behave as if there were something of higher value than human life.
You will have five hundred million little bells, and I shall have five hundred million springs of fresh water…
Don’t give up! It’s not over. The universe is balanced. Every set-back bears with it the seeds of a come-back.
Don’t dwell on things. Don’t stay in one place too long. It was the only way to stay ahead of sadness.
The voice says, maybe you don’t go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don’t do. The things you don’t finish.
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
What keeps life fascinating is the constant creativity of the soul.
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life — the life God is sending one day by day.
Dying is only one thing to be sad over. Living unhappily is something else.
Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day.
Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.
Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.
To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.
Life’ wrote a friend of mine, ‘is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
Because if you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward.
In love, as in life, one misheard word can be tremendously important. If you tell someone you love them, for instance, you must be absolutely certain that they have replied “I love you back” and not “I love your back” before you continue the conversation.
I really don’t see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I’ll certainly try to forget the fact.
Wanting him to come back before anyone notices part of the world has not moved since he left.
Each affects the other, and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.
Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ‘morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’ clouds.
If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!
Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to.
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
There are times to stay put, and what you want will come to you, and there are times to go out into the world and find such a thing for yourself.
If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don’t, they never were.
At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.
People aren’t either wicked or noble. They’re like chef’s salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.