149 Inspiring Quotes On Living

There are moments in life when a sprinkle of wisdom and a dash of inspiration can profoundly impact our journey. Whether you're searching for motivation to push through challenges, seeking solace during tough times, or simply wanting to reflect on the beauty of existence, a powerful quote can be just the spark you need. In this compilation, we've gathered 149 of the most inspiring quotes on living. These words of wisdom from diverse thinkers, authors, and leaders aim to ignite your passion, elevate your perspective, and encourage you to live your life to the fullest. Dive in and let these timeless insights illuminate your path.

1. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” - Annie Dillard

2. “What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.” - John Irving

3. “Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out.” - Anton Chekhov

4. “We shouldn't live as if [other worlds] mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.” - Philip Pullman

5. “We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.” - Thornton Wilder

6. “Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.” - Mark Twain

7. “Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.” - Cormac McCarthy

8. “Had we but World enough, and Time, This coyness Lady were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long Loves Day.” - Andrew Marvell

9. “Often the test of courage becomes rather to live than to die.” - Vittorio Alfieri

10. “Making a FistFor the first time, on the road north of Tampico,I felt the life sliding out of me,a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.I was seven, I lay in the carwatching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin."How do you know if you are going to die?"I begged my mother.We had been traveling for days.With strange confidence she answered,"When you can no longer make a fist."Years later I smile to think of that journey,the borders we must cross separately,stamped with our unanswerable woes.I who did not die, who am still living,still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,clenching and opening one small hand.” - Naomi Shihab Nye

11. “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” - Aldo Leopold

12. “The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.” - Alan Wilson Watts

13. “The morning wind spreads its fresh smell. We must get up and take that in, that wind that lets us live. Breathe before it's gone.” - Rumi

14. “Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.” - Nathaniel Hawthorne

15. “Tout est question d'équilibre” - Mireille Guiliano

16. “Patience, he thought. So much of this was patience - waiting, and thinking and doing things right. So much of all this, so much of all living was patience and thinking.” - Gary Paulsen

17. “As you walk and eat and travel, be where you are. Otherwise you will miss most of your life.” - Siddhārtha Gautama

18. “If life is worth living for so is it worth dying.” - Santosh Kalwar

19. “We never know when our last day on earth will be. So, love with full sincerity, believe with true faith, and hope with all of your might. Better to have lived in truth and discovered life, than to have lived half heartedly and died long before you ever ceased breathing. ” - Cristina Marrero

20. “We need faith and the mind of the Lord Jesus to recognize something of lasting value in even our most ordinary tasks.” - Phillip Yancey

21. “To His Coy MistressHad we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood, And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires and more slow; An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest; An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart. For, lady, you deserve this state, Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust; The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapped power. Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.” - Andrew Marvell

22. “He was weary of himself, of cold ideas and brain dreams. Life a poem? Not when you went about forever poetizing about your own life instead of living it. How innocuous it all was, and empty, empty, empty! This chasing after yourself, craftily observing your own tracks--in a circle, of course.This sham diving into the stream of life while all the time you sat angling after yourself, fishing yourself up in one curious disguise or another! If he could only be overwhelmed by something--life, love, passion--so that he could no longer shape it into poems, but had to let it shape him!” - Jens Peter Jacobsen

23. “The greatest art is to shape the quality of the day. ” - Henry David Thoreau

24. “As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death. ” - George Bernard Shaw

25. “Living a good life is like flipping pancakes. If you hesitate, it splatters all over the place.” - Matt Simpson

26. “May a man live well-, and long-enough, to leave many joyful widows behind him.” - Roman Payne

27. “Did I live the spring I’d sought?It’s true in joy, I walked along,took part in dance, and sang the song.and never tried to bind an hourto my borrowed garden bower;nor did I once entreata day to slumber at my feet.Yet days aren’t lulled by lyric song,like morning birds they pass along,o’er crests of trees, to none belong;o’er crests of trees of drying dew,their larking flight, my hands, eschewThus I’ll say it once and true…From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered,I learned that time cannot be spent,It only can be squandered.” - Roman Payne

28. “He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.” - Horace

29. “When you stop existing and you start truly living, each moment of the day comes alive with the wonder and synchronicity.” - Steve Maraboli

30. “Living is getting knocked down time and again, then standing up time and again, and once more. It's easy to act honorable when things are coming along and all your pastures are green. Plenty difficult when the ground is dried and burned and people have connived to take even that from you. I'll sell this place, or I'll lose it. I'll go on. People who don't have hard times aren't living.” - Nancy E. Turner

31. “To live at all is miracle enough.” - Mervyn Peake

32. “All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.” - Kenneth Grahame

33. “As the connections have been broken by the fragmentation and isolation of work, they can be restored by restoring the wholeness of work. There is work that is isolating, harsh, destructive, specialized or trivialized into meaninglessness. And there is work that is restorative, convivial, dignified and dignifying, and pleasing. Good work is not just the maintenance of connections - as one is now said to work "for a living" or "to support a family" - but the enactment of connections. It is living, and a way of living; it is not support for a family in the sense of an exterior brace or prop, but is one of the forms and acts of love. (pg. 133, The Body and the Earth)” - Wendell Berry

34. “But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.” - C.S. Lewis

35. “To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damn hard.” - Carl Sandburg

36. “To breathe is to live, but to write unimpeded is to breathe eternal.” - M. Clifford

37. “The clock holds me nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere. There is nothing else but now and the shifting depth of the night. I sit at a table alone smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and listening and surviving. I should not be here or anywhere. I should not be breathing or taking space. I should not have been given this moment or anything else. I should not have this opportunity again to live. I do not deserve it or deserve anything yet it is here and I am here and I Have it all of it still. I won't have it again. This moment or this chance they are the same and they are mine if I choose them and I do. I want them. Now and as long as I can have them they are both precious and fleeting and gone in the blink of an eye don't waste them. A moment and an opportunity and a life, all in the unseen tick of a clock holding me nowhere. My heart is beating. The walls are pale and quiet. I am surviving. ” - james frey

38. “How dull it is to pause, to make an end,To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!As tho’ to breathe were life!” - Alfred Lord Tennyson

39. “To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.” - Robert M. Pirsig

40. “The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.” - Stendhal

41. “Let not our longing slay the appetite of our living.” - Jim Elliot

42. “Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

43. “Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could be absolutely certain that my love would never be returned: how much more simple life would be. One could plod through the Siberian salt mines of existence without being bothered about happiness. Unfortunately the happiness is there. There is always the chance (about eight hundred and fifty to one) that another heart will come to mine. I can't help hoping, and keeping faith, and loving beauty. Quite frequently I am not so miserable as it would be wise to be.” - T.H. White

44. “I thought about the earth then, really thought about it, the tsunami's and earthquakes and volcanoes, all the horrors I haven't witnessed but have changed my life, the lives of everyone I know, all the people I'll never know. I thought about life without the sun, the moon, stars, without flowers and warm days in May. I thought about a year ago and all the good things I'd taken for granted and all the unbearable things that had replaced those simple blessings. And even though I hated the thought of crying in from of Syl, tears streamed down my face.” - Susan Beth Pfeffer

45. “As Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard says, "To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.” - Madeleine L'Engle

46. “I'm a man of simple tastes. I'm always satisfied with the best.” - Oscar Wilde

47. “Here's to another year and let's hope it's above ground.” - Carol Shields

48. “What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature… That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in.” - Tom Wolfe

49. “Your heart's voice is your true voice. It is easy to ignore it, for sometimes it says what we'd rather it did not - and it is so hard to risk the things we have. But what life are we living, if we don't live by our hearts? Not a true one. And the person living it is not the true you.” - Susan Fletcher

50. “This cruel age has deflected me,like a river from this course.Strayed from its familiar shores,my changeling life has flowedinto a sister channel.How many spectacles I've missed:the curtain rising without me,and falling too. How many friendsI never had the chance to meet.” - Anna Akhmatova

51. “I'm not in search of sanctity, sacredness, purity; these things are found after this life, not in this life; but in this life I search to be completely human: to feel, to give, to take, to laugh, to get lost, to be found, to dance, to love and to lust, to be so human.” - C. JoyBell C.

52. “Our key to greatness lies not in our ability to project ourselves to others as if we are putting ourselves onto a projector and creating an image of ourselves on a projector screen. Rather, our key to greatness lies in who we are which we can give to other people in a way that when they walk away from us, they are able to say in their hearts that they have taken away something with them quite extraordinary.” - C. JoyBell C.

53. “If you want to forget something or someone, never hate it, or never hate him/her. Everything and everyone that you hate is engraved upon your heart; if you want to let go of something, if you want to forget, you cannot hate.” - C. JoyBell C.

54. “The only person who can pull me down is myself, and I'm not going to let myself pull me down anymore.” - C. JoyBell C.

55. “I have learned that you can go anywhere you want to go and do anything you want to do and buy all the things that you want to buy and meet all the people that you want to meet and learn all the things that you desire to learn and if you do all these things but are not madly in love: you have still not begun to live.” - C. JoyBell C.

56. “I would rather carry around a plastic bag with five thousand Euro inside, than carry around a Louis Vuitton/Gucci/Prada bag with only one hundred Euro inside!” - C. JoyBell C.

57. “It is when we think we can act like God, that all respect is lost, and I think this is the downfall of peace. We lie if we say we do not see color and culture and difference. We fool ourselves and cheat ourselves when we say that all of us are the same. We should not want to be the same as others and we should not want others to be the same as us. Rather, we ought to glory and shine in all of our differences, flaunting them fabulously for all to see! It is never a conformity that we need! We need not to conform! What we need is to burst out into all these beautiful colors!” - C. JoyBell C.

58. “We are all equal in the fact that we are all different. We are all the same in the fact that we will never be the same. We are united by the reality that all colours and all cultures are distinct & individual. We are harmonious in the reality that we are all held to this earth by the same gravity. We don't share blood, but we share the air that keeps us alive. I will not blind myself and say that my black brother is not different from me. I will not blind myself and say that my brown sister is not different from me. But my black brother is he as much as I am me. But my brown sister is she as much as I am me.” - C. JoyBell C.

59. “Live from abundance;Utilize with economy;Share in advance.” - Geoffrey M. Gluckman

60. “My body is the shape I live in and it shapes the way I live.” - Raquel Welch

61. “THE BARROW In this high field strewn with stones I walk by a green mound, Its edges sheared by the plough. Crumbs of animal bone Lie smashed and scattered round Under the clover leaves And slivers of flint seem to grow Like white leaves among green. In the wind, the chestnut heaves Where a man's grave has been. Whatever the barrow held Once, has been taken away: A hollow of nettles and dock Lies at the centre, filled With rain from a sky so grey It reflects nothing at all. I poke in the crumbled rock For something they left behind But after that funeral There is nothing at all to find. On the map in front of me The gothic letters pick out Dozens of tombs like this, Breached, plundered, left empty, No fragments littered about Of a dead and buried race In the margins of histories. No fragments: these splintered bones Construct no human face, These stones are simply stones. In museums their urns lie Behind glass, and their shaped flints Are labelled like butterflies. All that they did was die, And all that has happened since Means nothing to this place.Above long clouds, the skiesTurn to a brilliant redAnd show in the water's faceOne living, and not these dead." — Anthony Thwaite, from The Owl In The Tree” - Anthony Thwaite

62. “Now may every living thing, young or old,weak or strong, living near or far, known orunknown, living or departed or yet unborn,may every living thing be full of bliss.” - Anonymous

63. “And all meet in singing, which braids together the different knowings into a wide and subtle music, the music of living. ” - Alison Croggon

64. “The world is come upon me, I used to keep it a long way off, But now I have been run over and I am in the hands of the hospital staff.” - Stevie Smith

65. “They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never dissapointed.” - J.G. Ballard

66. “A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.” - Antoine de Saint-Exuper

67. “But I have my life, I’m living it. It’s twisted, exhausting, uncertain, and full of guilt, but nonetheless, there’s something there.” - Banana Yoshimoto

68. “How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.” - William S. Burroughs

69. “When I was a little girl, everything in the world fell into either of these two categories: wrong or right. Black or white. Now that I am an adult, I have put childish things aside and now I know that some things fall into wrong and some things fall into right. Some things are categorized as black and some things are categorized as white. But most things in the world aren't either! Most things in the world aren't black, aren't white, aren't wrong, aren't right, but most of everything is just different. And now I know that there's nothing wrong with different, and that we can let things be different, we don't have to try and make them black or white, we can just let them be grey. And when I was a child, I thought that God was the God who only saw black and white. Now that I am no longer a child, I can see, that God is the God who can see the black and the white and the grey, too, and He dances on the grey! Grey is okay.” - C. JoyBell C.

70. “And all at once the heavy nightFell from my eyes and I could see, --A drenched and dripping apple-tree,A last long line of silver rain,A sky grown clear and blue again.And as I looked a quickening gustOf wind blew up to me and thrustInto my face a miracleOf orchard-breath, and with the smell, --I know not how such things can be! --I breathed my soul back into me.Ah! Up then from the ground sprang IAnd hailed the earth with such a cryAs is not heard save from a manWho has been dead, and lives again.About the trees my arms I wound;Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;I raised my quivering arms on high;I laughed and laughed into the sky” - Edna St. Vincent Millay

71. “A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

72. “...Who knows what death, anxiety of the living, Who knows what loneliness, end of the lovingI could say to myself of the love (I had): Let it not be immortal, since it is flame But let it be infinite while it lasts.” - Vinicius de Moraes

73. “Your life experience is a moving picture, of which you are writer, director, performer, producer and critic.” - T.F. Hodge

74. “Life, for the living, is a gift of opportunity; an exercise of the will to choose.” - T.F. Hodge

75. “You live and then you die, I thought. It's good to have some good times.” - Natalie Goldberg

76. “Living is painful. Without pain, reality would escape us and the lessons the world has for us will go untaught.” - Jamie Magee

77. “I don't know why people are afraid of lust. Then I can imagine that they are very afraid of me, for I have a great lust for everything. A lust for life, a lust for how the summer-heated street feels beneath my feet, a lust for the touch of another's skin on my skin...a lust for everything. I even lust after cake. Yes, I am very lusty and very scary.” - C. JoyBell C.

78. “Persistence. Perfection. Patience. Power. Prioritize your passion. It keeps you sane.” - Criss Jami

79. “I hope I don't write TOO many books! When I look at authors who have written too many books, I wonder to myself "When did they live?" I certainly want to write BECAUSE I live! I know I don't want to write in order to live! My writing is an overflow of the wine glass of my life, not a basin in which I wash out my ideals and expectations.” - C. JoyBell C.

80. “As a spirit having a human experience, you can choose to not merely exist but to be fully conscious and aware of living in a limited world. When you take a conscious part in life and its multitudes of choices, you won't let life happen to you - you will make life happen for you.” - James Van Praagh

81. “Pain is a pesky part of being human, I've learned it feels like a stab wound to the heart, something I wish we could all do without, in our lives here. Pain is a sudden hurt that can't be escaped. But then I have also learned that because of pain, I can feel the beauty, tenderness, and freedom of healing. Pain feels like a fast stab wound to the heart. But then healing feels like the wind against your face when you are spreading your wings and flying through the air! We may not have wings growing out of our backs, but healing is the closest thing that will give us that wind against our faces.” - C. JoyBell C.

82. “The first and last schoolmaster of life is living and committing oneself unreservedly and dangerously to living; to men who know this an Aristotle and a Plato have much to say; but those who have imposed cautions on themselves and petrified themselves in a system of ideas, them the masters themselves will lead into error” - Thornton Wilder

83. “If some persons died and others did not die death would indeed be a terrible affliction.” - Jean de La Bruyère

84. “…In this way that he sought to control the very passage of his life, deftly and without forethought, yet precisely and with enormous care. Part of it was to allow what was enormous, what was profound, without limiting it.” - Jesse Ball

85. “We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.” - Chuck Klosterman

86. “Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.” - Gloria Steinem

87. “To live is - to war with trolls In the holds of the heart and mind” - Henrik Ibsen

88. “I have argued that this sort of thinking is problematic in at least two regards:First, the notion that nonhuman animals do not have an interest in continued existence—that they do not have an interest in their lives—involves relying on a speciesist concept of what sort of self-awareness matters morally. I have argued that every sentient being necessarily has an interest in continued existence—every sentient being values her or his life—and that to say that only those animals (human animals) who have a particular sort of self-awareness have an interest in not being treated as commodities begs the fundamental moral question. Even if, as some maintain, nonhuman animals live in an “eternal present”—and I think that is empirically not the case at the very least for most of the nonhumans we routinely exploit who do have memories of the past and a sense of the future—they have, in each moment, an interest in continuing to exist. To say that this does not count morally is simply speciesist.Second, even if animals do not have an interest in continuing to live and only have interests in not suffering, the notion that, as a practical matter, we will ever be able to accord those interests the morally required weight is simply fantasy. The notion that we property owners are ever going to accord any sort of significant weight to the interests of property in not suffering is simply unrealistic. Is it possible in theory? Yes. Is it possible as a matter of practicality in the real world. Absolutely not. Welfarists often talk about treating “farmed animals” in the way that we treat dogs and cats whom we love and regard as members of our family. Does anyone really think that is practically possible? The fact that we would not think of eating our dogs and cats is some indication that it is not.” - GaryLFrancione

89. “I think that there are those who write of life being a skip on the sidewalk, a chocolate bar, a bowl of cherries... the problem with that is it ends up disappointing people. Because life is more like being on the tube in London; you never really know what could happen! But then there are those people who bring a box of chocolates to eat on the tube...so life, it isn't a skip on the sidewalk, but it is a matter of strength: "Can I bring my bowl of cherries to feast on while I stand here in the gutter?" that's the essence of life. Can you still put on your rose-colored glasses while your eyes are filled with tears, and see everything in rosy colors? That's the strength that fuels a true life. Can you think to bring your little box of chocolates with you while you sit on the tube running under the streets of London? Because you should. Because even if you don't know anybody, and you don't know what's gonna happen next, you should have your box of chocolates with you. You should eat your bowl of cherries. And that is what life is.” - C. JoyBell C.

90. “Some people are like thorns. But you have to let them be thorns, because thorns can't turn into petals. The trick is not letting them prick you; never let a thorn prick you!” - C. JoyBell C.

91. “People can have their opinions about everything in the world, but people's opinions end where the tip of my nose begins. Your opinions of others can only go so far as to where their own shoreline is. The world is for your taking, but other people are not. One is only allowed to have an opinion of me, if that person is done educating him/herself on everything about me. Before people educate themselves on everything about you, they're not allowed to open their venomous mouthes and have an opinion about you.” - C. JoyBell C.

92. “You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

93. “Between living and dreaming there is a third thing. Guess it.” - Antonio Machado

94. “Are you doing life or are you living?” - Dale Forehand

95. “Living is too hard right now. Dying is easy. Let me die.” - Kristen Cashore

96. “I’m barely human. I’m more like a creature; to me, everything gives off a scent! Thoughts, moments, feelings, movements, words left unsaid, words barely spoken; they all have a distinct sense, distinct fragrances! Both a smell and a touch! To inhale is to capture, to experience! I can perceive and I can “touch” in so many odd ways! And so I am made up of all these scents, all these feelings! An illumination of nerve endings!” - C. JoyBell C.

97. “Sasha's green eyes were right up against yours, the lashes interlocking. "In Naples," she said, "there were kids who were just lost. You knew they were never going to get back to what they'd been, or have a normal life. And then there were other ones who you thought, maybe they will."...You opened your eyes, which you hadn't realized were shut again. "what I'm saying is, We're the survivors," Sasha said...."Not everyone is. But we are. Okay?” - Jennifer Egan

98. “The fog is clearing; life is a matter of taste.” - Frank Wedekind

99. “[He] went on to say that during all those years he had done nothing at all, that all he had felt had been a need to live, to live actively, violently, noisily, a need to sing, to make music, to roam the woods, to drink a little too much and get involved in a brawl.” - Edmond De Goncourt

100. “There isn't so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I'd spent the rest of it being afraid of everything.” - Nick Hornby

101. “Once a thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it won't. Or will-depending. As long as you live, there’s always something waiting, and even if it’s bad, and you know it's bad, what can you do? You can’t stop living.” - Truman Capote

102. “We're living in science fiction, but we don't realize it.” - Terry Pratchett

103. “En vivant votre misère, vous pouvez être malheureuse ou heureuse. C'est dans ce choix que consiste votre liberté. Vous êtes libre de fondre votre individualité dans la marmite de la multitude avec un sentiment de défaite, ou bien avec euphorie. (...) notre seule liberté est de choisir entre l'amertume et le plaisir. L'insignifiance de tout étant notre lot, il ne faut pas la porter comme une tare, mais savoir s'en réjouir. (ch. 43)” - Milan Kundera

104. “I write so the endangered thoughts roaming naked and vulnerable through the misty jungles of my mind aren't slain by the guns of practical living.” - Kim Krizan

105. “You can't run away from trouble. There ain't no place that far.” - Uncle Remus

106. “I firmly disbelieve in death. A spirit never dies. Where it wanders when it leaves the flesh, is a cognitive proposition.” - Kellie Elmore

107. “I find that I am most happy and healthy when I am living in alignment with my goals, dreams, and principles.” - Steve Maraboli

108. “What is this life if, full of care,We have no time to stand and stare.No time to stand beneath the boughsAnd stare as long as sheep or cows.No time to see, when woods we pass,Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.No time to see, in broad daylight,Streams full of stars, like skies at night.No time to turn at Beauty's glance,And watch her feet, how they can dance.No time to wait till her mouth canEnrich that smile her eyes began.A poor life this if, full of care,We have no time to stand and stare.- Leisure” - W.H. Davies

109. “Don't become a prisoner of your own reality, set yourself free by creating a life worth living.” - Steven Redhead

110. “It is a subliminal thing. It is the tick of a clock that has ticked so long one no longer notices. Something is in a room when a man lives in it. Something is not in the room when a man is dead in it.” - Ray Bradbury

111. “Its hard to die. Harder to live” - Dan Simmons

112. “She's no longer afraid to die. What she's afraid of is living, accepting the status quo.” - Ellen Hopkins

113. “I started to discover the meaning of happiness when I started to discover--and practice--the art of acceptance. When I started to accept life for what it was and I started to accept whatever situation I was in as the way things were, I started to see that my happiness depended on my own attitude. When I started focusing on getting the most out of my life the way it was rather than trying to turn it into what I thought it should be, I started to realize that I was, indeed, becoming a much happier person.” - Tom Walsh

114. “Do You think it matters if they're tiny or deep? he asked. Well, if they're not tiny breaths and they're not deep breaths, then they're just ... breaths. Then you're just breathing for the sake of ... breathing. ... Seize them. Feel them. Love them ...” - K.A. Tucker

115. “Legacy is not what's left tomorrow when you're gone. It's what you give, create, impact and contribute today while you're here that then happens to live on.” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

116. “you got one life so dont stop living it!” - Hedley

117. “And what cats have to tellon each return from hellis this: that dying is what the living do, that dying is what the loving do, and that dead dogs are those who do not knowthat dying is what, to live, each has to do.” - Alastair Reid

118. “Stand here, he thought, and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it. But behind each yellow rectangle that climbs, one over another, to the sky - under each bulb - down to there, see that spark over the river which is not a star? - there are people whom you will never see and who are your masters. At the supper tables, in the drawing rooms, in their beds and in their cellars, in their studies and in their bathrooms. Speeding in the subways under your feet. Crawling up in elevators through vertical cracks around you. Jolting past you in every bus. Your masters, Gail Wynand. There is a net - longer than the cables that coil through the walls of this city, larger than the mesh of pipes that carry water, gas and refuse - there is another hidden net around you; it is strapped to you, and the wires lead to every hand in the city. They jerked the wires and you moved. You were a ruler of men. You held a leash. A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends.” - Ayn Rand

119. “Life is not a true or false question.” - Rebecca McKinsey

120. “I do not particularly like the word 'work.' Human beings are the only animals who have to work, and I think that is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Other animals make their livings by living, but people work like crazy, thinking that they have to in order to stay alive. The bigger the job, the greater the challenge, the more wonderful they think it is. It would be good to give up that way of thinking and live an easy, comfortable life with plenty of free time. I think that the way animals live in the tropics, stepping outside in the morning and evening to see if there is something to eat, and taking a long nap in the afternoon, must be a wonderful life. For human beings, a life of such simplicity would be possible if one worked to produce directly his daily necessities. In such a life, work is not work as people generally think of it, but simply doing what needs to be done.” - Masanobu Fukuoka

121. “The fact that you are even here, alive, on this planet is a mathematical miracle, and you should not spend the time that you have being busy being miserable.” - Philip DeFranco

122. “Creating means living.” - Dejan Stojanovic

123. “I did not know I was on a search for passionate aliveness. I only knew I was lonely and lost and that something was drawing me deeper beneath the surface of my life in search of meaning. There is a hunger in people to go to those deep depths; to know that our lives are sacred; that our hearts are truly capable of love. It is a yearning to be all the we can be. A longing for what is real.” - Anne Hillman

124. “I wanted color. I wanted to soar with happiness even if it meant dealing with the weight of fear and guilt, too. I wanted to live.” - Heather Anastasiu

125. “You don’t live life. You act it.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

126. “Ignore what you don't like. Insist what u need.” - T.A

127. “A person who reads lives more than one life, but that means that they die more than once as well.” - Deanna Vasquez

128. “Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.” - Jeanette Winterson

129. “I mean obviously, staying alive is pretty fucking important . . . but there’s got to be something beyond that, right?” - Isaac Marion

130. “It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and -what will perhaps make you wonder more - it takes the whole of life to learn how to die.” - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

131. “Scars are an affirmation of living.” - Joshua Wisenbaker

132. “Don't put down too many roots in terms of a domicile. I have lived in four countries and I think my life as a writer and our family's life have been enriched by this. I think a writer has to experience new environments. There is that adage: No man can really succeed if he doesn't move away from where he was born. I believe it is particularly true for the writer.” - Arthur Hailey

133. “Seemingly suicidal, it's not. I never wanted to live. I wanted to be happy. Living was always accidental.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

134. “Life always begins with one step outside of your comfort zone.” - Shannon L. Alder

135. “When Death ComesWhen death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth. When it's over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world” - Mary Oliver

136. “The process of living, for each of us, is pretty similar. For every gain there is a setback. For every success, a failure. For every moment of joy, a time of sadness. For every hope realized, one is dashed.” - sue atchley ebaugh

137. “Hate is infectious, but so is love, the difference between the two is one takes effort and the other one doesn’t.” - Dave Guerrero

138. “With a sigh, he grabbed hold of his chair and lifted himself out of it, then wrote on the blackboard: How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? - A.Y.'I'm going to leave that up for the rest of the semester,' he said.'Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I don't want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to understand how people have answered that question and the questions each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.” - John Green

139. “The most precious gift to give to your spouse is not your life because if you die,he/she will no longer have use of you rather the most precious gift is your time, attention, affection, self and love!” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

140. “I have leveled with the girls - from Anchorage to Amarillo.I tell them that all marriages are happyIt's the living together afterward that's tough.I tell them that a good marriage is not a gift,It's an achievement.that marriage is not for kids It takes guts and maturity.It separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls.I tell them that marriage is tested dily by the ability to compromise.Its survival can depend on being smart enough to know what's worth fighting about.Or making an issue of or even mentioning.Marriage is giving - and more important, it's forgiving.And it is almost always the wife who must do these things.Then, as if that were not enough, she must be willing to forget what she forgave.Often that is the hardest part.Oh, I have leveled all right.If they don't get my message, Buster,It's because they don't want to get it.Rose-colored glasses are never made in bifocalsBecause nobody wants to red the small print in dreams.” - Ann Landers

141. “If science can eliminate sleep, we will have more time to live and no time for the dreams. But living is superior to the dream because it is real!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

142. “No matter how many sins you make or how slow you travel back toward God's valley, you are still way ahead of a person who never made a mistake and doesn't know what it is like to climb out of a pit of shame and rise above their temptations.” - Shannon L. Alder

143. “I got a body covered in scars, but then who doesn’t? If you don’t have a few scars, you haven’t really lived.” - Lexi Blake

144. “Sometimes you go through life and the wrong thing happens.” - Jennifer Manske Fenske

145. “His life spells living. Your life or my life, apart from Him, spells death.” - Ravi Zacharias

146. “The simple things in life are the greatest gifts.” - Bryant McGill

147. “I am not afraid to die; I am only afraid of saying goodbye to you forever.” - Shannon L. Alder

148. “I have lost and loved and won and cried myself to the person I am today.” - Charlotte Eriksson

149. “Ye are different, Emma. I doona need ye in order to survive. But surviving is no' the same as living. Or the same as feeling human again. I am alive when I'm with you. Ye feed my soul. (Angus MacKay)” - Kerrelyn Sparks