Life is an intricate tapestry of experiences, emotions, and wisdom that often leaves us searching for insight and inspiration. One of the most profound ways to gain perspective is through the words of those who have pondered the essence of existence. In this collection, we've gathered 74 quotes that encapsulate the beauty, challenges, and mysteries of life and living. These words, penned by thinkers, writers, and visionaries, offer a guiding hand and a comforting presence as we navigate our own journeys. Whether you're seeking motivation, reflection, or a new way of seeing the world, these quotes are sure to resonate with you.
1. “I’d always enjoyed life, and I knew I would again. But I was going to have to slog through a lot of bad patches to get there” - Charlaine Harris
2. “I consider myself a stained-glass window. And this is how I live my life. Closing no doors and covering no windows; I am the multi-colored glass with light filtering through me, in many different shades. Allowing light to shed and fall into many many hues. My job is not to direct anything, but only to filter into many colors. My answer is destiny and my guide is joy. And there you have me.” - C. JoyBell C.
3. “Destiny is real. And she's not mild-mannered. She will come around and hit you in the face and knock you over and before you know what hit you, you're naked- stripped of everything you thought you knew and everything you thought you didn't know- and there you are! A bloody nose, bruises all over you, and naked. And it's the most beautiful thing.” - C. JoyBell C.
4. “This is the key to life: To expect everything to be given to you from above, yet to be genuinely surprised and forever grateful, when they are. Expecting all good things to be yours, while not knowing how to take anything for granted. If there may be a key in life, this is the key.” - C. JoyBell C.
5. “Do you really believe in destiny?" "How can I not believe in destiny, when there is no difference between my memories and my dreams at night? There's no difference between their reality. And if I dream something first, I remember it later when I am actually walking in the place or looking at the person I first dreamed of. Days later. Or years later. Destiny~ she walks with me.” - C. JoyBell C.
6. “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.
7. “Stories are a different kind of true.” - Emma Donoghue
8. “It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty...” - Jon Krakauer
9. “What life gives us, good or bad, we seldom deserve.” - William Kent Krueger
10. “Loo, life is black and white. You don't know what's good for you, because you don't see the black and white! You don't see where the black lines end and where the white lines begin! You're going to grow up to be no good if you keep on that way. It's impractical. I only have one child, and I won't have her growing up to be impractical. I can't think of a worse thing to be than impractical!” - C. JoyBell C.
11. “Heaven is always there for us; but this life... this life is a gift to us.” - C. JoyBell C.
12. “How do they do it?” He stopped at her side, his eyes on the jugglers. It seemed impossible that not one ball fell to the ground.“Determination.” She elbowed him playfully. “And being willing to make a few mistakes.” - Leigh LaValle
13. “A clown on a throne is still a clown. A king in rags is still a king.” - C. JoyBell C.
14. “Politeness is okay, but it gets old and boring. You want to attack life with a passion, not a politeness, you want people to think about you and remember you and say "she is so passionate" you don't want people to think about you and remember you and say "she is so polite," because, who cares about polite?” - C. JoyBell C.
15. “And I told him, I said: "One day you're going to miss the subway because it's not going to come. One of these days, it's going to break down and it's not going to come around and everyone else will just wait for the next one or will take the bus, or walk, or run to the next station: they will go on with their lives. And you're not going to be able to go on with your life! You'll be standing there, in the subway station, staring at the tube. Why? Because you think that everything has to happen perfectly and on time and when you think it's going to happen! Well guess what! That's not how things happen! And you'll be the only one who's not going to be able to go on with life, just because your subway broke down. So you know what, you've got to let go, you've got to know that things don't happen the way you think they're going to happen, but that's okay, because there's always the bus, there's always the next station...you can always take a cab.” - C. JoyBell C.
16. “One who has hope lives differently.” - Pope Benedict-XVI
17. “The day I understood everything, was the day I stopped trying to figure everything out. The day I knew peace was the day I let everything go.” - C. JoyBell C.
18. “Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.” - Orson Scott Card
19. “I think that the best thing we can do for our children is to allow them to do things for themselves, allow them to be strong, allow them to experience life on their own terms, allow them to take the subway... let them be better people, let them believe more in themselves.” - C. JoyBell C.
20. “Taking on too much of other people's drama is just a poor excuse for not taking ownership and control over your own life.” - José N. Harris
21. “Humanity does not suffer from the disease of wrong beliefs but humanity suffers from the contagious nature of the lack of belief. If you have no magic with you it is not because magic does not exist but it is because you do not believe in it. Even if the sun shines brightly upon your skin every day, if you do not believe in the sunlight, the sunlight for you does not exist.” - C. JoyBell C.
22. “There are people who are generic. They make generic responses and they expect generic answers. They live inside a box and they think people who don't fit into their box are weird. But I'll tell you what, generic people are the weird people. They are like genetically-manipulated plants growing inside a laboratory, like indistinguishable faces, like droids. Like ignorance.” - C. JoyBell C.
23. “If you could see your perfect image in the mirror it would remove all your fear.” - Stanley Victor Paskavich
24. “A few diaries could replace tons of self help books simply because their written in the first person...” - Stanley Victor Paskavich
25. “The needles they poke you with leaves a hole that closes in. But unkind words can make a hole that will never mend.” - Stanley Victor Paskavich
26. “Your life is your choice, so make it worthwhile” - Wennie Lin
27. “Don't think about making life better for other people who don't even deserve you, rather, focus on making your life the best, for yourself and those who love you.” - C. JoyBell C.
28. “Sometimes the best way to find what you really desire in life is to stop looking for it.” - T.R. Wallace
29. “Start the good job today by your self and let the generation end it tomorrow by them selves.” - Issah Awal
30. “Life’s not a one-shot special. It’s a friggin’ on-going series. Live it!” - Arnold Arre
31. “Many times, you are the single most significant and glorious thing that has ever happened in the lives of some people; they sit around and talk about you over and over again throughout the years while you are out there living your life, every step that you take and every kiss that you make having absolutely nothing to do with them, at all!” - C. JoyBell C.
32. “No one measures a life in weeks and days. You measure life in years and by the things that happen to you.” - Sara Zarr
33. “Our lives are businesses that are sometimes run by idiots.” - Patrick Reinken
34. “I think that the best kind of change, is the change that comes from the inside and begins it's way out until it emerges on the outside; a change that is born underneath then continues and spreads until it has reached the surface. That's a true change. A powerful change. And I have found that while we are emerging, changing into something glorious; it is actually us becoming who we really are. A water lily is born underneath the water, inside the soil at the bottom of the river or lake. And the water lily has always been a water lily for that whole time that it was sprouting out of the wet soil, reaching up through the dark water towards the sunlight, stretching and grasping for the surface; where it then buds and blooms on the outside in the sunshine. It doesn't bud and bloom on the surface and then try to reach down below into the soil.” - C. JoyBell C.
35. “Don't let a thief into your house three times. The first time was enough. The second time was a chance. The third time means you're stupid.” - C. JoyBell C.
36. “Women waste so much time wearing no perfume. As for me, in every step that I have taken in life, I have been accompanied by an exquisite perfume!” - C. JoyBell C.
37. “Life is a bowl of cherries. Some cherries are rotten while others are good; its your job to throw out the rotten ones and forget about them while you enjoy eating the ones that are good! There are two kinds of people: those who choose to throw out the good cherries and wallow in all the rotten ones, and those who choose to throw out all the rotten ones and savor all the good ones.” - C. JoyBell C.
38. “It is always the first and last steps that are the hardest to take. We walk away and try not to turn back, or we stand just outside the gates, terrified to find what's waiting for us now that we've returned. In between, we stumble blindly from one place and life to the next. We try to do the best we can. There are moments like this, however, when we are neither coming nor going, and all we have to do is sit and look back on the life we have made.” - Dinaw Mengestu
39. “Like attracts like. It'll surprise you as long as you live. Choose a love and work to make it true, and somehow something will happen, something you couldn't plan, will come along to move like to like, to set you loose, to set you on the way to your next brick wall.” - Richard Bach
40. “Não aspiro a nada. Dói-me a vida. Estou mal onde estou e já mal onde penso em poder estar.” - Fernando Pessoa
41. “I honestly wish I could believe that things will end perfectly with one big bright happy ending. But these last few days have taught me that life isn't made up of shiny moments. Life is hard; it's gritty. One day you are filled with joy and the next, you are crawling through the muddy trenches with no inkling of when you might be able to climb your way back up again. ~Willow Mosby (Exposing ELE)” - Rebecca Gober
42. “Growing old is to be set free. It is a slow and long-simmering process that extracts you from what you are really made of. But it requires acceptance. You cannot put a flailing chicken in a boiling pot. You must accept the heat and the pain with serenity so that the full flavors of your life maybe released.” - Samantha Sotto
43. “We are as connected to each other, as time is to the clock.” - Zephyr A. McIntyre
44. “In order for us to begin something we have to start.” - Zulima James
45. “it's really make sense when it's does not make sense” - sarajevo_sara
46. “It's easy to win. Anybody can win.” - Philip K. Dick
47. “See the world anew and write down the bones of it.” - A. D. Sams
48. “Zadane su nam ulice, mjesta i padovi. Usponi katkad ovise o našoj izdržljivosti.” - Jasna Horvat
49. “When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.” - E.B. White
50. “Man lives his whole life trying to figure out the secrets of life only to realize in the end life was the secret.” - Terry Blakeman
51. “if you don't have any weird moments, you're weird” - bertie gilbert
52. “It was one of those moments that would have had dramatic music if my life were a movie, but instead I got a radio jingle for some kind of submarine sandwich place blaring over the store's ambient stereo. The movie ofmy life must be really low-budget.” - Jim Butcher
53. “So you're giving up? That's it? Okay, okay. We'll leave you alone, Quasimodo. We just thought, maybe you're made up of something much stronger.” - Victor Hugo
54. “People don’t always value life, even their own, as much as they should.” - Alex Potvin
55. “...throw roses into the abyss and say: 'here is my thanks to the monster who didn't succeed in swallowing me alive.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
56. “I may not be old but I’m too old to have this much nothing” - Jonathan Tropper
57. “Despite the forecast, live like it's spring.” - Lilly Pulitzer
58. “It is an extremely unfortunate fact, that there are those who see the morale of respect as something that is beneficial to the other person on the receiving end, rather than something that is beneficial to the one who is capable of giving the respect! Because that's simply not how it works; the person who is capable of discerning respect and giving it to others, is the person who is better! There are people who believe that the virtue of respect and the ability to discern when to give respect and in which amounts to give it, belongs to the lower class! Oh I beg, I beg to differ! No. And no and no! If I am able to discern the amounts of respect to be given so that I may function as a beaming member of society, this virtue illuminates ME; this virtue does not illuminate those whom I give the respect to! Respect is known by the illuminated being!s” - C. JoyBell C.
59. “There is a little word that we can say to others now. "Thank You Very Much".” - Marya Sy
60. “What’s important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision that the commission made up. It’s up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that.” - Cheryl Strayed
61. “Most days I juggle everything quite well, on the other days there's always red wine.” - Rachael Bermingham
62. “...once you've crawled into what's commonly thought of as the sordid underbelly of life, you realize it's all just different versions of normal.” - Josh Kilmer-Purcell
63. “Erlendur didn’t believe in premonitions, visions or dreams, nor reincarnation or karma, he didn’t believe in God although he’d often read the Bible, nor in eternal life or that his conduct in this world would affect whether he went to heaven or hell. He felt that life itself offered a mixture of the two.Then sometimes he experienced this incomprehensible and supernatural de´ja` -vu, experienced time and place as if he’d seen it all before, as if he stepped outside himself, became an onlooker to his own life. There was no way he could explain what it was thathappened or why his mind played tricks on him like this.” - Arnaldur Indriðason
64. “Life is not what it's supposed to be. It's what it is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference.” - Aleatha Romig
65. “If you're born with in the wild you run with the wild” - Cristian L. Martinez
66. “Life is so much richer, so very much more meaningful, if you plant yourself in a place that will nourish you.” - Ann Shayne
67. “Morir es tan solo una forma particularmente exacta de envejecer.” - Alessandro Baricco
68. “I didn't die, and that's the point. Doesn't matter how close you come if you walk away whole.” - Courtney Schafer
69. “But the summer had been a very happy one, too -- a time of glad living with summer suns and skies, a time of keen delight in wholesome things; a time of renewing and deepening of old friendships; a time in which she had learned to live more nobly, to work more patiently, to play more heartily.” - L.M. Montgomery
70. “Living Life In The Fast Lane is Great...Until You Crash.” - David Murdock
71. “Today I realized that I am nothing more than tomorrow's ghost. In a way, it robs my sense of self to know I'm always changing; at the same time, it provides incentive to have the best today possible so I can have a positive influence on tomorrow and, if need be, shake some sense into the living. (Samantha Green)” - Riley Noehren
72. “A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.” - Miguel de Cervantès
73. “Beautiful food and health are priceless.” - Bryant McGill
74. “What happens to those who live dangerously by being true to who they are?” - Bryant McGill
