89 Inspiring Quotes On Living

In a world filled with constant noise and endless distractions, finding a moment of genuine inspiration can be a powerful catalyst for change. Whether you're seeking motivation to tackle new challenges, a spark of creativity, or simply a reminder of life's inherent beauty, a thoughtfully chosen quote can be a beacon of light. Our carefully curated collection of 89 inspiring quotes on living has been handpicked to provide you with a dose of wisdom and positivity. Each quote carries the potential to uplift your spirits, motivate your actions, and remind you of the possibilities that life holds. Dive in and let these words resonate within you, igniting a renewed passion for your journey.

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

2. “It is better to beg forgiveness, than ask permission.” - Grace Murray Hopper

3. “There is no remedy for death—or birth—except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.” - Jim Crace

4. “The thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I’m tired of being enclosed here. I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.” - Emily Brontë

5. “Though under earth, and throneless now I beYet while I lived all earth was under me.” - C.S. Lewis

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

7. “There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

8. “Each day death corrodes what we call living, and life ceaselessly swallows our desire for the void.” - Jindrich Styrsky

9. “To them I'm simply an object from the past that they wish will disappear Then why do I exist? Why am I alive? When I thought about this I could find no answer. But as you live you need a reason otherwise it's the same as being dead, I then came to this conclusion I exist to kill every human besides myself. Fighting only for yourself living while only loving yourself If you think that everybody else simply exist to allow you to experience that feeling nothing is better then that world. As long as there are people in this world for me to kill and continue to feel that joy of living my existence will not vanish.” - Masashi Kishimoto

10. “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

11. “To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

12. “Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

13. “Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer gradually becomes less and less convincing?” - Julian Barnes

14. “People long to go backward in their imagination as well as forward. We don't wish simply to exist forever in some future; we wish to have existed in some distant past.” - Gloria Whelan

15. “I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits” - Anais Nin

16. “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

17. “All we know, Midnight. The best of all we know. For Chestry Valley and its master we loved. For Nana. For Sugarloaf and Brimstone Farm. For Pop and Mom and Tom. For the foals to come. For yesterday and for all tomorrows, we dance the best we know. For good-by.” - Kate Seredy

18. “Well, nowIf little by little you stop loving meI shall stop loving youLittle by littleIf suddenly you forget meDo not look for meFor I shall already have forgotten youIf you think it long and mad the wind of banners that passes through my lifeAnd you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have rootsRememberThat on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my armsAnd my roots will set off to seek another land” - Pablo Neruda

19. “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

20. “You only live once, buy Picassos whenever possible. ” - james frey

21. “Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime” - Samuel Butler

22. “The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget: your thing granaries ("museums"), and not yourselves, are full.” - Alice Walker

23. “To remember love after long sleep; to turn again to poetry after a year in the market place, or to youth after resignation to drowsy and stiffening age; to remember what once you thought life could hold, after telling over with muddied and calculating fingers what it has offered; this is music, made after long silence. The soul flexes its wings, and, clumsy as any fledgling, tries the air again” - Mary Stewart

24. “(about William Blake)As for Blake's happiness--a man who knew him said: "If asked whether I ever knew among the intellectual, a happy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me."And yet this creative power in Blake did not come from ambition. ...He burned most of his own work. Because he said, "I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy."...He did not mind death in the least. He said that to him it was just like going into another room. On the day of his death he composed songs to his Maker and sang them for his wife to hear. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened and he burst into singing of the things he saw in heaven. ” - Brenda Ueland

25. “The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.” - Jack London

26. “It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.” - George Eliot

27. “Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in.” - Leonard Cohen

28. “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

29. “There are two things we should always be 1. raw and 2. ready. When you are raw, you are always ready and when you are ready you usually realize that you are raw. Waiting for perfection is not an answer, one cannot say "I will be ready when I am perfect" because then you will never be ready, rather one must say "I am raw and I am ready just like this right now, how and who I am.” - C. JoyBell C.

30. “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.

31. “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.

32. “The best way to die is when you're living.” - Alice Hoffman

33. “I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories... water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.” - Clarissa Pinkola Estés

34. “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

35. “Man träumt gar nicht, oder interessant -- Man muss lernen, ebeson zu wachen: -- gar nicht, oder interessant” - Friedrich Nietzsche

36. “Realizing that our minds control our bodies while our bodies reflect our minds amounts to understanding the most fundamental aspects of ourselves. It further equals a comprehension of the relationship between our “tools.” And since the mind and body are interrelated, this understanding makes it easier to see why coordinating them is a practical way of using these tools to greatest effect—a way of using the mind and body to live our lives as art.” - H.E. Davey

37. “I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,whoever I was, I wasalive for a little while.” - Mary Oliver

38. “Real living is living for others.” - Bruce Lee

39. “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

40. “Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent; the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

41. “People wait around too long for love. I'm happy with all of my lusts!” - C. JoyBell C.

42. “Ye are better than all the balladsThat ever were sung or said;For ye are living poems,And all the rest are dead.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

43. “The idea that property has overcome our personalities is the single reason we'll miss the best part of our lives. It's people, not possessions that make our lives worth living.” - Brian Krans

44. “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

45. “The past embraces the futureThe future embraces the pastThey are both intertwinedLinked in all eternity” - Karen Hackel

46. “You are beholdenTo the truthIt is the wayIt is the pathIt is your destinyTo be trueIs to be” - Karen Hackel

47. “The venerable teachers, philosophers & spiritual practitioners throughout history have concluded that the greatest happiness we can experience comes from the development of an open, loving heart.” - Allan Lokos

48. “We are fast moving into something, we are fast flung into something like asteroids cast into space by the death of a planet, we the people of earth are cast into space like burning asteroids and if we wish not to disintegrate into nothingness we must begin to now hold onto only the things that matter while letting go of all that doesn't. For when all of our dust and ice deteriorates into the cosmos we will be left only with ourselves and nothing else. So if you want to be there in the end, today is the day to start holding onto your children, holding onto your loved ones; onto those who share your soul. Harbor and anchor into your heart justice, truth, courage, bravery, belief, a firm vision, a steadfast and sound mind. Be the person of meaningful and valuable thoughts. Don't look to the left, don't look to the right; we simply don't have the time. Never be afraid of fear.” - C. JoyBell C.

49. “Times like this were special. Memory builders. When something extraordinary happened to a person the kind of things remembered forever after it didn't have to be a life-changing event like a graduation or marriage or birth of a child. It more often was the small things. The sheer joy of summer sunlight on a fragrant flower. The giggle of a toddler. The brush of a lover's fingertips. And the person marks the moment with the flashing insight thinking... This is special. I should remember this” - Sandra Hill

50. “…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

51. “It's decidedly bizzare, when the Worst Thing hppens and you find yourself still conscious, still breathing.” - Elisa Albert

52. “How nice-to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.” - Kurt Vonnegut

53. “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

54. “Maybe you think you’ll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn’t work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It’s by living that you live more. By waiting you wait more. Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it.” - Ann Brashares

55. “Life is sweet or bitter depending on where your attention is, at that moment.” - George Alexiou

56. “Living as I do with human beings, the more that I observe them, the more I am forced to conclude that they are selfish.” - Natsume Soseki

57. “My environment reflects the life I've led, the places I've visited and the people I've loved.” - Virginia Nicholson

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

59. “En travaux pratiques de physique, n'importe quel collégien peut faire des expériences pour vérifier l'exactitude d'une hypothèse scientifique. Mais l'homme, parce qu'il n'a qu'une seule vie, n'a aucune possibilité de vérifier l'hypothèse par l'expérience de sorte qu'il ne saura jamais s'il a eu tort ou raison d'obéir à son sentiment. (partie I, ch. 16)” - Milan Kundera

60. “vivre dans la vérité, ne mentir ni à soi-même ni aux autres, ce n'est possible qu'à la condition de vivre sans public. Dès lors qu'il y a un témoin à nos actes, nous nous adaptons bon gré mal gré aux yeux qui nous observent, et plus rien de ce que nous faisons n'est vrai. Avoir un public, penser à un public, c'est vivre dans le mensonge (partie III, ch. 7)” - Milan Kundera

61. “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

62. “The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate. Let Big Brother do the singing and dancing for you. Be a reporter. Be a good witness. A grateful member of theaudience.” - Chuck Palahniuk

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

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

65. “If you are not careful you will end up living the illusions that others have created for you.” - Steven Redhead

66. “Start living by taking back the control of your life now! Create a life more in tune with your true desires.” - Steven Redhead

67. “The joy of living is his who has the heart to demand it.” - Theodore Roosevelt

68. “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

69. “Dying is as natural as being born, and all of us have to face it someday. Some sooner than others. It's difficult to understand the meaning of it all. The question isn't, 'Why do we die?' The correct question is, 'Why do we live?” - S.M. Reine

70. “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

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

72. “Living on steam isn't easy.” - Jessica Fortunato

73. “It's a lot easier to be crazy or mad than to just get on with living.” - Jaclyn Moriarty

74. “So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing,and put your lips to the world.And live your life.” - Mary Oliver

75. “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

76. “...you fantasize about me reading my poems to you - it doesn't work that way - I write down everything later - living is not an after-thought...” - John Geddes

77. “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

78. “My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

80. “Dream sets us on fire.Dream gives us direction.Dream betters our potential.Dream helps us prioritize.Dream adds value to our work andlife.Dream colors our future.” - Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

81. “I eat you, life; you make me living eat.- The Word” - William Kean Seymour

82. “Jetzt habe ich es kapiert: Es geht nicht um Fortschritt. Es geht nicht um eine Erfahrung. Nein. Es geht in jedem einzelnen Moment einfach nur darum, in genau diesem Moment das Richtige zu tun.” - Matthias B. Krause

83. “...escribir lo que no se había vivido, lo que sólo se había querido vivir, era también una manera —cobarde y tímida— de vivirlo...” - Mario Vargas Llosa

84. “Be in love with your life. Every minute of it.” - Jack Kerouac

85. “Rest and peace should not be left until you're deceased. They are two vital life incredients everybody needs and seeks.” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

86. “It’s time for a spring cleaning of your thoughts, it’s time to stop to just existing it’s time to start living.” - Steve Maraboli

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

88. “Pray that you are in the right place, at the right time, to meet the right person, that together you may help one another.” - Don Polson

89. “As exciting, difficult, and memorable as our past can be, there comes a time when we have to get on with living.” - Patrick Carman