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Living quotes

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“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism

“it was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.” Edith Wharton, House of Mirth

“A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels...” Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism

“you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.” Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I don't live in either my past or my future. I'm interested only in the present.” Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.” George R. R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.” L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

“if one has money without brains, he cannot use it to advantage; but if one has brains without money, they will enable him to live comfortably to the end of his days.” L. Frank Baum, The Marvelous Land of Oz

“Haven’t you learned anything, not even with the approach of death? Stop thinking all the time that you’re in the way, that you’re bothering the person next to you. If people don’t like it, they can complain. And if they don’t have the...” Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die

“One can survive everything nowadays, except death, and live down anything except a good reputation.” Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

“You’re alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything.” Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“To be awake is to be alive.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“There’s something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you’re still alive.” Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“While I hope that the chemical gets rid of my chronic depression, I want to continue being crazy, living my life the way I dream it, and not the way other people want it to be.” Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die

“You’re mine . . . Mine, as I’m yours. And if we die, we die. All men must die, Jon Snow. But first we’ll live.” George R. R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

“Every day was there to be lived or to mark one's departure from this world.” Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“I had chosen the dead rather than the living, the thing thought rather than the thing thinking!” George MacDonald, Lilith

“It is nothing to die; it is dreadful not to live.” Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“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, Wuthering Heights

“Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living.” Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.” Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Stuff your eyes with wonder . . . live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.” Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system.” Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.” Henry James, The Ambassadors

“she felt pain, a violent pain, but it made her alive, because it was worth feeling.” Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying” Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby!” George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them.” Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism

“Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget that until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,—'Wait and hope.'” Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.” Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.” Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement address

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live according to nature.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their own song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our...” Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“As long as we don’t die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.” John Green, Paper Towns

“the question is not how to get cured, but how to live.” Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime.” Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

“the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll just have to learn how to be babies longer.” Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

“The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing.” Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom

“When you start to live outside yourself . . . it's all dangerous.” Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“I'm not a starfish or a pepper tree. I'm a living, breathing human being. Of course I've been in love.” Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don't you think so?” Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles

“Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.” Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal.” John Dewey, Democracy and Education

“we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive.” George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.” John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?” John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“I'd want it real. I'd take no pride in any hopeless longing. I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it.” Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

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Related topics

life happiness existence longing death feeling world time nature reality reason fear self place courage past personality reading love dream

Related authors

Kurt Vonnegut (1)
Paulo Coelho (5)
Ray Bradbury (4)
John Green (3)
Oscar Wilde (3)
Neil Gaiman (3)
Chuck Palahniuk (3)
L. Frank Baum (3)
Edith Wharton (2)
George R. R. Martin (2)
Emily Brontë (2)
John Steinbeck (2)
Ayn Rand (2)
Andy Warhol (2)
Jonathan Safran Foer (2)
George Bernard Shaw (1)
Haruki Murakami (1)
Arthur Schopenhauer (1)
Henry David Thoreau (1)
Milan Kundera (1)

Related sources

Fahrenheit 451 (2)
The Soul of Man under Socialism (2)
Veronika Decides to Die (2)
The Alchemist (2)
House of Mirth (2)
Wuthering Heights (2)
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (2)
The Marvelous Land of Oz (2)
Atlas Shrugged (2)
Dandelion Wine (2)
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2)
Lilith (1)
Pygmalion (1)
Studies in Pessimism (1)
Les Misérables (1)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1)
The Fault in Our Stars (1)
Slaughterhouse-Five (1)
A Woman of No Importance (1)
Walden (1)