*Some may be repeated!
Rabindranath Tagore
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age forever.
Emily Dickinson
That love is all there is,
Is all we know of love.
Katherine Hepburn
Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.
Charles Dickens
Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.
Emily Bronte
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
Carl Jung
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
Leo Tolstoy
He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.
Mark Twain
To get the full value of joy
You must have someone to divide it with.
William Shakespeare
I love thee, I love but thee
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold
And the stars grow old.
Albert Einstein
Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
Albert Einstein
No, this trick wont work. How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?
Winston Churchill
My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.
Mark Twain
Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
A. Powell Davies:
Life is just a chance to grow a soul.
A. Powell Davies:
Life is just a chance to grow a soul.
Abraham Lincoln:
And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.
Adrienne Rich:
Life on the planet is born of woman.
Alan Bennett:
Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.
Albert Einstein:
True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness.
Albert Einstein:
Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.
Albert Schweitzer:
There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.
Albert Schweitzer:
Ethics cannot be based upon our obligations toward [people], but they are complete and natural only when we feel this Reverence for Life and the desire to have compassion for and to help all creatures insofar as it is in our power. I think that this ethic will become more and more recognized because of its great naturalness and because it is the foundation of a true humanism toward which we must strive if our culture is to become truly ethical.
Albert Schweitzer:
Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.
Civilization and Ethics, 1949
Albert Schweitzer:
Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life and that to destroy, harm, or to hinder life is evil. Affirmation of the world -- that is affirmation of the will to live, which appears in phenomenal forms all around me -- is only possible for me in that I give myself out for other life.
Alice Walker:
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Alice Walker:
Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.
Amelia Burr:
Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.
Anais Nin:
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
Anais Nin:
People living deeply have no fear of death.
Anais Nin:
The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
Anais Nin:
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
Annie Dillard:
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Barry Lopez:
How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
Arctic Dreams
Ben Jonson:
A good life is a main argument.
Benjamin Disraeli:
Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
Benjamin Franklin:
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that the stuff life is made of.
Bertrand Russell:
Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].
Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].
I have wished to know why the stars shine.
Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.
This has been my life; I found it worth living.
adapted
Buckminster Fuller:
Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.
Buddha:
If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard:
Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish each moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived.
played by Patrick Stewart, from the film "Star Trek: Generations"
Carl Jung:
There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
Carl Sandburg:
Our lives are like a candle in the wind.
Carl Sandburg:
Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
Charlotte Bronte:
Life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.
Chinese proverb:
When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.
Colette:
I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.
Colette:
Life is nothing but a series of crosses for us mothers.
Corita Kent:
Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed.
Corita Kent:
Life is a succession of moments. To live each one is to succeed.
Dorothy Thompson:
Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.
Dorothy Thompson:
Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.
E. B. White:
You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.
Charlotte, "Charlotte's Web"
Edith Wharton:
Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
Edna St. Vincent Millay:
My candle burns at both its ends;
It will not last the night;
But oh, my foes, and oh, my friends --
It gives a lovely light.
Edna St. Vincent Millay:
Life is a quest and love a quarrel ...
Elbert Hubbard:
Life is just one damned thing after another.
Elbert Hubbard:
Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.
Eleanor Roosevelt:
I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived. Curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.
Elie Wiesel:
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
(Oct. 1986)
Elizabeth Drew:
The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.
Emily Dickinson:
Love—is anterior to Life—
Posterior—to Death—
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth—
Emily Dickinson:
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain.
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
Emily Dickinson:
That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.
Emily Dickinson:
To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
Ernest Becker:
The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.
Ernest Becker:
[W]e now know that the human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of life and the fear of death... Heidegger brought these fears to the center of his existential philosophy. He argued that the basic anxiety of [humanity] is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world. That is, both fear of death and fear of life, of experience and individuation.
Ernest Becker:
I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?
Ernest Dowson:
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses;
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
F. Forrester Church:
Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.
Franklin P. Jones:
Love doesn't make the world go 'round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.
Frederick Buechner:
The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.
Friedrich Nietzsche:
And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
George Bernard Shaw:
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.
George Eliot:
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
George Sand:
Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.
George Santayana:
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
Germaine Greer:
Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life.
Goethe:
A useless life is an early death.
HH the Dalai Lama:
What is the meaning of life? To be happy and useful.
Harry Emerson Fosdick:
Nothing else matters much -- not wealth, nor learning, nor even health -- without this gift: the spiritual capacity to keep zest in living. This is the creed of creeds, the final deposit and distillation of all important faiths: that you should be able to believe in life.
Helen Keller:
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
Henri Frederick Amiel:
Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.
Henry David Thoreau:
However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
Henry James:
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
Henry Van Dyke:
Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love, to work, to play, and to look up at the stars.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
and things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art; to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Immanuel Kant:
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
Isaac Asimov:
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.
Isadora Duncan:
People do not live nowadays - they get about ten percent out of life.
James F. Bymes:
Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem to be more afraid of life than death
Jean-Paul Sartre:
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
Joan Baez:
You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.
John Dewey:
Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.
John Dewey:
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
John Lennon:
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
Joni Mitchell:
I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all.
Kalidasa:
Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And To-morrow is only a Vision;
But To-day well lived makes
Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness,
And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!
Katharine Hepburn:
Without discipline, there's no life at all.
Leo Buscaglia:
What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.
Madame de Stael:
The mystery of existence is the connection between our faults and our misfortunes.
Marcus Aurelius:
The universe is transformation; our life is what our thoughts make it.
Marcus Aurelius:
Remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses.
Marcus Aurelius:
And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.
Margaret Fuller:
Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.
Maria Mitchell:
Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow.
Marian Wright Edelman:
Service is what life is all about.
Marie Curie:
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
Mark Twain:
What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. Who was it who said, "Blessed is the man who has found his work"? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work--not somebody else's work. The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man's work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.
Mark Twain:
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Mark Twain:
There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy and a tragedy.
Mark Twain:
Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
Mark Twain:
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Martin Luther King, Jr.:
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
Mary Oliver:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver:
To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. Blackwater Woods
Matthew Arnold:
Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy'd the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done...
May Sarton:
A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.
Mohandas K. Gandhi:
Where there is love there is life.
Mortimer Adler:
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
Nadine Stair (attributed, probably erroneously):
If I had my life to live over, I'd dare to make more mistakes next time. I'd relax; I'd limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I'd have fewer imaginary ones.
You see, I'm one of those people who lived sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I had my moments, and if I had to do it over again, I'd have more of them. In fact, I'd try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after the other, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I've been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat, and a parachute. If I had it to do over again, I would travel lighter than I have.
If I had my life to live over again, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dance; I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies.
The story behind this quotation
Norbert Capek:
It is worthwhile to live
and fight courageously
for sacred ideals.
This entry continued ...
Norman MacEwan:
Happiness is not so much in having as sharing. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
Norman Vincent Peale:
Live your life and forget your age.
Oliver Wendell Holmes:
It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.
Oliver Wendell Holmes:
Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.
Oliver Wendell Holmes:
A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
Omar N. Bradley:
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.
Oscar Wilde:
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
Paul Anka:
And now the end is near
And so I face the final curtain,
My friends, I'll say it clear,
I'll state my case of which I'm certain.
I've lived a life that's full, I've travelled each and evr'y highway
And more, much more than this, I did it my way.
Paul Beattie:
When My Mind is Still
When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I remember things too easily forgotten:
The purity of early love,
The maturity of unselfish love that asks --
desires -- nothing but another's good,
The idealism that has persisted through all the tempest of life.
When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I can find a quiet assurance, an inner peace, in the core of my being.
It can face the doubt, the loneliness, the anxiety,
Can accept these harsh realities and can even grow
Because of these challenges to my essential being.
When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I can sense my basic humanity,
And then I know that all men and women are my brothers and sisters.
Nothing but my own fear and distrust can separate me from the love of friends.
If I can trust others, accept them, enjoy them,
Then my life shall surely be richer and more full.
If I can accept others, this will help them to be more truly themselves,
And they will be more able to accept me.
When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I know how much life has given me:
The history of the race, friends and family,
The opportunity to work, the chance to build myself.
Then wells within me the urge to live more abundantly,
With greater trust and joy,
With more profound seriousness and earnest service,
And yet more calmly at the heart of life.
Paul Beattie was a Unitarian Universalist minister, serving in congregations including in Kansas City, Missouri, and last at the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh, PA. He was also president of the Fellowship of Religious Humanists, among his many involvements.
Paul Bowles:
... we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
Pearl S. Buck:
The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.
Pearl S. Buck:
The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
Rabindranath Tagore:
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.
from Gitanjali
Ralph Ellison:
Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
We are always getting ready to live but never living.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Life is a succession of lessons, which must be lived to be understood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Life is a progress, and not a station.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.:
Life is short, but there is always time enough for courtesy.
Ray Bradbury:
Life is "trying things to see if they work."
Raymond Charles Barker:
The principle of life is that life responds by corresponding; your life becomes the thing you have decided it shall be.
Robert Byrne:
The purpose of life is a life of purpose.
Robert Frost:
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
Robert Frost:
What is this talked-of mystery of birth
But being mounted bareback on the earth?
Robert Louis Stevenson:
The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.
Roy H. Williams:
Lives, like money, are spent. What are you buying with yours?
Sarah Ban Breathnach:
An authentic life is the most personal form of worship. Everyday life has become my prayer.
Sarah Bernhardt:
Life begets life. Energy becomes energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.
Sean O'Casey:
I have found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active, and sometime terrifying experience, and I've enjoyed it completely. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other.
Seneca:
Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.
Sharon Welch:
Injustice can be eliminated, but human conflicts and natural limitations cannot be removed. The conflicts of social life and the limitations of nature cannot be controlled or transcended. They can, however, be endured and survived. It is possible for there to be a dance with life, a creative response to its intrinsic limits and challenges ... [A Feminist Ethic of Risk]
Sophia Lyon Fahs:
Life becomes religious whenever we make it so: when some new light is seen, when some deeper appreciation is felt, when some larger outlook is gained, when some nobler purpose is formed, when some task is well done.
Stephen Covey:
Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power.
Theodore Rubin:
There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.
Thich Nhat Hanh:
Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.
Thomas Jefferson:
It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.
Tom Lehrer:
Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.
Toni Morrison:
Birth, life, and death -- each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.
Unknown:
Life would be much easier if I had the source code.
Ursula K. LeGuin:
If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
Victor Frankl:
If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So, if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life.
Victor Frankl:
A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."
Victor Frankl:
We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by doing a deed; (2) by experiencing a value; and (3) by suffering.
Victor Hugo:
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
Virginia Satir:
Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understand, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not.
Wallace Stegner:
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Will Rogers:
Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
William Blake:
For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.
William James:
Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.
The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902
William James:
These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create that fact.
Is Life Worth Living?
Winston Churchill:
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
Zeno:
The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.
Albert Einstein:
Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
Albert Einstein:
How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?
Albert Schweitzer:
Thought cannot avoid the ethical or reverence and love for all life. It will abandon the old confined systems of ethics and be forced to recognize the ethics that knows no bounds. But on the other hand, those who believe in love for all creation must realize clearly the difficulties involved in the problem of a boundless ethic and must be resolved not to veil from [humankind] the conflicts which this ethic will involve [us], but allow [us] really to experience them. To think out in every implication the ethic of love for all creation -- this is the difficult task which confronts our age.â€
Alfred Adler:
We only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. If men or women contemplate an escape, they do not collect all their powers for the task. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a "getaway." We cannot love and be limited.
Alfred Tennyson:
I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Allan K. Chalmers:
The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
Ambrose Bierce:
Love: a temporary insanity, curable by marriage.
Amy Bloom:
Love at first sight is easy to understand; it's when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.
Amy Tan:
I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.
Anais Nin:
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
Ann Landers:
If you have love in your life it can make up for a great many things you lack. If you don't have it, no matter what else there is, it's not enough.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh:
Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery:
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.
Barbara De Angelis:
Love is a choice you make from moment to moment.
Barbara De Angelis:
Love and kindness are never wasted. They always make a difference. They bless the one who receives them, and they bless you, the giver.
Bayard Rustin:
When I say I love Eastland, it sounds preposterous -- a man who brutalizes people. But you love him or you wouldn't be here. You're going to Mississippi to create social change -- and you love Eastland in your desire to create conditions which will redeem his children. Loving your enemy is manifest in putting your arms not around the man but around the social situation, to take power from those who misuse it -- at which point they can become human too.
Bayard Taylor:
I love thee, I love but thee
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars grow old...
Bertrand Russell:
Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].
Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].
I have wished to know why the stars shine.
Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.
This has been my life; I found it worth living.
adapted
Bertrand Russell:
A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.
Bible:
Love is patient, love is kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It is not rude, it is not self-seeking.
It is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails.
I Corinthians 13:4-8
Blaise Pascal:
The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.
C.S. Lewis:
Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone.
Carl Jung:
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
Carter Heyward:
Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being "drawn toward." Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one's friends and enemies.
This entry continued ...
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve:
Tell me who admires and loves you,
And I will tell you who you are.
Chaucer:
For there is one thing I can safely say: that those bound by love must obey each other if they are to keep company long. Love will not be constrained by mastery; when mastery comes, the God of love at once beats his wings, and farewell -- he is gone. Love is a thing as free as any spirit; women naturally desire liberty, and not to be constrained like slaves; and so do men, if I shall tell the truth.
This entry continued ...
Dale Evans:
Every time we love, every time we give, it's Christmas.
Don Byas:
You call it madness, but I call it love.
E.M. Forster:
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. Only connect...
Ecclesiastes:
For everything there is a season,
And a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate,
A time for war, and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
Edna St. Vincent Millay:
Life is a quest and love a quarrel ...
Edna St. Vincent Millay:
I love humanity but I hate people.
Elbert Hubbard:
The love we give away is the only love we keep.
Elie Wiesel:
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
(Oct. 1986)
Elie Wiesel:
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
Elizabeth Barret Browning:
Whoso loves, believes the impossible.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox:
All love that has not friendship for its base,
Is like a mansion built upon the sand.
Emily Dickinson:
That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love.
Emily Dickinson:
Love—is anterior to Life—
Posterior—to Death—
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth—
Emily Dickinson:
Who has not found the heaven below
Will fail of it above.
God's residence is next to min,
His furniture is love.
Emma Goldman:
Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere.
Erich Fromm:
Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved."
Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love."
Immature love says: "I love you because I need you."
Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."
Ernest Becker:
When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.
Euripides:
He is not a lover who does not love forever.
Felix Adler:
Love is the expansion of two natures in such fashion that each include the other, each is enriched by the other.
Francis David:
We need not think alike to love alike.
Franklin P. Jones:
Love doesn't make the world go 'round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.
Friedrich Nietzsche:
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Georg C. Lichtenberg:
Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.
George MacDonald:
To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.
George Sand:
There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.
George Santayana:
Love is only half the illusion; the lover, but not his love, is deceived.
The Life of Reason, 1905-1906
Goethe:
To be loved for what one is, is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him, their own selves, their version of him.
H. L. Mencken:
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia -- to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
Prejudices, 1919
HH the Dalai Lama:
Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually. Peace, for example, starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us.
This entry continued ...
HH the Dalai Lama:
When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.
Han Suyin [Elizabeth Comber]:
...love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.
b. 1917 Chinese writer and physician
Hazrat Inayat Khan:
The sage said, "The best thing is not to hate anyone, only to love. That is the only way out of it. As soon as you have forgiven those whom you hate, you have gotten rid of them. Then you have no reason to hate them; you just forget.
Spiritual Dimensions of Psychology
Helen Keller:
Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding line, and no way of knowing how near the harbor was. "Light! Give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.
Henri Nouwen:
Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.
Henry David Thoreau:
Love must be as much a light as it is a flame.
Henry David Thoreau:
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
If I am not worth the wooing, I am surely not worth the winning.
Herman Hesse:
If I know what love is, it is because of you.
Hermann Hesse:
You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.
Hobbes (of Calvin and ...):
I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each others dreams, we can be together all the time.
Houssaye:
Tell me whom you love and I will tell you who you are.
Ingrid Bergman:
A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.
Iris Murdock:
We can only learn to love by loving.
Isha McKenzie-Mavinga:
On reflection, one of the things I needed to learn was to allow myself to be loved.
James Baldwin:
The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
Another Country, 1962
James D. Bryden:
Love does not die easily. It is a living thing. It thrives in the face of all of life's hazards, save one -- neglect.
James Thurber and E.B. White:
Love is the strange bewilderment which overtakes one person on account of another person.
Jane Austen:
Friendship is the finest balm for the pangs of despised love.
Jane Austen:
One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it unless it has all been suffering, nothing but suffering.
Jean Baptiste Henry Lacordaire:
We are the leaves of one branch, the drops of one sea, the flowers of one garden.
Jeanne Moreau:
Age does not protect you from love, but love to some extent protects you from age.
Jessamyn West:
A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.
The Quaker Reader, 1962
Jimi Hendrix:
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
Joan Vinge:
Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it.
The Snow Queen
John Lennon:
Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.
Jonathan Swift:
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Karl Menninger:
Love cures people -- both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
W.H. Murray
Katharine Hepburn:
Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.
Lily Tomlin:
If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?
Lisa Hoffman:
Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important.
M. Scott Peck:
Although the act of nurturing another's spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one's own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved.
Madeleine de Scudery:
Love makes mutes of those who habitually speak most fluently.
Marcel Proust:
In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual, delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted, atrocious.
Margaret Anderson:
In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person.
Margaret Guenther:
[W]e all need friends with whom we can speak of our deepest concerns, and who do not fear to speak the truth in love to us.
Mark Twain:
Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
Mark Twain:
Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
Mark Twain:
After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
Adam, in Adam's Diary
Martin Luther King, Jr.:
Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.
Martin Luther King, jr.:
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
Mary Oliver:
To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. Blackwater Woods
Mary Parrish:
Love vanquishes time. To lovers, a moment can be eternity, eternity can be the tick of a clock.
Mary S. Calderone:
I truly feel that there are as many ways of loving as there are people in the world and as there are days in the life of those people.
Matthew Arnold:
Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy'd the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done...
Mitsugi Saotome:
If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth.
Mohandas K. Gandhi:
Hatred ever kills, love never dies. Such is the vast difference between the two. What is obtained by love is retained for all time. What is obtained by hatred proves a burden in reality for it increases hatred.
Mohandas K. Gandhi:
Where there is love there is life.
Molleen Matsumura:
Love is like a campfire: It may be sparked quickly, and at first the kindling throws out a lot of heat, but it burns out quickly. For long lasting, steady warmth (with delightful bursts of intense heat from time to time), you must carefully tend the fire. (2007)
Molleen Matsumura:
Love is more than just a feeling: it's a process requiring continual attention. Loving well takes laughter, loyalty, and wanting more to be able to say, "I understand" than to hear, "You're right." (1999)
Molly Haskell:
But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat.
Mother Teresa:
The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.
Mother Teresa:
Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go.
Nathaniel Hawthorne:
It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.
from The Scarlet Letter
Norman Lindsay:
The best love affairs are those we never had.
Oscar Hammerstein, II:
Do you love me because I'm beautiful,
or am I am beautiful because you love me?
Oscar Wilde:
Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Paul Tillich:
The first duty of love is to listen.
Pearl Bailey:
What the world really needs is more love and less paperwork.
Pearl S. Buck:
A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.
Pearl S. Buck:
The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
Pearl S. Buck:
I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.
Rainer Maria Rilke:
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.
Reinhold Niebuhr:
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
Robert Frost:
Earth's the right place for love. I don't know where it's likely to go better.
Birches
Robert Fulghum:
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death.
Robert G. Ingersoll:
Love is the only bow on life's dark cloud.
It is the Morning and the Evening Star.
It shines upon the cradle of the babe,
and sheds its radiance upon the quiet tomb.
It is the mother of Art,
inspirer of poet, patriot, and philosopher.
It is the air and light of every heart, builder of every home,
kindler of every fire on every hearth.
It was the first to dream of immortality.
It fills the world with melody,
for Music is the voice of Love.
Love is the magician, the enchanter,
that changes worthless things to joy,
and makes right royal kings and queens of common clay.
It is the perfume of the wondrous flower -- the heart
and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon,
we are less than beasts;
but with it, earth is heaven
and we are gods.
Robert Heinlein:
Love is a condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
Roger de Bussy-Rabutin:
Absence is to love as wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small and kindles the great.
Rose Walker:
Have you even been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...
This entry continued ...
Roy Croft:
I love you
Not only for what you are
But for what I am
When I am with you
Love (first stanza)
Rumi:
Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absent-minded.
Someone sober will worry about events going badly.
Let the lover be.
Rumi:
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Rumi:
Come out of the circle of time
And into the circle of love.
Saint Francis de Sales:
You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves.
Samuel Butler:
Perhaps; but is it not Tennyson who has said: "'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have lost at all"? in The Way of All Flesh
Sharon Welch:
Resistance to oppression is often based on a love that leads us to value ourselves, and leads us to hope for more
than the established cultural system is willing to grant ... such love is far more energizing than guilt, duty, or self-sacrifice. Love for others leads us to accept accountability (in contrast to feeling guilt) and motivates our search for ways to end our complicity with structures of oppression. Solidarity does not require self-sacrifice, but an enlargement of the self to include community with others. [The Feminist Ethic of Risk]
Simone Weil:
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?"
Sir Arthur Pinero:
Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.
Song of Solomon:
This is my beloved and this is my friend.
Spanish proverb:
Where there is love, there is pain.
St. Augustine:
Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.
Søren Kierkegaard:
Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.
Thomas Merton:
It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them…. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.
Tom Robbins:
The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.
Still Life With Woodpecker
Truman Capote:
The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.
Other Voices, Other Rooms, 1948
Unknown:
Love is blind, but friendship closes its eyes.
Ursula K. LeGuin:
Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
Ursula LeGuin:
Love doesn't sit there like a stone. It has to made like bread; remade all the time, made new.
Victor Frankl:
A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."
Victor Hugo:
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
W.H. Murray:
...the more the soul knows, the more she loves, and loving much, she tastes much.
from the journal of his Himalayan expedition
Washington Irving:
Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.
Willa Cather:
Where there is great love, there are always miracles.
Willa Cather:
Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.
William E. Gladstone :
We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.
William Shakespeare:
Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.
William Shakespeare:
Love all, trust a few.
William Shakespeare:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.
"Romeo and Juliet"
William Sloane Coffin:
The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
William Wordsworth:
The little unremembered acts of kindness and love are the best parts of a person's life.
Zora Neale Hurston:
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
Zora Neale Hurston:
Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.