more quotations and passages on life

Life is a moment-to-moment happening;
any attempt to possess it, save it,
or store it, is to lose the present moment.

A Spiritual Warrior

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Give the best you have received from the past to the best that
you may come to know in the future. Accept life daily not as a cup
to be drained but as a chalice to be filled with whatsoever things are
honest, pure, lovely, and of good report. Making a living is best
undertaken as part of the more important business of making a life.
Every now and again take a good look at something not made with
hands—a mountain, a star, the turn of a stream. There will come
to you wisdom and patience and solace, and above all the assurance
that you are not alone in the world.

Sidney Lovett

We must cultivate and defend particularity, individuality, and irregularity—life.
Human beings do not have a future in the collectivism of bureaucratic states
or in the mass society created by capitalism. Every system, by virtue as much
of its abstract nature as of its pretension to totality, is the enemy of life.
As a forgotten Spanish poet, José Moreno Villa, put it with melancholy
wit: “I have discovered in symmetry the root of much iniquity.”

Octavio Paz

Life just is. You have to flow
with it. Give yourself to the
moment. Let it happen.

Jerry Brown

Life is good and is always
trying to do us a good turn
if we will only allow it
to do so.

Henry T. Hamblin

The real trick is to stay alive
as long as you live.

Ann Landers

Life is learning which rules to obey, which rules not to obey, and the wisdom to tell the difference between the two.

Anonymous

Life is short. Each year passes more quickly than the previous one.
It’s easy to deny yourself many of life’s simple pleasures because you
want to be practical. Forget about practical and decide instead to become
a joy collector. Always be on the lookout for gifts without ribbons. God is
strewing them across your path right now. His gifts come tagged with a note:
“Life can be wonderful. Do your best not to miss it!” Enjoy what it is before
it isn’t anymore. . . . Dare to slip on a pair of bunny slippers once in a while!
Surprise yourself! Enjoy the little things because one day you’ll look back
and realize they were the big things!

Barbara Johnson

To recognize your capacity to affect life is to know yourself
most intimately and deeply, to recognize your real value and
power, independent of any role that you may have been given
to play or expertise you may have acquired. It is possible
to strengthen or diminish the life around you in almost any role.
One of the ways in which we become dangerous to others is
to assume that our role or our expertise has in it such an inherent
capacity for good that we, occupying that role, can do no harm.
There is no role that absolves us of the responsibility to listen,
to be mindful that life is all around us, touching us.

Rachel Naomi Remen

Life is the ability to start over again.

Joan Chittister

Life is really simple,
but people insist on making it complicated.

Confucius

Life is not something to be lived through:
it is something to be lived up to.
It is a privilege, not a penal servitude
of so many decades on earth.

William G. Jordan

Life was never meant to be a struggle;
just a gentle progression from one point
to another, much like walking through
a valley on a sunny day.

Stuart Wilde

You're only here for a short visit.
Don't hurry, don't worry, and stop
to smell the flowers along the way.

Walter Hagen

Life, like any other exciting
story, is bound to have
painful and scary parts,
boring and depressing
parts, but it's a brilliant
story, and it's up to us
how it will turn out
in the end.

Bo Lozoff

It is a pity that the words "spiritual life" were ever invented,
for they have caused so much confusion. For, in truth, there is
only life--everyday life--which is simply what is at every moment.

Robert Powell

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Life begins when a person first realizes how soon it ends.

Marcelene Cox

I have never given very deep thought to a philosophy of life, though I have
a few ideas that I think are useful to me. One is that you do whatever comes
your way as well as you can, and another is that you think as little as possible
about yourself and as much as possible about other people and about things
that are interesting. The third is that you get more joy out of giving joy to others
and should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.

Eleanor Roosevelt

I don’t want to be a passenger in my own life.

Diane Ackerman

It is fair to say that the world around you is a mirror. Therefore
you have a lot more control over the future than you might think,
because you can shape your world just by being true
to what you really care about.

Bradley Trevor Greive

Life is. I am. Anything might happen.
   And I believe I may invest my life with meaning.
   The uncertainty is a blessing in disguise.
   If I were absolutely certain about all things, I would spend my life
in anxious misery, fearful of losing my way. But since everything
and anything are always possible, the miraculous is always nearby
and wonders shall never, ever cease.

Robert Fulghum

The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible,
to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard,
and gallop over the thick, sunstruck hills every day. . . . It began as mystery,
and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

Diane Ackerman

There is never a frozen moment.
Life flows and so must we.

Stephen C. Paul

To be alive is the biggest fear humans have. Death is not
the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk
to be alive--the risk to be alive and express what we really are.

Don Miguel Ruiz

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way,
that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have
a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing,
having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it,
without knowing what's going to happen next.

Gilda Radner

There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence
of a high, pure, simple, and useful life.

Booker T. Washington

I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
goes on as fruit.

Dawna Markova

"Life, we think, measures us by
how well we've succeeded, or
how miserably we have failed,"
Old Hawk continued. "On the
other hand, perhaps life doesn't
measure us at all, at least
not in the same ways we measure
ourselves. Perhaps it doesn't expect
us to succeed or fail. Life may
simply want us to make the journey
in order to add to or detract from
the whole. To put it another way,
when we reach the end of the
journey that is each of our lives,
we will be examples to those who
come behind us. Some of us,
unfortunately, but perhaps
necessarily, will be examples
of how not to live life. Others of us
will be examples of how to live life."

Joseph M. Marshall III