Famous Quotes & Sayings

Albert Camus

There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.

Albert Camus

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

Albert Camus

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.

What art thou, life, that we, must court thy stay? A breath one single gasp must puff away! A short-lived flower, that with the day must fade! A fleeting vapor, and an empty shade! A stream that silently but swiftly glides To meet eternity's immeasured tides! A being, lost alike by pain or joy? A fly can kill it, or a worm destroy! Impair'd by labor, and by ease undone, Commenced in tears, and ended in a groan.

A poem's life and death dependeth still Not on the poet's wits, but reader's will.

Annie Besant

In the light of reincarnation life changes its aspect, for it becomes the school of the eternal Man within us, who seeks therein his development, the Man that was and is and shall be, for whom the hour will never strike.

Annie Dillard

We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet

Annie Dillard

Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.

Annie Dillard

We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.

Annie Dillard

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.

Annie Dillard

The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.

Annie Dillard

The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.

Annie Dillard

I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.

Annie Dillard

I think that the dying pray at the last not please but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks.

Annie Dillard

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Clay Aiken

As long as you're living right, then you don't have to worry about what people see.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Not so many years ago there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel -movement through space -provided the universal metaphor for change. One of the subtle confusions -perhaps one of the secret terrors -of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.

Daniel J. Boorstin

The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.

D. H. Lawrence

The man who had died looked nakedly on life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flinging itself up in stormy or subtle wave-crests.... always the man who had died saw not the bird alone, but the short, sharp wave of life of which the bird was the crest.

D. H. Lawrence

Life is beautiful, as long as it consumes you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is gorgeous, glorious. It's when you burn a slow fire and save fuel, that life's not worth having.

D. H. Lawrence

If only we could live two lives: the first in which to make one's mistakes, and the second in which to profit by them.

D. H. Lawrence

We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do - it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much.

D. H. Lawrence

We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

D. H. Lawrence

I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations based upon some unanimous accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality. I am weary of personality. Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us.

D. H. Lawrence

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.

D. H. Lawrence

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

D. H. Lawrence

The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one's wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great-quite god-like. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it.

D. H. Lawrence

Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really.

D. H. Lawrence

For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time.

D. H. Lawrence

America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. They can't trust life until they can control it.

D. H. Lawrence

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.

D. H. Lawrence

For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.

D. H. Lawrence

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.