Quotes on Life

I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.

It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.

There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.

The right of nature... is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life.

The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.

Everyday we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read the lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Everyman, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths.

The acquisition of knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive out useless things and retain the good. For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.

The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going

Conceit spoils the finest genius.

Life can be magnificent and overwhelming -- that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.

Sorrows do not last forever when we are journeying towards the thing we have always wanted.

You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.

Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.

Resolved, never to do anything which I should be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life.

It is not the strength of the body that counts, but the strength of the spirit.

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.

Birth and death are not two different states, but they are different aspects of the same state.

There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man's whole life is a succession of moment after moment. There will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment.