Quotes on Life

To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing

I'd rather die on my feet, than live on my knees.

The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.

If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.

Together, they would watch everything that was so carefully planned collapse, and they would smile at the beauty of destruction.

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!

You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute, And now and then stab, as occasion serves.

[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.

Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.

Another year is fast approaching. Go be that starving artist you’re afraid to be. Open up that journal and get poetic finally. Volunteer. Suck it up and travel. You were not born here to work and pay taxes. You were put here to be part of a vast organism to explore and create. Stop putting it off. The world has much more to offer than what’s on 15 televisions at TGI Fridays. Take pictures. Scare people. Shake up the scene. Be the change you want to see in the world.

No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.

If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.

Everybody has that point in their life where you hit a crossroads and you've had a bunch of bad days and there's different ways you can deal with it and the way I dealt with it was I just turned completely to music.

Ever wonder about those people who spend $2 apiece on those little bottles of Evian water? Try spelling Evian backward.

Life is a mirror: if you frown at it, it frowns back; if you smile, it returns the greeting.

It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you.

A child can teach an adult three things: to be happy for no reason, to always be busy with something, and to know how to demand with all his might that which he desires.