#Living Quotes

“Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.”

“He decided to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of living.”

“Wisdom will never let us stand with any man on an unfriendly footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited for some better sympathy or intimacy to come. But whence and when: Tomorrow will be like today. Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live.”

“Life only avails, not the having lived.”

“It does not to dwell on dreams and forget to live, but it is equally foolish to ignore the past – never forget.”

“We are always getting ready to live, but never living... The wave moves onward but the particles of which it is composed do not... It cannot be but that at intervals throughout society there are real men intermixed . . . as the carpenter puts one iron bar in his bannister for every five or six wooden ones.”

“Postpone not your life.”

“Don't sit and wait. Get out there, feel life. Touch the sun, and immerse in the sea.”

“If we live truly, we shall see truly.”

“The finest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the real with the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed.”

“To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. It is not the part of men, but of fanatics, or of mathematicians, if you will, to say, that, the shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring whether for so short a duration we were sprawling in want, or sitting high. Since our office is with moments, let us husband them.”

“Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.”

“Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.”

“Lord, let me live until I die.”

“A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school,preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not "studying a profession," for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.”

“Dying is nothing. What's terrible is not to live.”

“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.”

“To drive free, to love free, to court destruction with taunts, to feed the remainder of life with one hour of fullness and freedom - one brief hour of madness and joy.”

“But I don't think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.”

“I note the derogatory rumors concerning the use of alcoholic stimulants and lavish living. It is the penalty of greatness.”

“And every breath I breathe untill the moment I'm deceased. Will be another moment ballin' as a 'G'.”

“To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.”

“Happiness and success in life are not the result of what we have, but rather of how we live. What we do with the things we have makes the biggest difference in the quality of life.”

“You have to stop looking in the mirror and realize that your living for yourself, not other people.”

“The worst of all fears is the fear of living”

“There are dreadful moments when death comes very near those we love, even if for the time being it passes by. But life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living.”

“Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function; living is the functionary.”

“Life is to be lived, not controlled.”

“Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.”

“I wrote when I did not know life;now that I do know the meaning of life,I have no more to write.Life cannot be written; life can only be lived.”

“Don't tell me that you have exhausted Life. When a man says that, one knows that life has exhausted him.”

“Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.”

“The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.”

“It is the greatest good for an individual to discuss virtue (aka areté) every day...for the unexamined life is not worth living.”

“Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause - that it must be lived forward. The more one thinks through this clause, the more one concludes that life in temporality never becomes properly understandable, simply because never at any time does one get perfect repose to take the stance - backward.”

“The highest of all is not to understand the highest but to act upon it.”

“You live life looking forward, you understand life looking backward.”

“An unexamined life is a life of no account.”

“It is not living that matters, but living rightly.”

“What most counts is not merely to live, but to live right.”

“The really important thing is not to live, but to live well. And to live well meant, along with more enjoyable things in life, to live according to your principles.”

“You don't have to worry about the future, you don't worry about the past - you just explode.”

“The rest of the world lives to eat, while I eat to live.”

“Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.”

“Those then who know not wisdom and virtue, and are always busy with gluttony and sensuality, go down and up again as far as the mean; and in this region they move at random throughout life, but they never pass into the true upper world; thither they neither look, nor do they ever find their way, neither are they truly filled with true being, nor do they ever taste of pure and abiding pleasure.”

“Most people live dejectedly in worldly joys or sorrows. They sit on the sidelines and do not join the dance.”

“Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.”

“Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.”

“Thou shouldst eat to live; not live to eat.”

“Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued." "It is not living that matters, but living rightly. The unexamined life is not worth living.”