Alive But At What Cost Quotes & Sayings

I learned years ago, I adore acting and I think it's the most alive I know how to be - almost - but I really want a good life. I've been married for 17 years - I know, they call us the last couple. I have a 13-year-old daughter. I have a lovely home life with good friends who aren't in the business ... and I have no desire to cost my whole life in pursuit of the career alone. — Kathleen Turner

The paradox of soul-satisfaction is this: When I die to myself, my soul comes alive. God says the wrong approach to soul thirst is through human achievement and material wealth. So soul-satisfaction is not about acquiring the right things but about acquiring the right soul. It is not something you buy, but something you receive freely from God. Hear these great words of the prophet Isaiah: "Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and [your soul] will delight in the richest of fare." And it will be satisfied. — John Ortberg

Was I a dreamer, looking for an elusive happiness that real life could never deliver? Or were we meant to know the rapture of being alive, even at the cost of breaking the rules? — Elizabeth Lesser

That was Flint's treasure that we had come so far to seek, and that had cost already the lives of seventeen men from the Hispaniola. How many it had cost in the ammassing, what blood and sorrow, what good ships scuttled on the deep, what brave men walking the plank blindfold, what shot of cannon, what shame and lies and cruelty, perhaps no man alive could tell. — Robert Louis Stevenson

If they made it out of the well alive, he'd stay and fight for her no matter the cost. He wouldn't run away again, not even if Peter put a gun to his head. He'd do whatever he had to in order to win her heart. He'd beg her to forgive him. And then he'd beg her to marry him. — Jody Hedlund

Metallica lives in a little bubble. We just do our own thing. We're not part of any trends or waves or fads. We can just do our own thing, all the time. It's a great luxury. I don't think we were really appreciative of it until recently, and really understood that it is what keeps us alive. It's great to be able to have the freedom to run around and do all this crazy stuff, and at all cost, avoid making another record, just to piss our managers off. — Lars Ulrich

Maybe my reliance on numbing is keeping me from the two things I was born for: learning and loving. I could go on hitting easy buttons until I die and feel no pain, but the cost of that decision could be that I'll never learn, love, or be truly alive. — Glennon Doyle Melton

Food cost rather than the absolute absence of food can often be the key factor in shortages and possible starvation. During the height of the Irish Potato Famine in 1845, Ireland was actually exporting food to England. The peasants starved because they could not afford to buy food at the local prices, enhanced by the loss of the potato crop. There was enough food, in absolute terms, to keep everyone alive; they died because they had no money to buy it. — Peter Wadhams

The way health care is funded in the U.S. is not sustainable. People are being kept alive who are probably better off dead. The cost of health care is too high, and you don't get much for it - it's twice as high in the U.S. as elsewhere, and it's because of the middlemen. — Richard J. Roberts

JESUS beckons HIS followers to a path that's far from the easy road. It's a path filled with adventure, uncertainty, and unlimited possibilities - the only path that can fulfill the deepest longings and desires of your heart. This is the barbarian way: to give your heart to the only ONE who can make you fully alive. To unleash the untamed faith within. To be consumed by the presence of a passionate and compassionate GOD. To go where HE sends, no matter the cost. The Barbarian Way — Erwin Raphael McManus

For instance, one of the costs of the war is that soldiers today get very seriously injured but stay alive, and we can keep them alive but at an enormous price. — Joseph Stiglitz

The ever-increasing weight of responsibilities that enmeshes our lives keeps us locked into the system. We become the pulse that keeps the beast alive, but the cost is our own lives. The natural world around us shrinks, crushed beneath the suffocating might of work. — Fennel Hudson

From Alan Lightman's intricate 1993 novel Einstein's Dreams; set in Berne in 1905: With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts ... and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own ... Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. — Christopher Hitchens

In those days contests were extremely rough and frequently cost the participants their lives. Thus, whenever I sallied forth to take part in any of those affairs, I invariably bade farewell to my parents, since I had no assurance that I should ever return alive. — Yokoyama Sakujiro

Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it. — William James

Next to her a calico cat puffed away at a hubble-bubble. Puss's watch cost more than his vest, and his vest cost more than his boots, and his boots cost more than a house. If you stripped him naked and sold off his costume, you'd walk away with enough money to retire - though if you left him alive you wouldn't have long to enjoy it. The only thing that could rival Puss's vanity was his sadism. — Daniel Polansky

I didn't want that bouquet to die. Not yet. Not tomorrow. Not the next day. I wanted to keep it alive for as long as possible. And it wasn't because it cost a hundred and fifty dollars. I didn't know why it was. I just knew I did. — Kristen Ashley

People are delighted to accept pensions and gratuities, for which they hire out their labour or their support or their services. But nobody works out the value of time: men use it lavishly as if it cost nothing. But if death threatens these same people, you will see them praying to their doctors; if they are in fear of capital punishment, you will see them prepared to spend their all to stay alive. — Seneca.

The ovarian world is the product of a life rhythm. The moment a child is born it becomes part of a world in which there is not only the life rhythm but the death rhythm. The frantic desire to live, to live at any cost, is not a result of the life rhythm in us, but of the death rhythm. There is not only no need to keep alive at any price, but, if life is undesirable, it is absolutely wrong. This keeping oneself alive, out of a blind urge to defeat death, is in itself a means of sowing death. Every one who has not fully accepted life, who is not incrementing life, is helping to fill the world with death. To make the simplest gesture with the hand can convey the utmost sense of life; a word spoken with the whole being can give life. Activity in itself means nothing: it is often a sign of death. — Henry Miller

And yet a knowledge
is here that tenses the throat
as for song: the inheritance
of the ones, alive or once
alive, who stand behind
the ones I have imagined,
who took into their minds
the troubles of this place,
blights of love and race,
but saw a good fate here
and willingly paid its cost,
kept it the best they could,
thought of its good,
and mourned the good they lost.
(From the ending of Where in Clearing, p179) — Wendell Berry

There is no easy formula for determining right and wrong livelihood, but it is essential to keep the question alive. To return the sense of dignity and honor to manhood, we have to stop pretending that we can make a living at something that is trivial or destructive and still have sense of legitimate self-worth. A society in which vocation and job are separated for most people gradually creates an economy that is often devoid of spirit, one that frequently fills our pocketbooks at the cost of emptying our souls. — Sam Keen

Daydreams are doable. The turn-on is not in scale, spectacle, or cost. It's in the doing. Anything you haven't done is an adventure. Wanting to is the principal requirement. If you can do and want to, don't not. In short, while alive, live. — Malcolm Forbes

but the general tendency is for wages to level down to the cost of production of labour, that is, the cost necessary for keeping the worker alive and capable of working and reproducing. — Anonymous

Freedom is of more account than the height of a roof beam. I ought to know; mine cost me eighteen years' slavery. The man who lives on his own land is an independent man. He is his own master. If I can keep my sheep alive through winter and can pay what has been stipulated from year to year - then I pay what has been stipulated; and I have kept my sheep alive. No, it is freedom that we are all after, Titla. He who pays his way is a king. He who keeps his sheep alive through the winter lives in a palace. — Halldor Laxness

At the cost of efficiency always choose awareness, and you will create the situation in which meditation will become possible.

You are not here just to become more and more efficient - you are here to become more and more alive; you are here to become more and more intelligent; you are here to become more and more happy, ecstatically happy. But that is totally different from the ways of the mind. — Osho

Those who say that life is worth living at any cost have already written an epitaph of infamy, for there is no cause and no person that they will not betray to stay alive. — Sidney Hook

Nothing can fill the gap when we are away from those we love, and it would be wrong to try to find anything ... It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; he does not fill it, but keeps it empty so that our communion with another may be kept alive, even at the cost of pain. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

At the time, I remained relatively calm before that spectacle of horrors, which is perhaps the most telling indication of just how desensitized I had become. The more I witnessed such atrocities and rubbed shoulders with death, the more I desired to stay alive, no matter the cost. — Kang Chol-Hwan

The health dollar is very precious. When someone has such a bad condition as brain cancer, we know they're going to die and they're usually going to die within 12 months of diagnosis. They cost a lot of money to keep the patient alive for that period of time. Is it really worth it? — Charles Teo

But in my wretched efforts to stay alive at almost any cost I could still hurt and be hurt in my turn, and as long as death's black barrel organ was playing it seemed I would have to dance to the cheerless, doom-filled tune that was turning inexorably on the drum, like some liveried monkey with a terrified rictus on its face and a tin cup in its hand. That didn't make me unusual; just German. — Philip Kerr