Certain Things In Life Quotes & Sayings

Optimism hopes for the best without any guarantee of its arriving and is often no more than whistling in the dark. Christian hope, by contrast, is faith looking ahead to the fulfillment of the promises of God, as when the Anglican burial service inters the corpse 'in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.' Optimism is a wish without warrant; Christian hope is a certainty, guaranteed by God himself. Optimism reflects ignorance as to whether good things will ever actually come. Christian hope expresses knowledge that every day of his life, and every moment beyond it, the believer can say with truth, on the basis of God's own commitment, that the best is yet to come. — J.I. Packer

We are but phantoms, and the phantoms of phantoms, desires like cloud-shadows and wills of straw that eddy in the wind; the days pass, use and wont carry us through as a train carries the shadow of its lights - so be it! But one thing is real and certain, one thing is no dream-stuff, but eternal and enduring. It is the centre of my life, and all other things about it are subordinate or altogether vain. I loved her, that woman of a dream. And she and I are dead together! — H.G.Wells

For the law, the clarity of language and the finality of judgment is crucial, because you have to decide a case one way or another - whether it is criminal or civil or whatever. In ordinary life, you do not have to decide things with absolute finality. You do not have to decide on a theory in order to behave in a certain way towards other people. — Talal Asad

Music does a lot of things for a lot of people. It's transporting, for sure. It can take you right back, years back, to the very moment certain things happened in your life. It's uplifting, it's encouraging, it's strengthening. — Aretha Franklin

Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A huge amount of success in life comes from learning as a child how to make good habits. It's good to help kids understand that when they do certain things habitually, they're reinforcing patterns. — Charles Duhigg

When you're going over periods of your life, you remember certain things, certain events, certain people that you've forgotten. You've forgotten certain lessons or people you were very close to, and then you haven't seen them in a while. I think if you can go through life with the correct regrets, then looking back on it, like I did, a certain portion of my life is pretty enjoyable. All my regrets are ones that I'd like to keep. — Steve Guttenberg

If you're dealing with heavy topic matter, sometimes it's good to have a lightness going into it because it allows you to be open to possibilities, rather than getting rigidly stuck into a certain mind-set. People are strange. When you break up, sometimes you end up laughing with one another, as opposed to crying. Things in life are unusual, and to find those things, it's best to be relaxed. — Michael Fassbender

There is no man," [the painter Elstir] began, "however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man - so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise - unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. . . We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world."
Marcel Proust
Within a Budding Grove (translated by C. Scott Moncrieff) — Marcel Proust

The Jetavana Temple bells
ring the passing of all things.
Twinned sala trees, white in full flower,
declare the great man's certain fall.
The arrogant do not long endure:
They are like a dream one night in spring.
The bold and brave perish in the end:
They are as dust before the wind. — Royall Tyler

Babe, you cannot plan life. You can pull out all the stops to plan for everything and life will find a way to fuck with those plans, sock you in the gut, send you scrambling. Through that, you either have the balls not to back down and the strength to know what's important and hold the fuck on with everything you got, or you don't have that and you give up 'cause you're weak. Know two things for certain: I'm not fuckin' weak and you aren't either. — Kristen Ashley

I won't waste your time with the injuries of my childhood, with my loneliness, or the fear and sadness of the years I spent inside the bitter capsule of my parents' marriage, under the reign of my father's rage, after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of a childhood? I have no desire to describe mine; I only want to say that in order to survive the dark and often terrifying passage of my life I came to believe certain things about myself. — Nicole Krauss

You may not see every single piece of the puzzle that creates your life
you may not see every move the grand chess player makes
but know, He is in complete control of the game board. Sometimes certain pieces are moved or knocked over to make room for new ones. Other times, things happen because of the world we live in. But everything in the end, will always turn out for good. It's a nice promise, isn't it? To know there's a reason for it all? — Rachel Van Dyken

You know there's always things in life that you have to do despite the fact that you know for certain the outcome is going to be messy, painful, humiliating, or all three. — Ben Aaronovitch

To answer your question as honestly as I can, I've wanted since I was very little to not have to worry about money. I've never been poverty-level poor (I mean, there's been years where I've been officially beneath the poverty line, but that wasn't poverty: that was being a student and living the Student Lifestyle), but I've been in a place where you know you can't afford a better-quality food, where you can't do certain things because of money, and I'd prefer not to have those problems if I can. I sort of have troubles with money in general, with how it determines so much of our lives but with how we all try to ignore it, but I would like to be (and stay) in a place where I can pick up some new comics and games and not worry about how much they cost.
This is terrible; you're asking me where I want to be in the future, what I want my life to be like, and the only thing I can tell you is Man, all I know is I don't want to be POOR. — Ryan North

There are certain parts of a classic nerd's brain that can destroy that person - obsessing about things to the detriment of everything else in your life. But those are the same tools that you can use to turn everything around. — Chris Hardwick

Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits. — James Salter

The law was not society, it began. Society was people like himself and Owen and Brillhart, who hadn't the right to take the life of another member of society. And yet the law did. "And yet the law is supposed to be the will of society at least. It isn't even that. Or maybe it is collectively," he added, aware that as always he was doubling back before he come to a point, making things as complex as possible in trying to make them certain. — Patricia Highsmith

But just then, as if to avoid a certain awkwardness, Seaman began to talk not about Newell but about Newell's mother, Anne Jordan Newell. He described her appearance (pleasing), her work (she had a job at a factory that made irrigation systems), her faith (she went to church every Sunday), her industriousness (she kept the house as neat as a pin), her kindness (she always had a smile for everyone), her common sense (she gave good advice, wise advice, without forcing it on anyone). A mother is a precious thing, concluded Seaman. Marius and I founded the Panthers. We worked whatever jobs we could get and we bought shotguns and handguns for the people's self-defense. But a mother is worth more than the Black Revolution. That I can promise you. In my long and eventful life, I've seen many things. I was in Algeria and I was in China and in several prisons in the United States. A mother is a precious thing. This I say here and I'll say anywhere, anytime, he said in a hoarse voice. — Roberto Bolano

We could say that meditation doesn't have a reason or doesn't have a purpose. In this respect it's unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we don't do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment. — Alan W. Watts

I like [that] there's a certain inherent drama to those jobs that is exciting to tell stories about and it's still real life. I'm a little less interested in the current fad of being obsessed with superheroes and things that are so out of the box. — Ethan Hawke

Age makes you notice certain things. For example, I now know that a man's life is broadly divided into three periods. During the first, it doesn't even occur to us that one day we will grow old, we don't think that time passes or that from the day we are born we're all walking toward a common end. After the first years of youth comes the second period, in which a person becomes aware of the fragility of life and what begins like a simple niggling doubt rises inside you like a flood of uncertainties that will stay with you for the rest of your days. Finally, toward the end of life, the period of acceptance begins, and, consequently, of resignation, a time of waiting. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Maybe it's impossible to find everything you want in one person. Maybe everyone in your life gives you certain things you need. And your friends give you the rest of what you can't get from your boyfriend. — Susane Colasanti

The mold we give to our lives is so that there will be no cataclysms. The order we seek we are willing to surrender to the flow of life at any time, but it is there as a brake on a car, and our health is a brake. We put brakes on, against our temperament. he said, Even a room, arranged in a certain manner, prevents certain things from taking place in it. — Anais Nin

I can look at the future with anticipation. And it's comforting to know that someday, as Christians, we'll be able to look back and have a little more clarity on why certain things in life happened. — Amy Grant

The thing is, I don't know if these stories he was telling were mine, or his, or someone else's. You spend your life among words, listening, making sense out of what you say and out of what you imagine other people are saying to you, believing that something in particular happened like this or that, as a result of this or that, with these or those consequences. But it is never so simple, is it? I suppose that if we read about ourselves in a book, we wouldn't recognize ourselves, we wouldn't realize that those people doing certain things and behaving in a particular manner are us. I always believed that I knew Alejandro, that I knew him intimately, I mean, the way you might know a doll you've once taken to pieces. But it wasn't true. — Alberto Manguel

Until you, I didn't consider my past as an issue. Yes, it affected certain ways I did things, but everything had its place and I wasn't unhappy. In fact, I thought I had a comfortable and uncomplicated life."
"Oh boy." My nose wrinkled. "Hello, Mr Comfortable. I'm Miss Complicated."
His grin flashed. "Never a dull moment. — Sylvia Day

Few things in life are certain, and one of them is that you can turn on the television at three in the morning and someone will be singing and dancing on the Indian channel. Proof of Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence. — Jessica Zafra

I am certain that there are two things in life which are dependable
the delights of the flesh and the delights of literature. I have had the good fortune to bring them together and enjoy them together in full quantity. — Peter Greenaway

The other Miller was different. Quieter. Sad, maybe, but at peace. He'd read a poem many years before called "The Death-Self," and he hadn't understood the term until now. A knot at the middle of his psyche was untying. All the energy he'd put into holding things together - Ceres, his marriage, his career, himself - was coming free. He'd shot and killed more men in the past day than in his whole career as a cop. He'd started - only started - to realize that he'd actually fallen in love with the object of his search after he knew for certain that he'd lost her. He'd seen unequivocally that the chaos he'd dedicated his life to holding at bay was stronger and wider and more powerful than he would ever be. No compromise he could make would be enough. His death-self was unfolding in him, and the dark blooming took no effort. It was a relief, a relaxation, a long, slow exhale after decades of holding it in. — James S.A. Corey

Have I told you about the tension of opposites? he says. The tension of opposites? Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't.
You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted.
A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle.Sounds like a wrestling match, I say.
A wrestling match. He laughs. Yes, you could describe life that way.
So which side wins, I ask?
Which side wins? He smiles at me, the crinkled eyes, the crooked teeth.
Love wins. Love always wins. — Mitch Albom

The best things are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain common work as it comes certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things of life. — Robert Louis Stevenson

When you're younger - duh - you don't really have the tools to deal with certain things in your life. — Scott Ian

I am a very honest person, and I can only say there are moments in my life where I really did think I was being me in the sense of my morals and beliefs and the way I acted. But when I look back at certain things that I wore and my hair and make-up, I was like, 'Whoa! That wasn't me!' But I didn't know it back then. — Jessie J.

In the course of this story, and very soon now, it will be necessary to make some disclosures about Mr. Krupper of a nature too coarse to be dealt with very directly in a work of such brevity. The grossly naturalistic details of a life, contained in the enormously wide context of that life, are softened and qualified by it, but when you attempt to set those details down in a tale, some measure of obscurity or indirection is called for to provide the same, or even approximate, softening effect that existence in time gives to those gross elements in the life itself. When I say that there was a certain mystery in the life of Mr. Krupper, I am beginning to approach those things in the only way possible without a head-on violence that would disgust and destroy and which would actually falsify the story.
("Hard Candy") — Tennessee Williams

During the last ten years of his life my father gradually lost the power of speech. At first he simply had trouble calling up certain words or would say similar words instead and then immediately laugh at himself. In the end he had only a handful of words left, and all his attempts at saying anything more substantial resulted in one of the last sentences he could articulate: 'That's strange.'
Whenever he said 'That's strange,' his eyes would express an infinite astonishment at knowing everything and being able to say nothing. Things lost their names and merged into a single, undifferentiated reality. I was the only one who by talking to him could temporarily transform that nameless infinity into the world of clearly named entities. — Milan Kundera

If you tell certain people that you like Kerouac, they assume that's all you read, like you don't know anything else about literature. I recognize all the things that people dislike about the way he writes - his tone and the sentimentality of it all. But those books were there for me at a very important point in my life. — Ben Gibbard

Desires to use this handbook in your personal life. I'm certain of two things: prayerless lives are powerless lives, and prayerful lives are powerful lives. — Beth Moore

We have to go through certain things in order to appreciate life and learn lessons. — Mariah Carey

There's certain things in life that I love. One is architecture. And music, culture, food, people. New Orleans has all of that. — Lenny Kravitz

In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural. — James Salter

Life is too short..and nothing is certain. Nothing. Just because you tell someone you'll talk to them later, or you'll see them tomorrow, there is no guarantee that either of those things will happen. You hope they will. Hell, we all assume they will. But we don't really know. Life can change in an instant. A single instant. — J. Sterling

I know that you have to be reserved about certain things in your life. — Janina Gavankar

That's the thing: You can change things. You can repair mistakes. You can restart your whole life if you have to.
But some things you never get back. Certain people. Certain moments in time when you don't know better than to shield your heart.
You don't see those moments coming, you don't know it when they're happening, but later, as the plainness of life begins to show itself, you realize how important they were. You understand who really changed you, who made you what you are. — Blake Nelson

Everything that has happened to me is of value to me. As painful as certain things are, and have been, and were, there's a use for those things in my life and in my work. — Martin Landau

There is a certain way that life ought to be, an ideal way, a perfect way, and there is the way that life is, not quite the opposite of ideal, not quite the opposite of perfect, it just is not quite the way it should be but not quite the way it should not be either; I mean to say that in any situation, only one or two, maybe even three out of ten, things are just what you have been praying for. — Jamaica Kincaid

For me, white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one's life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own. — Peggy McIntosh

Before it incarnates, each soul enters into a sacred contract with the Universe to accomplish certain things. It enters into this commitment in the fullness of its being. Whatever the task that your soul has agreed to, all of the experiences of your life serve to awaken within you the memory of that contract, and to prepare you to fulfill it. — Gary Zukav

There are some things in life that we are meant to experience. Circumstances will always shift us back to certain situations until we walk through it and learn something."- Aimee (Marked Book #1) page 79 — A.N. Meade

It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert. — Neil Jordan

I can see,' Miss Emily said, 'that it might look as though you were simply pawns in a game. It can certainly be looked at like that. But think of it. You were lucky pawns. There was a certain climate and now it's gone. You have to accept that sometimes that's how things happen in the world. People's opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.'
'It might be just some trend that came and went,' I said. 'But for us, it's our life. — Kazuo Ishiguro

In so many ways, a lot of the drive I've had to do certain things has been because of this sense that I have both the opportunity and in some sense the obligation to ratify that my parents' life had purpose. — Marco Rubio

I practiced law for five years and that gives you insight into a certain mind-set that maybe a lot of writers haven't had firsthand access to. There's an almost casual cruelty, a very low level of overall awareness, but sometimes there's also knowledge that real damage is being done - this attitude of "Oh, what the hell," this kind of moral cognitive dissonance. These are people who have never missed a meal. It's an unknowingness, an unawareness ... Many people were operating from a very narrow range of experience, and yet they had complete faith in it. Their way was the correct way, the only way. They had virtually no awareness of any other way of life except in terms of demonizing things ... It's an extremely blindered experience of the world. — Ben Fountain

I don't know if I learned anything new from this journey, but I now had a beautiful and peaceful vision of the kind of balance I wanted in my life. To be able to move calmly and peacefully from one thing to the next, each in its own time, without the pressure of other responsibilities pushing in on me. And always writing, in and around and among everything else, always writing. I loved her sense of purpose and awareness of the spirit in all things. She honors all things. And she has a purpose in the words she spreads, certain words for certain people, and she watches, and she celebrates the blossoming that comes from her words. She has a rhythm for her everyday life which is productive and intentional, measured and life-giving. — Marge Hulburt

I sound awful saying it but I think it can be like that. I see a lot of people in unstimulating relationships. And not just boyfriend-girlfriend relationships. They find themselves in stagnant friendships. If people were a little less scared [of ending things] they'd get more out of life ... You meet the right person at the right time and they fulfil a certain something in your life. You fulfil something in theirs. But there's a time limit to that. Unless you choose to be bloody good company for the rest of your life, do you know what I mean? — Laura Marling

There is a certain indolence in us, a wish not to be disturbed, which tempts us to think that when things are quiet, all is well. Subconsciously, we tend to give the preference to 'social peace,' though it be only apparent, because our lives and possessions seem then secure. Actually, human beings acquiesce too easily in evil conditions; they rebel far too little and too seldom. There is nothing noble about acquiescence in a cramped life or mere submission to superior force. — A.J. Muste

There are certain things I believe we need to keep in our emotional arsenal as we navigate through life. Hope is a big one. The more of that we can carry, the better. — Wendelin Van Draanen

The events of the world can have no separate life from the world. And yet the world itself can have no temporal view of things. It can have no cause to favor certain enterprises over others. The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one. There is no favoring, you see. How could there be? At whose behest? This man did not cease to believe in God. Nor did he come to have some modern view of God. There was God and there was the world. He knew that the world would forget him but that God could not. And yet that was the very thing he wished for. — Cormac McCarthy

I think one of the major misconceptions about me is that I live my life the way people think I lead my life, with hot and cold drinks running everywhere and a party all the time. They think of my life in terms of certain excesses that don't really exist. Things are actually fairly simple. — George Clooney

As a Muslim, I believe in the concept of fate, that there are certain things out of my control. Thus, what chance do I have to stand against kismet? — Aishah Madadiy

The origin is nameless; the origin is absolutely quiet, it is not whirring about making noise. Creation is something that is most holy, that is the most sacred thing in life, and if you have made a mess of your life, change it. Change it today, not tomorrow. If you are uncertain, find out why and be certain. If your thinking is not straight, think straight, logically, Unless all that is prepared, all that is settled, you cannot enter into this world, into the world of creation. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Yet are you so certain, good mistress, you wish to be free of this mist? Is it not better some things remain hidden from our minds?"
"It may be for some, father, but not for us. Axl and I wish to have again the happy moments we shared together. To be robbed of them is as if a thief came in the night and took what's most precious from us."
"Yet the mist covers all memories, the bad as well as the good. Isn't that so, mistress?"
"We'll have the bad ones come back too, even if they make us weep or shake with anger. For isn't it the life we've shared? — Kazuo Ishiguro

Real life issues are not mathematical equations. We're not calculators crunching numbers. We're humans sorting through complex, multi-layered issues, and we're doing so while enduring the (sometimes profound) personal effects of our conclusions. While we want to be reasonable, we are inexorably pulled in the direction of our oldest mental habits and by our deepest life-impacting needs. We're repelled by those ideas which can jeopardize our comfort, safety, and happiness. We can try to be fair, but all the while we are fighting against our needs and fears. There are things we don't want to be true (or false). Our lives are built on certain beliefs which, if disproved, could wreck us. These are the truths that we 'can't handle'. — Daniel Ionson

Just as Divinity descends in a certain manner, to the extent that one communicates with Nature, so one ascends to Divinity through Nature, just as by means of a life resplendent in natural things one rises to the life that presides over them. — Giordano Bruno

My experience of life is that it's very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences. — Jasper Johns

I am not a courageous person by nature. I have simply discovered that, at certain key moments in this life, you must find courage in yourself, in order to move forward and live. It is like a muscle and it must be exercised, first a little, and then more and more. All the really exciting things possible during the course of a lifetime require a little more courage than we currently have. A deep breath and a leap. — John Patrick Shanley

Maybe life isn't for everyone,
Sometimes you do things to start anew life.
But the new paths will always bring you back to the old ones or just show a glimpse of it so that you again go through those thousand memories.
and no matter how much you try to get rid of the old shoe, Life will bring you to a certain point
where you would want to throw off the new shoe and wear the old one back again..
and Maybe, maybe you would or maybe you would not.
For who knows, We re mysterious beings in these mysterious world trying to figure out our existence. — Alamvusha

My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of 'Gone With the Wind', and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It's actually one of the things that you live and die for. — Neil Gaiman

The pleasure of doing the same thing, in the same way, every day, shouldn't be overlooked. The things I do every day take on a certain beauty and provide a kind of invisible architecture to my life. — Gretchen Rubin

Frequently I will end a service of worship in our congregation by saying something like, "Every day this week you have to decide if you want to achieve your life or receive it. If you make achieving your goal, your constant companion will be complaint, because you will never achieve enough. If you make receiving the goal, your constant companion will be gratitude for all that God is achieving in your life." I'm not certain that there are such things as measures of our spirituality, but if there are, then gratitude is probably the best one. It indicates that we are paying attention. — M. Craig Barnes

Maybe we are a little crazy. After all, we believe in things we don't see. The Scriptures say that faith is "being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see" (Heb. 11:1). We believe poverty can end even though it is all around us. We believe in peace even though we hear only rumours of wars. And since we are people of expectation, we are so convinced that another world is coming that we start living as if it were already here. — Shane Claiborne

But I have had to give up certain things in my life. One is shopping. Two is lunch with the girls. Three is cocktail parties, and four is studying my lines. — Joan Collins

I can identify with other people and situations, but I tend not to. I would rather recall things from my own life, and I don't have to force myself ... Just being in certain environments triggers a response in my brain, a certain feeling I want to articulate. For some reason, I am attracted to self-destruction. I know that personal sacrifice has a great deal to do with how we live or don't live our lives. — Bob Dylan

If only certain things had been preventable, his life would have unfurled in front of him as intended, like a lush Oriental carpet. No surprises, no detours. Just a thick tapestry of days and nights that at the end of his time on earth, he could roll up and proudly claim as his own. — Shilpa Agarwal

If there is anything certain in life, it is this. Time doesn't always heal. Not really. I know they say it does, but that is not true. What time does is to trick you into believing that you have healed, that the hurt of a great loss has lessened. But a single word, a note of a song, a fragrance, a knife point of dawn light across an empty room, any one of these things will take you back to that one moment you have never truly forgotten. These small things are the agents of memory. They are the sharp needle points piercing the living fabric of your life.

Life, my children, isn't linear where the heart is concerned. It is filled with invisible threads that reach out from your past and into your future. These threads connect every second we have lived and breathed. As your own lives move forward and as the decades pass, the more of these threads are cast. Your task is to weave them into a tapestry, one that tells the story of the time we shared. — Stephen Lee

I normally don't initiate conversations with guys unless they want to talk about certain things - when I'm at the facility, I'm there to play football. If you want to talk about the meaning of life, games, whatever, I'm more than happy to, but when I'm in that building, I'm being paid to play football. Conversely, when I'm not at the facility, that's my life to live. — Chris Kluwe

You reach a certain age when reality grabs you by the scruff of the neck and shouts in your face:"Hey, look, this is what life is." And you have to open your eyes and look at it, listen to it, smell it: people who don't like you, things you don't want to do, things that hurt, things that scare you, questions without answers, feelings you don't understand, feelings you don't want but have no control over.
Reality.
When you gradually come to realise that all that stuff in books, films, television, magazines, newspapers, comics - it's all rubbish. It's got nothing to do with anything. It's all made up. It doesn't happen like that. It's not real. It means nothing. Reality is what you see when you look out of the window of a bus: dour faces, sad and temporary lives, millions of cars, metal, bricks, glass, rain, cruel laughter, ugliness, dirt, bad teeth, crippled pigeons, little kids in pushchairs who've already forgotten how to smile ... — Kevin Brooks

Few things in life are certain except death and being taxed. — Felix Dennis

The idea that certain things in life - and in the universe - don't yield up their secrets is something that requires a slightly more mature reader to accept. — Samuel R. Delany

At that point in time, there were three things in life that I knew for certain: (1) I was a girl who'd never met a site she couldn't hack or a code she couldn't break, (2) I had a roundhouse that could put a grown man in the hospital, and (3) I would without question chop off my own hands before I'd come within five feet of a pom-pom — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Can anything be more idiotic than certain people who boast of their foresight? They keep themselves officiously preoccupied in order to improve their lives; they spend their lives in organizing their lives. They direct their purposes with an eye to a distant future. But putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune's control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? — Seneca.

In real life things don't go so smoothly. At certain points in our lives, when we really need a clear-cut solution, the person who knocks at our door is, more likely than not, a messenger bearing bad news. — Haruki Murakami

Many of the things that I have written on have focused, at least a big part of the story, on adolescents. I think that in that period of life, so much happens, and it's the period of life where you're forming into an adult. In certain ways, you're already an adult and in certain ways you're still a kid. — Jason Katims

Secondly, the proper counsel and intention of God in sending his Son into the world to die was, that thereby he might confirm and ratify the new covenant to his elect, and purchase for them all the good things which are contained in the tenure of that covenant, - to wit, grace and glory; that by his death he might bring many (yet some certain) children to glory, obtaining for them that were given unto him by his Father (that is, his whole church) reconciliation with God, remission of sins, faith, righteousness, sanctification, and life eternal. — John Owen

It is one of the strange ironies of this strange life that those who work the hardest, who subject themselves to the strictest discipline, who give up certain pleasurable things in order to achieve a goal, are the happiest. — Brutus Hamilton

Naturally, everybody has certain things they wish they hadn't done in life. They wish they hadn't kicked their dog when they were ten or something. — Clint Eastwood

Some people only go to church for the social life. They like having all the friends in church or getting the praises of men by doing certain things, but they don't go there to actually worship God. They go there so others can worship THEM instead. — Lisa Bedrick

In practice, some come to see easily, some with difficulty. But whatever the case, never mind. Difficult or easy, the Buddha said not to be heedless. Just that
don't be heedless. Why? Because life is not certain. Wherever we start to think that things are certain, uncertainty is lurking right there. Heedlessness is just holding things as certain. It is grasping at certainty where there is no certainty and looking for truth in things that are not true. Be careful! They are likely to bite you sometime in the future! — Ajahn Chah

We all have a family and I think we all have a perception of our family that we like to keep and we all have our positive memories in a certain way. Then when life catches up to them, when you see a different perspective of them, or when you are a couple degrees over, you can see things differently and it shakes you to the foundation. — David Shapiro

The paths people choose in life can lead to the creation or destruction of people, places, things, and relationships. The future is uncertain, but what is certain is there will be change. — Stephen Black

He continued. "So I shall simply tell you the truth. I have spent my entire life preparing for a cold, unfeeling, unimpassioned life - a life filled with pleasantries and simplicity. And then you came into it . . . you . . . the opposite of all that. You are beautiful and brilliant and bold and so very passionate about life and love and those things that you believe in. And you taught me that everything I believed, everything I thought I wanted, everything I had spent my life espousing - all of it . . . it is wrong. I want your version of life . . . vivid and emotional and messy and wonderful and filled with happiness. But I cannot have it without you.
"I love you, Juliana. I love the way you have turned my entire life upside down, and I am not certain I could live without you now that I have lived with you. — Sarah MacLean

The essence of spirituality does not consist in a specialised or narrow interest in some imagined part of life, but in a certain enlightened attitude to all the various situations which obtain in life. It covers and includes the whole of life. All the material things of this world can be made subservient to the divine game, and when they are thus subordained they become auxiliary to the self-affirmation of the spirit. — Meher Baba

Sometimes we fall into the negative so deeply that we do not realize our first instinctive reaction to everything is to think negatively or to "look" for the bad in every situation. The phrase "too good to be true" directly comes from this aspect of ourselves. To be cautious can be good in certain situations, but to dismiss every interaction or idea to the possibility of "bad things happening" puts us in a place where the beautiful or the divine never gets a chance to fully blossom. Mind your thoughts carefully, as you are the only one who can allow happiness to thrive in your life — Gary Hopkins

Just because you sing songs about a certain feeling doesn't mean you have to go feeling that way forever. You can sing about that for the rest of your life, but that doesn't mean things aren't going to change in your own life. — Billie Joe Armstrong

Not all things that are simple are all that simple. Certain simple things carry complex weight! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Watch the Film You Paid to See"

In my bedroom my weight is three times more
than what I'd weigh on Jupiter.
If your kitchen was on Mercury I'd be heavier by half
of you while sitting at your table.
On Uranus, a quarter of my weight is meat,
or an awareness of myself as flesh.
On Venus the light would produce a real volume around me
that would make me look happy in photographs.
This is how it is with quantity in any life. It's a fact
that on certain planets I'd actually be able to mount
the stairs four at a time. Think of the most beautiful horse
in the world: a ridiculously beautiful golden horse,
with a shimmering coat; it would weigh no more
than an empty handbag on Mars. You need
to get real about these things. — Todd Colby

The way of Jesus is thus not a set of beliefs about Jesus. That people ever thought it was is strange, when we think about it - as if one entered new life by believing certain things to be true, or as if the only people who can be saved are those who know the word "Jesus". Thinking that way virtually amounts to salvation by syllables.
Rather, the way of Jesus is the way of death and resurrection - the path of transition and transformation from an old way of being to a new way of being. To use the language of incarnation that is so central to John, Jesus incarnates the way. Incarnation means embodiment. Jesus is what the way embodied in a human life looks like. — Marcus J. Borg

We can choose the narrative we tell about our lives. We're born into cultures, nations and languages that we didn't choose. We're born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can't control. We're sometimes thrust into social conditions that we detest. But among all the things we don't control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to organize perceptions. — David Brooks

I looked around at what my colleagues were doing, and asked myself, 'What relationship has it with what's going on?' I found there was a great distortion of contemporary life. Photographers were interested only in certain things. A visually interesting place, people who were either very rich or very poor, and nostalgia. — Martin Parr

One thing in life is for certain, the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson