Copying Your Life Quotes & Sayings

All boys wish to be manly; but they often try to become so by copying the vices of men rather than their virtues. They see men drinking, smoking, swearing; so these poor little fellows sedulously imitate such bad habits, thinking they are making themselves more like men. They mistake rudeness for strength, disrespect to parents for independence. They read wretched stories about boy brigands and boy detectives, and fancy themselves heroes when they break the laws, and become troublesome and mischievous. Out of such false influences the criminal classes are recruited. Many a little boy who only wishes to be manly, becomes corrupted and debased by the bad examples around him and the bad literature which he reads. The cure for this is to give him good books, show him truly noble examples from life and history, and make him understand how infinitely above this mock-manliness is the true courage which ennobles human nature. — James Clarke

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism. — Wallace Stevens

I think on the things - the issues that Pope Francis cares about - not just remaking the Church and in just sort of a more compassionate visage, but really on trying to move real policy. — Joy-Ann Reid

Life imitates art, but clumsily, copying its movements when it thinks it isn't looking. — Neil Gaiman

He let me see in that strangely handsome face that he was thinking about her not without her clothes on, but eventually without her skin. — Laurell K. Hamilton

People get so upset about lyrics, and they're probably totally cool with horror movies. That doesn't really make sense. — Chris Reifert

If someone is copying what you do, Congratulate yourself for inspiring that someone to follow your footsteps. — Mohith Agadi

Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair. — Alberto Giacometti

There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves. — Soren Kierkegaard

The things you experience," she continued, "are written on your cells as memories and patterns, which are reprinted again on the next generation. And even if you never lift a shovel or plant a cabbage, every day of your life something is written upon you. And when you die, the entirety of that written record returns to the earth. All we have on this earth, all we are, is a record. Maybe the only things that persist are----copies of things. The original has long since passed away from this universe, but on and on we copy. I have devoted my miniscule life to the act of copying. — Madeleine Thien

I had the experience of a monk copying documents, applying myself assiduously to my work. And I thought whatever happened, happened - this is just what I do in my life. — Alan Furst

THE MOCKINGBIRD All summer the mockingbird in his pearl-gray coat and his white-windowed wings flies from the hedge to the top of the pine and begins to sing, but it's neither lilting nor lovely, for he is the thief of other sounds - whistles and truck brakes and dry hinges plus all the songs of other birds in his neighborhood; mimicking and elaborating, he sings with humor and bravado, so I have to wait a long time for the softer voice of his own life to come through. He begins by giving up all his usual flutter and settling down on the pine's forelock then looking around as though to make sure he's alone; then he slaps each wing against his breast, where his heart is, and, copying nothing, begins easing into it as though it was not half so easy as rollicking, as though his subject now was his true self, which of course was as dark and secret as anyone else's, and it was too hard - perhaps you understand - to speak or to sing it to anything or anyone but the sky. — Mary Oliver

Simple
Complex systems can arise
from simple rules.
It's not
that we want to survive,
it's that we've been drugged
and made to act
as if we do
while all the while
the sea breaks
and rolls, painlessly, under.
If we're not copying it,
we're lonely.
Is this the knowledge
that demands to be
passed down?
Time is made from swatches
of heaven and hell.
If we're not killing it,
we're hungry. — Rae Armantrout

The world needs poetry now more than ever. It's the only thing that can keep music from copying itself and sounding the same. — Lana Del Rey

They say copying is a form of flattery, I say it's lack of originality. — Elizabeth Blade

a missional church is simply any church that organizes itself around the mission of God in this world. — Michael Frost

Still, the future of civilisation lies, he thought, in the hands of young men like that; of young men such as he was, thirty years ago; with their love of abstract principles; getting books sent out to them all the way from London to a peak in the Himalayas; reading science; reading philosophy. The future lies in the hands of young men like that, he thought. — Virginia Woolf

Most critics write critiques which are by the authors they write critiques about. That would not be so bad, but then most authorswrite works which are by the critics who write critiques about them. — Karl Kraus

But I don't believe in heroes anymore. I just believe in people coping with their lives as best they can. You do what you have to do, and in some ways you have no more choice about it than a rock has about falling from a high place. — John Varley

Do you know that line of Kierkegaard's, Canon Chambers? "There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves." — James Runcie

We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be. — Marcel Proust

I never knew him. We both knew this place,
apparently, this literal small backwater,
looked at it long enough to memorize it,
our years apart. How strange. And it's still loved,
or its memory is (it must have changed a lot).
Our visions coincided--'visions' is
too serious a word--our looks, two looks:
art 'copying from life' and life itself,
life and the memory of it so compressed
they've turned into each other. Which is which?
Life and the memory of it cramped,
dim, on a piece of Bristol board,
dim, but how live, how touching in detail
--the little that we get for free,
the little of our earthly trust. Not much.
About the size of our abidance
along with theirs: the munching cows,
the iris, crisp and shivering, the water
still standing from spring freshets,
the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese. — Elizabeth Bishop

Similarly, anyone who wishes to understand the mind of the sacred writers must first cleanse his own life, and approach the saints by copying their deeds. — Athanasius

On the other hand it is probably safe to assume that Rembrandt and Spinoza surely would have at least passed on the street, now and again.
Or even run into each other quite frequently, if only at some neighborhood shop or other.
And certainly they would have exchanged amenities as well, after a time.
Good morning, Rembrandt. Good morning to you, Spinoza.
I was extremely sorry to hear about your bankruptcy, Rembrandt. I was extremely sorry to hear about your excommunication, Spinoza.
Do have a good day, Rembrandt. Do have the same, Spinoza.
All of this would have been said in Dutch, incidentally.
I mention that simply because it is known that Rembrandt did not speak any other language except Dutch.
Even if Spinoza may have preferred Latin. Or Jewish. — David Markson

For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself.
From within, I couldn't decide what to do.
Unable to see, I heard my name being called.
Then I walked outside. — Rumi

Something may have been lost in translation, but it certainly wasn't love — Erich Segal

Let me make it quite clear that when Christians say the Christ-life is in them, they do not mean simply something mental or moral. When they speak of being "in Christ" or of Christ being "in them", this is not simply a way of saying that they are thinking about Christ or copying Him. They mean that Christ is actually operating through them; that the whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts
that we are His fingers and muscles, the cells of His body. — C.S. Lewis

The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another. — Quentin Crisp