Don't Spend Your Life Quotes & Sayings

Man is an enigma. This enigma must be solved, and if you spend all your life at it, don't say you have wasted your time; I occupy myself with this enigma because I wish to be a man. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The great ones do not set up offices, charge fees, give lectures, or write books. Wisdom is silent, and the most effective propaganda for truth is the force of personal example. The great ones attract disciples, lesser figures whose mission is to preach and to teach. These are gospelers who, unequal to the highest task, spend their lives in converting others. The great ones are indifferent, in the profoundest sense. They don't ask you to believe: they electrify you by their behavior. They are the awakeners. What you do with your petty life is of no concern to them. What you do with your life is only of concern to you, they seem to say. In short, their only purpose here on earth is to inspire. And what more can one ask of a human being than that? — Henry Miller

If you choose a craft or hobby, then make sure it's something you really enjoy. Do it because you want to, not because others expect it of you or because it's something you once liked or because you don't want those materials you bought to go to waste. just as you should choose the life you want, it's also your choice how you spend your free time. — Peter Walsh

He'll come back. We all come back, kate. These private little revolutions always die. The compromise is always made. In a peculiar way. Frank is right
every man does have a star. The star of one's honesty. And you spend your life groping for it, but once it's out it never lights again. I don't think he went very far. He probably just wanted to be alone to watch his star go out. — Arthur Miller

After you're dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what's going to be your best memory of earth? What one moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet. What's your takeaway? Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive. — Douglas Coupland

You can't spend your life beating yourself up for something that happened yesterday. You die if you don't follow your desire. — Hanif Kureishi

To live the first five years of your life feeling that you are valuable is a wonderful thing and, if you don't have it, then you spend the rest of your life trying to find it. I think my mother realised this and tried to compensate for my father's extreme preoccupation with himself. — Rick Stein

Don't spend your life collecting other peoples postcards — Syd Hair

When life brings you mountains, you don't waste your time asking why; you spend your time climbing over them. — A.J. Darkholme

A few generations ago, men went to work or war and rarely got to see life beyond their careers. A generation ago, our parents had to answer the question of what they would do with the last third of their lives. How would they spend their retirement? Would it be squandered on silly things or invested in significance? But now, the question of legacy isn't a matter of if you live long enough or when you retire; it's a matter of what you will do with what you have right now. You don't have to earn a living for thirty years to turn around and spend the next thirty giving it away. If significance is what matters to you, you can structure your life and work in a way that allows you to live your legacy now. In fact, your giving doesn't have to be a by-product of your success; it can be the very thing that drives it in the first place. — Jeff Goins

I don't want to marry you. I don't want to want you," he added fiercely, taking one measured step toward her, then another. "And I sure as hell don't want to love you. But, God help me, I just can't stop myself." Closing the rest of the distance between them in a single stride, he snatched her up by the shoulders, his burning gaze searching her face as if to sear her features into his memory. "I don't want to marry you because I love you too much to ask you to spend the rest of your life hiding in the shadows. — Teresa Medeiros

And at this very moment, like a miracle, the rail-bus appeared. We waved our arms frantically, hardly daring to hope that it would stop. It did stop. We scrambled thankfully on board.
That is the irony of travel. You spend your boyhood dreaming of a magic, impossibly distant day when you will cross the Equator, when your eyes will behold Quito. And then, in the slow prosaic process of life, that day undramatically dawns - and finds you sleepy, hungry and dull. The Equator is just another valley; you aren't sure which and you don't much care. Quito is just another railroad station, with fuss about baggage and taxis and tips. And the only comforting reality, amidst all this picturesque noisy strangeness, is to find a clean pension run by Czech refugees and sit down in a cozy Central European parlor to a lunch of well-cooked Wiener Schnitzel. — Christopher Isherwood

The trouble is if you don't spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you. — Peter Shaffer

Survive long enough and you get to a far point in life where nothing else of particular interest is going to happen. After that, if you don't watch out, you can spend all your time tallying your losses and gains in endless narrative. All you love has fled or been taken away. Everything fallen from you except the possibility of jolting and unforewarned memory springing out of the dark, rushing over you with the velocity of heartbreak. May walking down the hall humming an old song - "The Girl I Left Behind Me" - or the mere fragrance of clove in spiced tea can set you weeping and howling when all you've been for weeks on end is numb. — Charles Frazier

The question you need to answer is what you want to do with your life given that you don't have the time to do everything? Do you want to spend most of your life paying off the interest of a 30-year mortgage and working so you can fill increasingly bigger houses with increasingly more stuff while being stuck in your daily commute in increasingly nicer cars? Or are you prepared to give up the stuff so that you can do whatever you want, whenever, and wherever, within reason? What will your legacy be--what you owned or who you were? — Jacob Lund Fisker

You know, you spend your whole life feeling like you don't quite fit in anywhere. And then you walk into a room one day, whether it's at university or an office or some kind of club, and you just go, 'Ah. There they are.' And suddenly you feel at home. — Jojo Moyes

JANUARY 24 He Will Reward You So repent (change your mind and purpose); turn around and return [to God], that your sins may be erased (blotted out, wiped clean), that times of refreshing (of recovering from the effects of heat, of reviving with fresh air) may come from the presence of the Lord. ACTS 3:19 Success principles alone will not work in your life if you don't spend time with God, allowing His Holy Spirit to be your Counselor and to give you revelation and understanding of what to do each day. But if you flow in God's plan, you will learn to stop trying to figure out how everything will work together for your good. Learn to seek God's face and not His hand all the time. Then keep your hands open and be ready to receive from Him. God is good; you can trust what He speaks to your heart to do. — Joyce Meyer

If you've treated your girlfriend without respect, taken advantage of her, or cheated on her, your actions have taught her that she has no value. Needless to say, this is a serious, serious injury. If you don't try to make it right, she might start to believe the lie you've told her and spend the rest of her life thinking she deserves poor treatment. — Josh Shipp

You need a lot of luck to find people with whom you want to spend the rest of your life. Some people manage to find their soul mate. Others don't. I think love is like a lottery. — Kylie Minogue

Don't spend your life finding yourself. Create yourself. — Julie Bragonier Minnick

The moment you know that this is the person with whom you want to spend the rest of your life, you should start the engagement process. Once you know this, the nature of the relationship changes. You view actions differently, the pressure to have sex increases, and your relationship with others is affected. If you're considering getting engaged, write out the sentence Staying married is hard work fifty times ... Though I say this with some humor, I think these points bear repeating: Don't underestimate the work involved, but don't panic either. — Kay Coles James

Get up and move at work today! Don't spend the whole day on your butt. Take a walk. Get some exercise. Play a game. Move! — Alexander Kjerulf

I used to like people more, but now I have children and that changes your life in a lot of ways. Like you spend time with people you never would have chosen to spend time with, not in a million years. I spend whole days with people, I'm like, "I never would have hung out with you. I didn't choose you. Our children chose each other based on no criteria by the way. They're the same size. They don't care who they make me hang out with." — Louis C.K.

Why did you spend your whole life working in an insurance company? You should have been a painter, a musician, well, I don't know. Why didn't you follow your calling?"

Don Rigoberto nodded and reflected a moment before answering.

"Because I was a coward, son," he finally murmured. "Because I lacked faith in myself. I never believed I had the talent to be a real artist. But maybe that was an excuse for not trying. I decided not to be a creator but only a consumer of art, a dilettante of culture. Because I was a coward is the sad truth. So now you know. Don't follow my example. Whatever your calling is, follow it as far as you can and don't do what I did, don't betray it. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

You can spend the rest of your life being afraid of people rejecting you. You have to start by not rejecting yourself. You don't deserve it. — Rae Earl

I treat my writing life like a fabulous, enchanting lover, because that is what it is to me. Something that is terribly time consuming, delicious and time-stopping. I have missed important meetings for love, and I will continue to put my writing life in the same position. My writing life is the lover at the center, not the neglected cranky demanding millstone, my ball and chain.
When you are love, truly and passionately, you don't have to write down in your daily schedule "Spend quality time with Lover today. You can't not. — Heather Sellers

You don't spend twenty years of your life in the service and not have a warm, nostalgic feeling left in you. It's a small service, and there's a lot of esprit de corps. — Alex Haley

Don't get too comfortable. We are here for a certain period of time, and how much of your life are you gonna choose to spend with distractions? How do you make your choices? What is important? — David Chase

If you want to become the best runner you can be, start now. Don't spend the rest of your life wondering if you can do it. — Priscilla Welch

To determine whether or not you have the ingredients to be charismatic, answer the following questions: What are your real feelings about who you are? What do you believe in? Do you have goals or a mission in life? Do you project optimism? Do others turn to you for leadership? Noncharismatic people spend their lives auditioning for others and hoping they'll be accepted. Charismatic people don't doubt their ability to add value to a situation, so they move forward with their mission. — Roger Ailes

You have your whole life ahead of you," my mother told me, "don't spend all your time in the past." It's good advice, I know it is, but the past has its own ideas. It can follow you around with a life of its own, casting a long shadow. — Gregory Galloway

Unfortunately, there's no law against being smart and living stupid, no matter how harmful it may be to you. You can unknowingly ricochet away from your deepest values because you've mistakenly come to believe you don't deserve to live them - and spend much of your life sabotaging what you want most by aiming for just the opposite. This doesn't mean your values haven't always been your values. They're driving you still and they're waiting for you still. Toss them away as forcefully as you want, then duck: boomerang. — Stan Slap

I want you to always think of Mrs. Martin. And I want you always to remember that donkey. Never forget that fear and desire can lead you into life's biggest trap if you're not aware of them controlling your thinking. To spend your life living in fear, never exploring your dreams, is cruel. To work hard for money, thinking that it will buy you things that will make you happy is also cruel. To wake up in the middle of the night terrified about paying bills is a horrible way to live. To live a life dictated by the size of a paycheck is not really living a life. Thinking that a job makes you secure is lying to yourself. That's cruel, and that's the trap I want you to avoid. I've seen how money runs people's lives. Don't let that happen to you. Please don't let money run your life. — Robert T. Kiyosaki

You gonna spend the rest of your days whining because you dad's a jerk? I hate people like that. Don't be a baby - live your own life. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Success is how you collect your minutes. You spend millions of minutes to reach one triumph, one moment, then you spend maybe a thousand minutes enjoying it. If you were unhappy through those millions of minutes, what good is the thousand minutes of triumph? It doesn't equate ... Life is made of small pleasures. Good eye contact over the breakfast table with your wife. A moment of touching a friend. Happiness is made of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. If you don't have all those zillions of tiny successes, the big ones don't mean anything. — Norman Lear

Every great, successful person I know shares the capacity to remain centered, clear and powerful in the midst of emotional "storms." How do they accomplish this? Most of them have a fundamental rule: In life, never spend more than 10 percent of your time on the problem, and spend at least 90 percent of your time on the solution. Most important, don't sweat the small stuff ... and remember, it's all small stuff! — Anthony Robbins

It is necessary to prepare, to plan, so that we don't fritter away our lives. Without a goal, there can be no real success. The best definition of success I have ever found goes something like this: Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. Someone has said the trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never crossing the goal line. — Thomas S. Monson

Think about the word mould for a moment. A mould is a device into which one crams and smashes something until it becomes the shape that they desire. Don't spend your life letting other people destroy you while they try and force you into their moulds. — Dan Pearce

Don't spend your energy and time worrying about where you're going after this life. You'll only end up missing out on this life. Then what's the point? — Dennis M. Dupuis

The point is, there will always be competing voices," I heard North say. "In your head and in the world. You can't spend your life caught between them."

I looked up at him. "You're telling me to choose."

"I know better than to tell you to do anything," North said, reaching around me to shut down his computer. "But if you don't decide, the world will choose for you. — Lauren Miller

[Lena] "This is crazy, you know. How can you know me well enough to love me?"
"Lena." He pressed a kiss to her temple. "I know what I need to know. I know that your laugh makes me want to smile, and I know that when you're sad, it bothers me. I know I love to watch you, I know you blush when you realize I've been staring at you, even though it makes you smile, too."
He combed a hand through her hair, angled her head, and brushed her mouth with his. "I may not know everything there is to know about you, Lena, but I do know I'd like to spend my life learning the things I don't know. — Shiloh Walker

There's a lot of stuff they don't teach you in the mythical editors' school. They don't teach you that you're going to have to spend a lot of your life in crisis management. — Bill Keller

Wow," the empty air finally said. "Wow. That puts a pretty different perspective on things, I have to say. I'm going to remember this the next time I feel an impulse to blame myself for something. Neville, the term in the literature for this is 'egocentric bias', it means that you experience everything about your own life but you don't get to experience everything else that happens in the world. There was way, way more going on than you running in front of me. You're going to spend weeks remembering that thing you did there for six seconds, I can tell, but nobody else is going to bother thinking about it. Other people spend a lot less time thinking about your past mistakes than you do, just because you're not the center of their worlds. I guarantee to you that nobody except you has even considered blaming Neville Longbottom for what happened to Hermione. Not for a fraction of a second. You are being, if you will pardon the phrase, a silly-dilly. Now shut up and say goodbye. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

The trouble with aggressive nonsmokers is that they feel they are doing you a favor by not allowing you to smoke. They seem to think that one day you'll look back and thank them for those precious fifteen seconds they just added to your life. What they don't understand is that those are just fifteen more seconds you can spend hating their guts and plotting revenge. — David Sedaris

Take a good look at your life right now. If you don't like something about it, close your eyes and imagine the life you want. Now allow yourself to focus your inner eye on the person you would be if you were living this preferred life. Notice the differences in how you behave and present yourself; allow yourself to spend several seconds breathing in the new image, expanding your energy into this ... — Marianne Williamson

You spend your whole life looking for answers because you think the next answer will solve all your problems: make you a little less miserable, because when you run out of questions you don't just run out of answers ... you run out hope. — House

I don't even want to spend the rest of my life with me.. how do you explain to someone you love that you can't give yourself to them because if you did, you're not sure who you'd be giving? That you aren't sure what your own words are worth? You can't tell someone that, especially someone you love. And so you don't.

Instead, I do the right thing. I lie. — Julie Buxbaum

Wake up one morning with a man you had thought you'd spend your life with, and realize, a rock in your gut, that you don't even like him. Spend a weepy afternoon in his bathroom, not coming out when he knocks. You can no longer trust your affections. People and places you think you love may be people and places you hate. — Lorrie Moore

Life is too short to spend your precious time trying to convince a person who wants to live in gloom and doom otherwise. Give lifting that person your best shot, but don't hang around long enough for his/her bad attitude to pull you down. Instead, surround yourself with optimistic people. — Zig Ziglar

Warning: If you are reading this then this warning is for you. Every word you read of this useless fine print is another second off your life. Don't you have other things to do? Is your life so empty that you honestly can't think of a better way to spend these moments? Or are you so impressed with authority that you give respect and credence to all that claim it? Do you read everything you're supposed to read? Do you think every thing you're supposed to think? Buy what you're told to want? Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you're alive. If you don't claim your humanity you will become a statistic. You have been warned. — Chuck Palahniuk

So now, I exhort you with this truth: Don't spend all your life playing it safe! Safety is very comfortable, but it may be keeping you from God's perfect plan for your life ... — Joyce Meyer

I spend all my time trying to keep thoughts away and ignore them ... But here you are, trying to remember your own life, writing your thoughts down so that you don't forget. I suddenly realized what it would be like not to know, not to remember. — Michael Scott

My books have all been very deeply felt. You don't spend eight years of your life working on a trendy knockoff. In that sense I've been serious. But I don't do lots of things that other serious writers do. I don't write book reviews. I don't sit on panels about the state of the novel. I don't go to writer conferences. I don't teach writing seminars. I don't hang out at Yaddo or MacDowell. I'm not concerned with my reputation as a writer and where I stand relative to other writers. I'm not competitive or professionally ambitious. I don't think about my work and my career in an overarching or systematic way. I don't think about myself, as I think most writers do, as progressing toward some ideal of greatness. There's no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me. — Bret Easton Ellis

I don't believe in jogging. It extends your life - but by exactly the amount of time you spend jogging. — Marshall Brickman

As an author, you need to keep talking to your audience to remind yourself what they like and what they don't like. You spend most of your life locked in a room, and you need to be social occasionally. — Jonathan Stroud

Sometimes the personality or just the particular process of a director can really affect your quality of life as a composer in terms of how much time you spend away from your family or the amount of time you spend doing the type of work that you maybe don't consider as fun to do as other type of work. — Christophe Beck

Derek, you just don't say things like that to a woman. Keep going this way and you'll spend your life alone."
"Don't change the subject. Andrea is cool. And she smells nice. It will be okay."
Apparently I was supposed to sniff people to determine their competence. "How do you know?"
He shrugged. "You just have to trust her. — Ilona Andrews

Maybe if you spend your life pretending you're on a movie set, you don't ever have to admit that the walls are made out of paper and the food is plastic and the words in your mouth aren't really yours. — Jodi Picoult

I'm sorry you don't want to know me anymore. I will spend the rest of my life regretting the fact that I wasted my second chance to know you. And I will always be conscious of your absence.- Gabriel to Julia. — Sylvain Reynard

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Now is your time. Become, believe, try. Walk closely with people you love, and with other people who believe that God is very good and life is a grand adventure. Don't spend time with people who make you feel like less than you are. Don't get stuck in the past, and don't try to fast-forward yourself into a future you haven't yet earned. Give today all the love and intensity and courage you can, and keep traveling honestly along life's path. — Shauna Niequist

If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life. — John Irving

It is necessary to prepare and to plan so that we don't fritter away our lives. Without a goal, there can be no real success. One of the best definitions of success I have ever heard goes something like this: success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. Someone has said the trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never cross the goal line. — Thomas S. Monson

At night I sometimes see the figure of a man, on an empty road in a deserted landscape, walking behind a hearse. I am that man. It's you the hearse is taking away. I don't want to be there for your cremation; I don't want to be given an urn with your ashes in it. I hear the voice of Kathleen Ferrier singing, 'Die Welt ist leer, Ich will nicht leben mehr'* and I wake up. I check your breathing, my hand brushed over you. Neither of us wants to outlive the other. We've often said to ourselves that if, by some miracle, we were to have a second life, we'd like to spend it together.
*The world is empty. I don't want to go on living. — Andre Gorz

You don't have to be young. You don't have to be thin. You don't have to be "hot" in a way that some dumbfuckedly narrow mindset has construed that word. You don't have to have taut flesh or a tight ass or an eternally upright set of tits. You have to find a way to inhabit your body while enacting your deepest desires. You have to be brave enough to build the intimacy you deserve. You have to take off all of your clothes and say, "I'm right here." There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay. And perhaps the body is our final frontier. It's the one place we can't leave. We're there till it goes. Most women and some men spend their lives trying to alter it, hide it, prettify it, make it what it isn't, or conceal it for what it is. But what if we didn't do that? That's the question you need to answer, — Cheryl Strayed

Don't waste your time consuming what makes you weak. Spend your time pressing in for the Presence. Become so intimate with Jesus, so full of Him, that it does not matter what challenges in life present themselves to you. You will be so spiritually full that you can feed a multitude of other people's needs. Jesus will give you more than enough. — Heidi Baker

You spend most of your life working and trying to hone your craft, working on your chops, working on your writing, and you don't really think about accolades. Then you get a bit older and they start coming your way. It's a nice pat on the back. — Geddy Lee

If you're suddenly doing something you don't want to do for four years, just so you've got something to fall back on, by the time you come out you don't have that 16-year-old drive any more and you'll spend your life doing something you never wanted to do in the first place. — Ewan McGregor

I don't wanna go throught the motions
I don't wanna go one more day
Without your all-consuming
Passion inside of me
I don't wanna spend my whole life asking
What if I had given everything?
Instead of going through the motions. — Matthew West

The phrase, 'You must die before you die,' is found in most of the world religions. If you don't learn how to die early, you spend the rest of your life avoiding failure. When you can free your True Self, the whole spiritual life opens up. — Richard Rohr

SETH: But don't you understand, Amy? You're wrong. Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of those things. Three - that's it. Maybe four, if you're very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things. But this isn't the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That's real life. Don't you see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing. — Hanya Yanagihara

The value of work, and of always learning something new, and what it takes to achieve excellence. I really believe in those things that you have to dedicate yourself and spend time, that excellence is elusive. It's a little maddening, to try to have that level of discipline in your life, and I don't succeed all the time. But I do try. — Ben Affleck

Acting is a marvelous profession ... If you can spend enough time playing other people, you don't have to think too much about your own character and motivations. — Dean Koontz

Don't feel obligated to spend time with people who pull you off the path of your life purpose. — Doreen Virtue

I couldn't stand by and watch you put yourselves in harm's way. No way. And fuck those SAVAK bastards, and their Western masters, and the grand servant of the West. Fuck anyone who wants to put me in jail because I stood by my friends to mourn the death of a hero, screw them all. I don't care if I have to spend the rest of my life behind bars, I don't, I really don't. I learned today that friendship is worth making sacrifices for. Doctor proved that life is a small price to pay for your beliefs. — Mahbod Seraji

Everything about [chance] scares the bejesus out of so many people; it's the this thing they try to avoid at all costs. Don't travel to the Middle East these days - there's a chance something could happen. Don't get involved with that new fellow on Creamery Street - I hear a lot of mud was scraped off his floor after the divorce. Don't have your baby at home - there's a a chance something could go wrong. Don't don't don't ... Well, you can't live your life like that! You can't spend your entire life avoiding chance. It's out there, it's inescapable, it's a part of the soul of the world. There are no sure things in this universe, and it's absolutely ridiculous to try and live like there are! — Chris Bohjalian

You don't spend your life hanging around books without learning a thing or two. — Lemony Snicket

If you don't decide what your life is about, it defaults to what you spend your days doing. — Robert Breault

You can't escape this feeling of disintegration. The world is fragile. But you also can't let it ruin your life. I'm actually a pretty composed person. I guess people imagine I spend my life thinking about crazy, sinister things but I don't, really. It's not like I'm trying to exorcise any demons. — Michael Shannon

I was blessed with another trait I inherited from my mother, her ability to forget the pain in life. I remember the thing that caused the trauma, but I don't hold onto the trauma. I never let the memory of something painful prevent me from trying something new. If you think too much about the ass kicking your mom gave you or the ass kicking that life gave you, you'll stop pushing the boundaries and breaking the rules. It's better to take it, spend some time crying, then wake up the next day and move on. You'll have a few bruises and they'll remind you of what happened and that's ok. But after a while, the bruises fade and they fade for a reason. Because now, it's time to get up to some shit again. — Trevor Noah

You spend so much of your life crafting this stuff that you want to laugh in the room. I don't want to sit there and slit my wrists. And I think it reflects reality. People use humor to survive, even in the most horrific situations. — Jenji Kohan

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

Picture a bird perched on a thin branch, she [Miss Saeki] says. 'The branch sways in the wind, and each time this happens the bird's field of vision shifts. You know what I mean?'
I nod.
'When that happens, how do you think the bird adjusts?'
I shake my head. 'I don't know.'
'It bobs its head up and down, making up for the sway of the branch. Take a good look at birds the next time it's windy. I spend a lot of time looking out that window. Don't you think that kind of life would be tiresome? Always shifting your head every time the branch you're on sways?'
'I do.'
'Birds are used to it. It comes naturally to them. They don't have to think about it, they just do it. So it's not as tiring as we imagine. But I'm a human being, not a bird, so sometimes it does get tiring. — Haruki Murakami

Don't spend your money till you have it. — Thomas Jefferson

If you want to be rich, be friends with people who have the same mindset as you, or who at least won't try to change your mindset to be more like theirs. Life is too short to spend time with people who don't help you move forward. — Robert Kiyosaki

Don't spend too much time grieving for me, Elena. I know you're probably a little sad as you're reading this, since that means I'm dead and you're having to learn how to go on in a new way. I would be sad if you didn't miss me, so I won't tell you not to, but I will tell you to keep on living. The world is full of beautiful music, flowers, places, and experiences. Enjoy it all as much as you can. Just remember it's the people in your life that make it worthwhile...People and memories, not things are what's important in the end. Nothing else matters as much as that. — M. Reed McCall

I'm the train.
I'm the one careening out of control.
Because sometime you see yourself- you see yourself the way you could be- the way you might be if things were different. And if you look too closely, what you see will scare you, it'll make you wonder what you might do given the opportunity. You know there's a different side of yourself you don't want to recognize, a side you don't want to see in the daylight. You spend your whole life doing everything to push it down and away, out of sight, out of mind. You pretend that a piece of yourself doesn't exist.
You live like that for a long time.
For a long time, you're safe.
And then you're not. — Tahereh Mafi

It's not enough to believe! Don't you see that, you stupid girl? You could spend your whole life hoping and believing! If a love affair is one-sided, then it's only ever a question, never an answer. You can't live your life waiting for an answer. — Sophie Kinsella

IF YOU DON'T GO AFTER WHAT YOU WANT; YOU COULD SPEND YOUR ENTIRE LIFE SETTLING FOR WHAT YOU CAN GET — Mo Stegall

If you want to be unhappy, uncomfortable, and insecure, just spend your life trying to do something that is not right for you. It is just like trying to wear shoes that don't fit. — Joyce Meyer

You don't spend most of your life in other people's heads without losing every prejudice you ever had. — Mercedes Lackey

Listen to me instead of your financial manager: It's okay to spend money, to save it, to give it away, to worry over it. It's just money. Your only enemy in life is time. Do be miser with time: hoard it, treasure it, don't squander a single minute of it. — Cassandra King

I don't know when I fell in love with you, but I have fallen deeper and harder than anyone else in my life. You've become my world. I can't imagine a day without you by my side, an hour without your smile, a minute without hearing you laugh, and a second without you in my life. She opened her mouth, and I shook my head. I will spend my life protecting you and being worthy of being yours, I've never wanted anything as badly as I want you to be mine, walking through life together hand and hand, and waking up with you next to me each morning makes my life so much sweeter than I ever thought possible — Chelle Bliss

- but they're minor-level functionaries. They can't do that kind of shit. And a demon can't possess another demon - or a half, for that matter. So two plus two, okay? His other half ain't Ahhazu, it's incubus. And there's only one half human, half incubus ever been recorded - "
"Maybe Pritkin's birth wasn't recorded."
"Bullshit. You know damn well who we got - "
"Don't say it."
" - next door, and John Pritkin ain't his - "
"I'm warning you."
" - name. It's motherfucking Mer - "
"Say it and spend the rest of your life in the Jurassic," I hissed. — Karen Chance

I thought that you said that your name was reserved only for family." A small smile broke through his stoic expression.
"The way I see it, even if you don't come around and realize that you can't resist my striking looks and enticing charm, and that you desperately want to spend the rest of your life in my arms - "
"Which will never happen ... "
" - you'll eventually end up with my silly little brother. Who, just to warn you, despite being a great guy, is nowhere near as handsome and charming as I. — Ada Adams

whole. I can't imagine anything more terrifying than losing Sophie. When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again; yet after giving birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to all sorts of dangers and disappearance, so you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to keep her close enough for comfort. That's the strange thing about being a mother: Until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one. It doesn't — Jodi Picoult

The world doesn't want to be punished. It wants to remain in darkness. It doesn't want to be told that what it believes is false. If you also don't want to be corrected, then you might as well leave the church and spend your time at the bar and brothel. But if you want to be saved - and remember that there's another life after this one - you must accept correction. — Martin Luther

What did he have to mope about, really? What more did he want? ... Love. Purpose. Those are the things that you can't plan for. Those are the things that just happen. And what if they don't happen? Do you spend your whole life pining for them? Waiting to be happy? — Rainbow Rowell

Learn to enjoy every minute of your life. Be happy now. Don't wait for something outside of yourself to make you happy in the future.
Think how really precious is the time you have to spend, whether it's at work or with your family. Every minute should be enjoyed and savored — Earl Nightingale

So stop eating yourself up. Things will go where they're supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course. Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt. Life is like that. I know I sound like I'm preaching from a pulpit, but it's about time you learned to live like this. You try too hard to make life fit your way of doing things.If you don't want to spend time in an insane asylum, you have to open up a little more and let yourself go with life's natural flow. — Haruki Murakami