Existence In Your Life Quotes & Sayings

Tell me how a person judges his or her self-esteem, and I will tell you how that person operates at work, in love, in sex, in parenting, in every important aspect of existence - and how high he or she is likely to rise. The reputation you have with yourself - your self-esteem - is the single most important factor for a fulfilling life. — Nathaniel Branden

When we ponder the vastness of the universe and eternity, we are closer to understanding the role of death in the mysterious life we are all experiencing. Through these realizations, greater acceptance of the inevitability of death positions us to be happier in our lives. After my journey through these ideas I feel strongly that happiness and a deeper understanding of death are linked phenomena that offer a fuller existence. — Loren Mayshark

A writer can't just be well-educated or good at research; to build a living, breathing world with interesting characters, you have to write from the gut. I'm not saying you have to live your life like a fantasy adventure. The trick is the ability to synthesize your own everyday experiences into your fiction. Infuse your characters with believable emotions and motivations. Infuse your world with rich sensory detail. For that you have to be in touch with your own existence and your own soul, the dark and the light of it. — Lynn Flewelling

I am delighted to have you play football. I believe in rough, manly sports. But I do not believe in them if they degenerate into the sole end of any one's existence. I don't want you to sacrifice standing well in your studies to any over-athleticism; and I need not tell you that character counts for a great deal more than either intellect or body in winning success in life. Athletic proficiency is a mighty good servant, and like so many other good servants, a mighty bad master. — Theodore Roosevelt

In a world where the only evidence of your existence was a body subject to decay and the works you left behind when the body was gone, you tried all manner of things to convince yourself that your life had some meaning, some permanence. — Traci Chee

When you are in love, it means that the person you love is of great personal, selfish importance to you and to your life. If you were selfless, it would have to mean that you derive no personal pleasure or happiness from the company and the existence of the person you love, and that you are motivated only by self-sacrificial pity for that person's need of you. I don't have to point out to you that no one would be flattered by, nor would accept, a concept of that kind. Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person. — Ayn Rand

There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns - small intuitive flashes, when you know you have done something correct for a change, when you think you are on the right track. I watched a pale dawn streak the cliffs with Day-glo and realized this was one of them. It was a moment of pure, uncomplicated confidence - and lasted about ten seconds. — Robyn Davidson

Being others-focused instead of self-focused changes your worldview. Living in a selfless manner and seeking to help others enriches our very existence on a daily basis. Get your hands dirty once in a while by serving in a capacity that is lower than your position or station in life. This keeps you tethered to the real world and grounded to reality, which should make it harder to be prideful and forget where you came from. — Miles Anthony Smith

A man has carried off your mistress, a man has seduced your wife, a man has dishonored your daughter; he has rendered the whole life of one who had the right to expect from heaven that portion of happiness God has promised to every one of his creatures, an existence of misery and infamy; and you think you are avenged because you send a ball through the head, or pass a sword through the breast, of that man who has planted madness in your brain, and despair in your heart. — Alexandre Dumas

In life, have but one desire, one only
to love Jesus Christ with all your soul. Let that be the one fixed idea of your entire existence. — Pedro Arrupe

But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses. — Bill Bryson

Human Error lies in judgment. While many will say that it's wrong to judge, one cannot survive in the light or the darkness without equipping the ability to judge. One must judge their morality. One must judge their potentiality. One must judge their actuality. One must judge their life. One must judge their very existence. What happens when God no longer lends a helping a hand? What happens when
God longer judges you? Only you can be the arbiter of your own existence. However, you will have to judge. So let me ask you, what's the difference between judging the subjective reality that one exists in, and judging the value of the subjective reality of another? The only difference lies is the sameness of one conception ... judgment. So tell me, is it wrong to judge others, when your very existence depends on you judging reality for validity? — Lionel Suggs

But suppose it past, - suppose one of these men, as I have seen them meagre with famine, sullen with despair, careless of a life which your lordships are perhaps about to value at something less than the price of a stocking-frame ; suppose this man surrounded by those children for whom he is unable to procure bread at the hazard of his existence, about to be torn for ever from a family which he lately supported in peaceful industry, and which it is not his fault than he can no longer so support; suppose this man - and there are ten thousand such from whom you may select your victims, - dragged into court to be tried for this new offence, by this new law, - still there are two things wanting to convict and condemn him, and these are, in my opinion, twelve butchers for a jury, and a Jefferies for a judge! — George Gordon Byron

I wonder if the real measure of "home" is the degree to which you can leave it alone. Maybe appreciating a house means knowing when to stop decorating. Maybe you've never really lived there until you've thrown its broken pieces in the garbage. Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn't the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that's actually the easy part. The hard part is what's right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life. The hard part is learning not just how to be but mastering the nearly impossible art of how to be at home. — Meghan Daum

This is the tattoo of life decisions."
"Tattoo of life decisions?"
"Yes. Tattoo. Marriage is the forever and permanent branding of one person to another. Sure, you can get it removed - but it's expensive, it's a process, and you're never the same after. You're scarred. It's always a part of you, visible or not. You get a tattoo with the intention of a life-long commitment. You have to defend its existence and take ownership of it in front of others for the rest of your life regardless of how it sags or droops or changes shape and color - because it will! It will change and fade, and not in an aesthetically pleasing way. — Penny Reid

This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero. — Ayn Rand

I don't see big subjects as separate from little ones. Yes, you could trudge through life with great human tragedies played out before your eyes without ever taking notice. Or you could see a universe in the smallest thing. The way a person takes their coffee, for example, might say something profound and important about that person, about all humanity, about existence itself. — Johnny Rich

What you accomplish in life is limited only by your imagination and the fear of reprisal. Life is too fleeting and unrewarding to have to live with the added anus of indignity. The denial of one's inevitable demise is what causes most of the astringent blandness in the world. When your existence ends most certainly in death, there is no such thing as 'going too far'. There are no 'lines' you should fear to cross except the finish line. Playing it safe is the most dangerous thing you could do. — Jim Goad

Work on your strong qualities
and become resplendent like the ruby.
Practice self-denial and accept difficulty.
Always see infinite life in letting the self die.
Your stoniness will decrease; your ruby nature will grow.
The signs of self-existence will leave your body,
and ecstasy will take you over. — Rumi

I think you're under no obligation whatsoever to forgive anything, to forget anything. You're not required to push away the years of abuse because the abuser now chooses to be sober and in his sobriety regrets his actions. And white may be small and unforgiving of me, I think people who do so at the snap of a dam finger are either liars or are in need of serious therapy. I assume you heard him out, so in my personal opinion, any debt you might owe for your existence is now paid in full. It may be fashionable to hold that terrible actions are indeed terrible, but that hte person inflicting them isn't responbile due to alcohol, drugs, DNA, or GD PMS. He damn well was responsible, and if you decided to loathe him for the rest of your life, I wouldn't blame you for it. How's that? (Cybil to Gage - she ROCKS) — Nora Roberts

The world, right this very moment people were suffering unimaginable atrocities and you couldn't close your heart completely, but you couldn't leave it wide open either, because otherwise how could you possibly live your life, when through pure, random luck you got to live in paradise? You had to register the existence of evil, do the little that you could, and then close your mind and think about new shoes. — Liane Moriarty

On the chessboard of his godforsaken existence, the pieces were lined up, the play preordained. Man, so many times in life you didn't get to pick your path because the way you went was decided for you.
Free will was such bullshit.
-Vishous's thoughts — J.R. Ward

The generations before you failed. They didn't stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn't ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn't make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it. — Paul Hawken

You spend your whole lifetime in your occupation, actually making life clever, easy and convenient for white people. But when you have to get transportation home, you are denied an equal accommodation. Our existence was for the white man's comfort and well-being; we had to accept being deprived of just being human. — Rosa Parks

Each moment life is new and you have to respond from your inner newness, you have to be available to the new as the new. And you have to respond, not out of your knowledge, but out of your present awareness. Only then life works, otherwise life stops working. If your life is not working, remember, it is the ego that is hindering, the mechanical has encroached upon the organic. To be free from the mechanical is to be in God, because it is to be in the organic unity of existence. — Rajneesh

There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being. — Aleksandar Hemon

Some people say they will not believe in anything they can't see. What a catastrophe to not have any faith at all! You live only less than a half of life, if you will only believe in the things that you can see. Life is lived by those who have much faith and believe in many unseen things. If you believe in nothing that you cannot see, think about how much there is that you choose to turn your face away from! You can't see your soul and you cannot prove that it exists, therefore if you call yourself one who believes in nothing unseen, then you will forever deny your soul its existence, for the existence of the soul dwells in love, trust, anger, passion, faith, belief, strength; the soul is forever nourished by things that are unseen! And so we have too many empty bodies walking around! Bodies with souls inside that are half-dead and dying. — C. JoyBell C.

Basically, being alive means keeping yourself ready for the sky to fall in on you at any time. If you start from the assumption that existence is only an ordeal, a test we have to pass, then you're equipped to deal with its sorrows and its surprises. If you persist in expecting it to give you something it can't give, that just proves that you haven't understood anything. Take things as they come; don't turn them into a drama. You're not piloting the ship, you're following the course of your destiny. — Yasmina Khadra

Also there were people going round in such clumsy ways, stopping and starting, and hordes of schoolchildren like the ones I used to keep in order. Why so many of them and so idiotic with their yelps and yells and the redundancy, the sheer un-necessity of their existence, Everywhere an insult in your face. As the shops and their signs were an insult, and the noise of the cars with their stops and starts. Everywhere the proclaiming, this is life. As if we needed, more of life. — Alice Munro

In the voyage of your worldly existence, the sails at which your life float upon, are tethered by the thoughts and emotions that which you harbor. Expand. — Will Barnes

Since one could virtually open the Bible to any page and likely find something that speaks to his particular situation, is it fair to attribute this to the voice of God? After all, the Bible is not the only relevant book in existence. There are other religions with other scriptural texts which could do the same job. In fact, the text need not even be "scriptural." I could select Sartre's "Existentialism and Humanism" off the shelf, randomly flip to any page, and likely find something applicable to my life. Does this mean God is speaking through the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, a man who was by no means considered a friend to Christian thought? If the answer is yes, then who really needs to read the Bible? If this God is capable of turning anything into his "word" at any time, then you could theoretically receive a message from him in your Alpha-Bits. — Michael Vito Tosto

And what nags me about this is that the source of my anxiety was exactly what Kierkegaard says the source of anxiety is, and what he praised in direct proportion to the volume any person possesses: possibility. The awareness that life is a series of choices any one of which could be either aggrandizing or disastrous. That this happens to be true I have no trouble signing on to. Any who has lived past the age of ten knows that even piddling actions can wind up having big consequences, and that even when you are super-conscious of your behaviors you can't know how things are going to turn out in the short- or the long-run. That's the drama of it all. On the one hand, your very existence means you can and will change things in your life and others. On the other hand, you aren't God, so everything is always going to be drenched in uncertainty and doubt. — Daniel Smith

Do you realize you can actually listen a person's soul into existence? Your fervent interest in the inner life of those you care for can awaken their dormant powers. The teacher Richard Moss says 'The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention.' Offer this gift. — Rob Brezsny

Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those
in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed. Suffer them if you can't escape them, but once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible. Above all, try to avoid telling stories about the unjust treatment you received at their hands; avoid it no matter how receptive your audience may be. Tales of this sort extend the existence of your antagonists ... — Joseph Brodsky

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light. — Barry Lopez

And as for what I've learned: be an instrument of peace. Be a gentleman at all costs. Enjoy yourself - have fun with your existence. Learn to listen to your inner voice and don't overdose on yourself. Keep your darkness in check. Let music be a healing force. Be a real musician: once you start counting money before notes, you're a full-time wannabe. Put your guitar down and go outside and take a long drink of light with your eyes. Go walk in the park and take off your shoes and socks and feel the grass under your feet and mud between your toes. Go see a baby smiling, go see a wino crawling, go see life. Feel life - all of it, as much as possible. Find a human melody, then write a song about it. Make it all come through your music. — Carlos Santana

Don't let yourself get bored. Exist to question; question your existence. — Doug Cooper

Each soul path is a divine unique fingerprint and its existence adds to the beautiful tapestry of the cosmos. "Life is a series of defining moments, cross roads and gateways as each door closes and new ones open. Always and in all ways follow the heartbeat of your own soul which is the pathfilled with light and love. — Jan Porter

-The burden of existence is bestowed upon birth.
-The gift of existence is bestowed upon birth.
Choose wisely, your life (and potential others' life) depend on it. — Kevin Focke

I am privileged to have your illuminating presence in my life that adds etherealness to my existence! — Avijeet Das

This is your life and the afterlife merged together in one perfect, endless existence. — Drew Magary

For a time, I was quite literally at loss as to what to do with myself. For more than half a century I had looked after Suleiman.My daily existence had been shaped by his needs, his companionship. Now I was free to do as I wished, but I found the freedom illusory, for what I wished for the most had been taken from me. They say, find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind. And now that I had fulfilled mine, I felt aimless and adrift. — Khaled Hosseini

Your life is the one place you have to spend yourself fully
wild, generous, drastic
in an unrationed profligacy of self ... And in that split second when you understand that you finally are about to die-to uncreate the world no time to do it over no more chances
that instant when you realize your conscious existence is truly flaring nova, won't you want to have used up all-all-the splendor that you are? — Robin Morgan

Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn't the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that's actually the easy part. The hard part is what's right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life. — Meghan Daum

What do you most value in your friends?
Their continued existence. — Christopher Hitchens

Baseball is a lot like life. It's a day-to-day existence, full of ups and downs. You make the most of your opportunities in baseball as you do in life. — Ernie Harwell

I sat and asked God a question, never before now had I felt he was truly listening; Or was it i, that disrupted his appearance ...
Why God, must the treasures of our world be hard done by and the enemies of life become greater in their scheme of manipulation?
Oh dear one, I chose the strong ones to hand the deepest lessons, because I know they can handle it and soon enough they will too.
The ones that twiddle their thumbs and become ignorant to what's their truth; will attract what they are and continue in the circle of vicious greed. They'll eventually grow, like you did too.
It may just take time, and your time now is bettering your existence from the struggle you've faced. — Nikki Rowe

First and foremost, you do not have to live up to or emulate the lives of any of your predecessors. But at the very least, you should know about them. You will have your own life, interests, and ideas of what you want or do not want in life. Do what you enjoy doing. Be honest with yourself and others. Don't think of satisfying anyone: your elders, peers, government, religion, or children who will come after you. Develop meaningful ideals, and become conscious of others, their existence, and their lives. — Yuri Kochiyama

You own a dog with the knowledge that it will move through the stages of existence in fast forward, providing you with a lesson about your own life passages if you let it. — Antonya Nelson

The fact that your lifespan is an infinitesimally tiny fragment in the life of the universe, and that there is, at the very least, a strong possibility that when you die, you disappear completely and forever, and that in five hundred years nobody will remember you and in five billion years the Earth will be boiled into the sun: this can be a profound and defining truth about your existence that you reflexively repulse, that you flinch away from and refuse to accept or even think about, consistently pushing to the back of your mind whenever it sneaks up, for fear that if you allow it to sit in your mind even for a minute, it will swallow everything else. It can make everything you do, and everything anyone else does, seem meaningless, trivial to the point of absurdity. — Greta Christina

So be joyful. Use your sense of humor. And laugh with the God who smiles when seeing you, rejoices over your very existence, and takes delight in you, all the days of your life. — James Martin

Always find purpose in your existence — Sunday Adelaja

Man feels and ponders death as though it were the end, when in fact death is merely the continuation of life. It is another life. You may not believe in the existence of the soul, yet you must acknowledge that your body will live on as green grass, as a cloud. For you are, after all, water and dust. — Janusz Korczak

This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust! — Friedrich Nietzsche

You've been striking at her ghost, screaming, 'If you didn't want me to turn out like him, you should have stayed to stop me!'
As his throat worked convulsively, she covered his hands with hers. 'But she can't hear you. So all you're doing is trudging a path that isn't your own, growing more weary of it by the day, wanting more from your existence but believing you're cursed to having less. That is no sort of life for anyone ... '
'How can you have such faith in me?' he asked hoarsely. 'How can you believe in me when I've given you no reason?'
'You've given me plenty of reasons, but there's only one that matters. I love you, Oliver. I can't help myself. That is my reason. — Sabrina Jeffries

The purpose of music is to elevate the spirit and inspire. Not to help push some product down your throat. It puts you in tune with your own existence. Sometimes you really don't know how you feel, but really good music can define how you feel ... someone who's telling me where he's been that I haven't and what it's like there - somebody whose life I can feel ... — Bob Dylan

For the rest, she grew used to the life that she was leading - used to the enormous sleepless nights, the cold, the dirt, the boredom, and the horrible communism of the Square. After a day or two she had ceased to feel even a flicker of surprise at her situation. She had come, like everyone about her, to accept this monstrous existence almost as though it were normal. The dazed, witless feeling that she had known on the way to the hopfields had come back upon her more strongly than before. It is the common effect of sleeplessness and still more of exposure. To live continuously in the open air, never going under a roof for more than an hour or two, blurs your perceptions like a strong light glaring in your eyes or a noise drumming in your ears. You act and plan and suffer, and yet all the while it is as though everything were a little out of focus, a little unreal. The world, inner and outer, grows dimmer till it reaches almost the vagueness of a dream. — George Orwell

You say your life is your own. But can you dare to ignore the chance that you are taking part in a gigantic drama under the orders of a divine Producer? Your cue may not come till the end of the play
it may be totally unimportant, a mere walking-on part, but upon it may hang the issues of the play if you do not give the cue to another player. The whole edifice may crumple. You as you, may not matter to anyone in the world, but you as a person in a particular place may matter unimaginably. — Agatha Christie

Choice is the basis of every part of your existence, but so is fear. The difference is, choice creates movement, where fear limits movement. — Rene Gaudette

Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self - which is absorbed in the moment - your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole. — Atul Gawande

I believe that you're great, that there's something magnificent about you. Regardless of what has happened to you in your life, regardless of how young or how old you think you might be, the moment you begin to think properly, there's something that is within you, there's power within you, that's greater than the world. It will begin to emerge. It will take over your life. It will feed you. It will clothe you. It will guide you, protect you, direct you, sustain your very existence, if you let it. Now, that is what I know for sure. — Michael Beckwith

Sometimes life has its way with you. It peels back the layers of your existence like the skin of an onion until the real you glows underneath, raw and painful to the touch. It's in those moments, in that hour, you look to those that give you strength - for me, — Addison Moore

I see an insidious problem in the marketing of weddings as 'the happiest day of your life.' The pressure that is placed upon this event to be the alpha and omega of your entire existence makes it, I think, into a kind of nuptial New Year's Eve, and we all know how that usually turns out. — Jessi Klein

He shook his head. You're asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live. It doesn't allow for special cases. A coin toss perhaps. In this case to small purpose. Most people don't believe that there can be such a person. You see what a problem that must be for them. How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of. Do you understand? When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That there could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You're asking that I second say the world. Do you see?
Yes, she said sobbing. I do. I truly do.
Good, he said. That's good. Then he shot her. — Cormac McCarthy

There's more to life than being an actor in a Hollywood movie. I'm not going to adapt my life after that existence, where a lot of people do. And they get the publicist, and they get all that stuff, and it becomes them. I think it's a stupid way to live your life. A really dumb way to live your life. — Zach Galifianakis

Do as little harm to others as you can; make any sacrifice for your true friends; be responsible for yourself and ask nothing of others; and grab all the fun you can. Don't give much thought to yesterday, don't worry about tomorrow, live in the moment, and trust that your existence has meaning even when the world seems to be all blind chance and chaos. When life lands a hammer blow in your face, do your best to respond to the hammer as if it had been a cream pie. — Dean Koontz

Life is brief, even at its longest. Whatever you are going to do with your life, get at it. All good will be attacked. All values must be defended. In all areas of the human existence, what we put into this world, we get back from it. — Jim Rohn

You cannot devote your life to an abstraction. Indeed, life shatters all abstractions in one way or another, including words such as "faith" or "belief". If God is not in the very fabric of existence for you, if you do not find Him (or miss Him!) in the details of your daily life, then religion is just one more way to commit spiritual suicide. — Christian Wiman

Poems give us permission to be unsure, in ways we must be if we are ever to learn anything not already known. If you look with open eyes at your actual life, it's always going to be the kind of long division problem that doesn't work out perfectly evenly. Poems let you accept the multiplicity and complexity of the actual, they let us navigate the unnavigable, insoluble parts of our individual fates and shared existence. — Jane Hirshfield

Kovacs to a female believer in New Revelation: ..I'm calling you a gutless betrayer of your sex. I can see your husband's angle, he's a man, he's got everything to gain from this crapshit. But you? You've thrown away centuries of political struggle and scientific advance so you can sit in the dark and mutter your superstitions of unworth to yourself. You'll let your life, the most precious thing you have, be stolen from you hour by hour and day by day as long as you can eke out the existence your males will let you have. And then, when you finally die, and I hope it's soon, sister, I really do, then at the last you'll spite your own potential and shirk the final power we've won for ourselves to come back and try again. You'll do all of this because of your fucking faith, and if that child in your belly is female, then you'll condemn her to the same fucking thing — Richard K. Morgan

My mom believed that you make your own luck. Over the stove she had hung these old, maroon painted letters that spell out, "MANIFEST." The idea being if you thought and dreamed about the way you wanted your life to be
if you just envisioned it long enough, it would come into being.
But as hard as I had manifested Astrid Heyman with her hand in mine, her blue eyes gazing into mine, her lips whispering something wild and funny and outrageous in my ear, she had remained totally unaware of my existence. Truly, to even dream of dreaming about Astrid, for a guy like me, in my relatively low position on the social ladder of Cheyenne Mountain High, was idiotic. And with her a senior and me a junior? Forget it.
Astrid was just lit up with beauty: shining blonde ringlets, June sky blue eyes, slightly furrowed brow, always biting back a smile, champion diver on the swim team. Olympic level.
Hell, Astrid was Olympic level in every possible way. — Emmy Laybourne

Easy thing for a spirit to get used to. It is very confining, very limiting. So the child will cry out at suddenly being so limited. Hear this cry. Understand it. And give your children as much of a sense of "unlimitedness" as you possibly can. Next, introduce them to the world you have created with gentleness and care. Be full of care - that is to say, be careful - of what you put into their memory storage units. Children remember everything they see, everything they experience. Why do you spank your children the moment they exit the womb? Do you really imagine this is the only way to get their engines going? Why do you take your babies away from their mothers minutes after they have been separated from the only life-form they have known in all of their present existence? Will not the measuring and the weighing and the prodding and the poking wait for just a moment while the newly born experience the safety and the comfort of that which — Neale Donald Walsch

I don't regret anything I was before because I still am.
I only regret not having loved you.
Put your hands in mine
And let's be quiet, surrounded by life. — Alberto Caeiro

The thing that drives me and my colleagues at both Apple and Pixar is that you see something very compelling to you, and you don't quite know how to get to it, but you know, sometimes intuitively, it's within your grasp. And it's worth putting in years of your life to make it come into existence. — Steve Jobs

Dying and living, weeping and laughing--all parts of our existence here on earth. What would happen in your friendships if together you embraced the hard parts of life and did not fear weeping together? — Afton Rorvik

People think that you're supposed to marry your type well, I didn't marry my type. It's much more practical, and based in a day-to-day existence. So when you have that, and you're happy, and you love her, don't waste time. Because time - and I've learned that at this point in my life - time is my most precious commodity. Nothing is more precious than time. Because when it runs out that's it — Michael Ealy

ARE YOU LIVING THE LIFE THAT YOUR MAKER INTENDED?
Does your life lack the flavor, the crackle, the intensity you've hoped for?
Daily, we find ourselves bombarded by a thousand recommendations for extending the duration of our lives - exercise three times weekly! smoke in moderation! exchange sugar for saccharine! - but the truth is that time does not gain value by accruing. Time acquires value by being "spent," and spent freely. The longest life is not always the best one; in the marjority of cases, just the opposite.
If you are, in fact, living the life that your maker intended - it may be time to seek another maker. — John Wray

If you live consciously, if you try to bring consciousness to every act that you go through, you will be living in a silent, blissful state, in serenity, in joy, in love. Your life will have the flavour of a festival. That is the meaning of heaven: your life will have many flowers in it, much fragrance will be released through you. You will have an aura of delight. Your life will be a song of life-affirmation, it will be a sacred yes to all that existence is. You will be in communion with existence - in communion with stars, with the trees, with the rivers, with the mountains, with people, with animals. This whole life and this whole existence will have a totally different meaning for you. From every nook and corner, rivers of bliss will be flowing towards you. Heaven is just a name for that state of mind. Hell means you are living so unconsciously, so absurdly, in such contradiction, that you go on creating more and more misery for yourself. — Osho

Always live your life with one dream to fulfill. No matter how many of your dreams you have realized in the past, always have a dream to go. Because when you stop dreaming, life becomes a mundane existence. — Sara Henderson

We awaken this bodhichitta, this tenderness for life, when we can no longer shield ourselves from the vulnerability of our condition, from the basic fragility of existence. In the words of the sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa, "You take it all in. You let the pain of the world touch your heart and you turn it into compassion." It is said that in difficult times, it is only bodhichitta that heals. — Pema Chodron

Sometimes in the middle of a normal day, a life-changing choice is thrown in front of you. Right then, you're one decision away from a completely different existence. You decide your future even though you aren't even aware you're doing it. Your choice might result in finding love or death or winning the fucking lottery - you don't know. — Ilsa Madden-Mills

There lives at least one being who can never change-one being who would be content to devote his whole existence to your happiness-who lives but in your eyes-who breathes but in your smiles-who bears the heavy burden of life itself only for you. — Charles Dickens

Self-love is not the process of ignoring things, paying attention to fewer flaws or forcing yourself to look away from the parts of you that you perceive as ugly or unwanted. Self-love is the process of expanding your awareness, of seeing those flaws and imperfections alongside the incredible potential of the universe flowing within you, alongside the eternal truth of life flowing within your veins in each second, alongside the flickers of creativity and opportunity present within each moment of your existence. Like this, the imperfections persist, but only as lovable quirks, like a bad doorknob on the front door of a cottage in paradise, like a few thorns on a beautiful rose, like a cloud in a sunset. Like this, what was once unwanted becomes essential, memorable, humbling. — Vironika Tugaleva

If you live with the limited beliefs of your mind, you cannot see life, beyond the physical existence, while in reality, the life happens at a much deeper level. — Roshan Sharma

My dear young friends, I want to invite you to "dare to love". Do not desire anything less for your life than a love that is strong and beautiful and that is capable of making the whole of your existence a joyful undertaking of giving yourselves as a gift to God and your brothers and sisters, in imitation of the One who vanquished hatred and death for ever through love (cf. Rev 5:13).
Love is the only force capable of changing the heart of the human person and of all humanity, by making fruitful the relations between men and women, between rich and poor, between cultures and civilizations. (Message for the 22nd World Youth Day: Palm Sunday, 1 April 2007) — Pope Benedict XVI

Most people miss their whole lives, you know. Listen, life isn't when you are standing on top of a mountain looking at a sunset. Life isn't waiting at the alter or the moment your child is born or that time you were swimming in a deep water and a dolphin came up alongside you. These are fragments. 10 or 12 grains of sand spread throughout your entire existence. These are not life. Life is brushing your teeth or making a sandwich or watching the news or waiting for the bus. Or walking. Every day, thousands of tiny events happen and if you're not watching, if you're not careful, if you don't capture them and make them COUNT, your could miss it. You could miss your whole life. — Toni Jordan

Why do people whose existence you are unaware of, whom you meet once and will never see again, come to play, behind the scenes, an important role in your life? — Patrick Modiano

... there is no quicker way of growing old than undue indulgence in regular habits. Indeed it seems probable that the reason why so many people die sooner than they should is because they have organised their lives in such a way that there is nothing left for them to do. Change, as is well-known, is not only a law of Nature, but the very breath of existence. And if you rule change out of your life there no longer seems any reason why you should continue altogether. — Franklin Lushington

Know that life, which does everything perfectly, is now moving you in a new direction. The chess piece of your existence is being moved to a new square on the board of life. — Frederick Lenz

Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world. Find ways to be with those who are suffering by all means, including personal contact and visits, images, sounds. By such means, ... awaken yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world. If we get in touch with the suffering of the world, and are moved by that suffering, we may come forward to help the people who are suffering. — Thich Nhat Hanh

You've taken me completely, baby. You've swallowed me up and drowned me in your beauty and spirit. You know I can't function without you. You've made my life as beautiful as you are. You've made me want to live a worthy existence - a life with you. All I need is you - to look at you; to listen to you; to feel you.' He drops my hands and smoothes his palms over my thighs. 'To love you. — Jodi Ellen Malpas

You really get tired in one area of your life, and then you start questioning your whole existence. — Seth Avett

Therefore, you should fall in love as often as you can. Fall in love with a thing, with a soul, with every person in your life. Fall in love with your very existence. Only then will you know you have lived. — R. YS Perez

The work of each individual contributes to a totality, and so becomes an undying part of the totality. That totality of human lives - past and present and to come - forms a tapestry that has been in existence now for many tens of thousands of years and has been growing more elaborate and, on the whole, more beautiful in all that time. Even the Spacers are an offshoot of the tapestry and they, too, add to the elaborateness and beauty of the pattern. An individual life is one thread in the tapestry and what is one thread compared to the whole? Daneel, keep your mind fixed firmly on the tapestry and do not let the trailing off of a single thread affect you. — Isaac Asimov

You don't know. You've never been married and divorced. Everything is insurmountable when you're married. The fact that you want to talk at the breakfast table and he insists on reading his paper is insurmountable. Leaving the seat up on the toilet is insurmountable. Getting peanut butter in the jelly jar is insurmountable. People don't change just because they're married. All those little habits and personality quirks that you previously thought were trivial become the bane of your existence. And the major problems, like different outlooks on life, are crushing. — Janet Evanovich

There are many diamonds in the world and if you lose your favorite, you can work hard, earn a lot of money and get another one to replace it. But the moments of your life aren't like that. Once they're gone, they'll never return. Each and every one is the most precious thing in existence. You can never meaningfully compare one moment with any other. You can never meaningfully compare your life with anyone else's. No matter how rich someone else may be, no matter how happy they look, no matter how enlightened they seem, they can never be you. Never, ever, ever. Only you can live your life. — Brad Warner

To exist is to stand out, away from the background," The Preacher said. "You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgment of your existence. — Frank Herbert

Why did his tongue cultivate such a great many glissades of truth? I don't know. However, we can see two interesting tendencies: 1. Everything in your father's life that had political blackness was filtered out. Politics were, for him, a swamp that had already drowned too many in his vicinity. Not until late in life would your father change his relationship with politics. Perhaps too late. 2. Certainly we all realized that your father's words were not totally correct. But still we were hypnotized and stimulated. Is it not bizarre how the words of imagination can rumble forth a certain comfort? And is that not reality's reason for the existence of superfluousities like horoscopes, psychologists, and authors? — Jonas Hassen Khemiri

Since you always lived inside your own head, you were much better at seeing the truth about others than you ever were at seeing yourself. So you navigated your life with the help of others who held up mirrors for you. People praised your good qualities and criticized your bad habits, and these perspectives - often surprising to you - helped you to guide your life. So poorly did you know yourself that you were always surprised at how you looked in photographs or how you sounded on voice mail. In this way, much of your existence took place in the eyes, ears, and fingertips of others. And now that you've left the Earth, you are stored in scattered heads around the globe. Here in this Purgatory, all the people with whom you've ever come in contact are gathered. The scattered bits of you are collected, pooled, and unified. The mirrors are held up in front of you. Without the benefit of filtration, you see yourself clearly for the first time. And that is what finally kills you. — David Eagleman

No one wants to go through life alone, fighting battles single-handedly their whole life. Not even the hardiest of heroes. That's just a miserable existence. Everyone needs someone in their corner, right? ... Even if you could," I wrinkled my brow, "would you really want to? By all accounts, it gets lonely being your own hero. — J.M. Richards