Familiar Life Quotes & Sayings

In breaking away from the familiar and the expected, you'll be forced and privileged to face greater challenges, learn harder lessons, and really get to know yourself. — Kelly Cutrone

The place was a familiar as breath but as far from his life now as the moon. — Kim Edwards

We may regard the cell quite apart from its familiar morphological aspects, and contemplate its constitution from the purely chemical standpoint. We are obliged to adopt the view, that the protoplasm is equipped with certain atomic groups, whose function especially consists in fixing to themselves food-stuffs, of importance to the cell-life. Adopting the nomenclature of organic chemistry, these groups may be designated side-chains. We may assume that the protoplasm consists of a special executive centre (Leistungs-centrum) in connection with which are nutritive side-chains... The relationship of the corresponding groups, i.e., those of the food-stuff, and those of the cell, must be specific. They must be adapted to one another, as, e.g., male and female screw (Pasteur), or as lock and key (E. Fischer). — Paul R. Ehrlich

At the time of our conversations, Chelsea Manning was 22 years of age - my own age when I made the choice to surrender to federal authorities ... I saw someone very familiar that day, and suddenly felt very old. — Adrian Lamo

I don't know what kind of life you had, what sorts of joys and sorrows you experienced. But even if there was something that left you unfulfilled, you can't go around seeking it at other people's doors. Even if it is at the place you're most familiar with, and the sort of act that is your forte. — Haruki Murakami

Fella's a genius. Best ever by a distance in my life time. Never really saw Pele ... Souness, Gullit, Venables and now Rooney agree Messi is the best they have seen. He plays a game with which we are not familiar. — Gary Lineker

I grew up in Muenchen where my father has been a professor for pharmaceutic chemistry at the university. He had studied chemistry and medicine, having been a research student in Leipzig with Wilhelm Ostwald, the Nobel Laureate 1909. So I became familiar with the life of a scientist in a chemical laboratory quite early. — Wolfgang Paul

Into all our lives, in many simple, familiar, homely ways, God infuses this element of joy from the surprises of life, which unexpectedly brighten our days and fill our eyes with light. — Samuel Longfellow

Thinking about death ... produces love for life. When we are familiar with death, we accept each week, each day, as a gift. Only if we are able thus to accept life bit by bit does it become precious. — Albert Schweitzer

All she had left of her old life and her old uncertainties was attacking familiar targets. — J.K. Rowling

Sometimes even feeling bad feels good. Negative emotions can feel so familiar (especially if they mimic our past) as to actually be comforting. Awareness is realizing that our life could always be better. Growth is doing what it takes to make it better ... — Danielle LaPorte

I felt caught in a dilemma that was new to me then but which since has become horribly familiar: the trap of adult life, in which you are held, wriggling, powerless to act because you can see both sides. On that occasion, as generally in the future, I compromised. — Mary McCarthy

why has almost everyone done the calendar thing, but almost no one has moved everything else in their life into a similar zone, by capturing it all and creating the habit of assessing it all appropriately? Three reasons: First, the data that is entered onto a calendar has already been thought through and determined; it's been translated down to the physical action level. You agreed to call Jim at noon on Monday: there is no more thinking required about what the appropriate action is, or where and when you're going to do it. Second, you know where those kinds of actions need to be parked (calendar), and it's a familiar and available tool. — David Allen

And I knew, too, that to live a life like Walter Cole's - a life almost mundane in the pleasure it derived from small happinesses and the beauty of the familiar, but uncommon in the value it attached to them - was something to be envied. — John Connolly

Scientists have, in fact, assembled long lists of scores of such "happy cosmic accidents." When faced with this imposing list, it's shocking to find how many of the familiar constants of the universe lie within a very narrow band that makes life possible. If a single one of these accidents were altered, stars would never form, the universe would fly apart, DNA would not exist, life as we know it would be impossible, Earth would flip over or freeze, and so on. — Michio Kaku

It never was anything very splendid at the best," said he. He lifted the lamp from the table with a sort of abstraction, not remarking even my offer to take it from him, and led the way. He was on the verge of seventy, and looked his age; but it was a vigorous age, with no symptom of giving way. The circle of light from the lamp lit up his white hair and keen blue eyes and clear complexion; his forehead was like old ivory, his cheek warmly colored; an old man, yet a man in full strength. He was taller than I was, and still almost as strong. As he stood for a moment with the lamp in his hand, he looked like a tower in his great height and bulk. I reflected as I looked at him that I knew him intimately, more intimately than any other creature in the world, - I was familiar with every detail of his outward life; could it be that in reality I did not know him at all? * — Mrs. Oliphant

I couldn't help wondering what it was that made me not good enough. It was a familiar feeling. I'd had it off and on my entire life. — Drew Nellins Smith

It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a treadmill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences. — Hunter S. Thompson

Although healing brings a better life, it also threatens to permanently alter life as you've known it. Your relationships, your position in the world, even your sense of identity may change. Coping patterns that have served you for a lifetime will be called into question. When you make the commitment to heal, you risk losing much of what is familiar. As a result one part of you may want to heal while another resists change.
Courage to Heal Workbook by Laura Davis — Laura Davis

The physicist is familiar with the fact that the classical laws of physics are modified by quantum theory, especially at low temperature. There are many instances of this. Life seems to be one of them, a particularly striking one. Life seems to be orderly and lawful behaviour of matter, not based exclusively on its tendency to go over from order to disorder, but based partly on existing order that is kept up. — Erwin Schrodinger

The more familiar that a place becomes, the more mysterious it becomes, as well, if you are alert to the truth of things. I have found this to be the case all of my life. — Dean Koontz

Oments of transport, and of comfort, and of a bracing vastness of possibility. That was all there for me sometimes when I plunged my mind into the Bible's puzzles; and it was always there in the music of church. I wouldn't have said it this way then. But I would feel all the cells in my body as I sang hymns that connected my little life with the grandeur of the cosmos, the Christian drama across space and time. This was my earliest experience of breath and body, mind and spirit soaring together, alive to both mystery and reality, in kinship with others both familiar and unknown. That's one way I'd define the feeling of faith now. — Krista Tippett

Do not choose for your friends and familiar acquaintance those that are of an estate or quality too much above yours ... You will hereby accustom yourselves to live after their rate in clothes, in habit, and in expenses, whereby you will learn a fashion and rank of life above your degree and estate, which will in the end be your undoing. — Matthew Hale

Rebecca and Robert enjoy the fact that they're so similar. They have very little sense that it limits them, narrows their perspective on life, or blinds them to a wide array of opinions, experiences, and different ways of thinking and being. But the fundamental human preference that they exemplify - for the familiar over the alien, the known over the unknown, and the comfortable over the dissonant - has insidious but important consequences. — Anonymous

Maybe there is a single spot, just one, where living organisms are holed up. Maybe so, but if so this would be the strangest thing of all, absolutely incomprehensible. For we are not familiar with this kind of living. We do not have solitary, isolated creatures. It is beyond our imagination to conceive of a single form of life that exists alone and independent, unattached to other forms — Lewis Thomas

As she wrote her pulse quickened to the pleasure of forming the phrases,--her blood warmed to the joy of the working. She was experiencing a return of the familiar sensation of happiness in constructing. Quite suddenly, in fancy she caught in the far distance a glimpse of silver wings. It gave her a warm thrill of gratification too deep for words. Immediately she knew through some inner consciousness, that no matter what the future would hold--joy or sorrow, happiness or grief--that no matter where life's paths would lead her--through sharp and stony ways or beside still waters--buried deep within her was an indestructible capacity to visualize a white bird flying. She might never get close to the way of its winging, but always there would be joy in lifting her eyes to the glory of its distant flight. — Bess Streeter Aldrich

Cool wind soothed her. She could breathe sweet air. The only heat she felt was the warm, familiar heat from the mage's body. Opening her eyes, she saw that she stood close to him. Raising her head, she gazed up into his face ... and felt a swift, sharp ache in her heart.
Raistlin's thin face glistened with sweat, his eyes reflected the pure, white flame of the burning bodies, his breath came fast and shallow. He seemed lost, unaware of his surroundings. And there was a look of ecstasy on his face, a look of exultation, of triumph.
"I understand," Crysania said to herself, holding onto his hands. "I understand. This is why he cannot love me. He has only one love in this life and that is his magic. To this love he will give everything, for this love he will risk everything! — Margaret Weis

It often happens that men pull in a certain political, social, or familiar harness simply because they never have time to ask themselves whether the position they stand in and the work they accomplish are right; whether their occupations really suit their inner desires and capacities, and give them the satisfaction which everyone has the right to expect from his work. Active men are especially liable to find themselves in such a position. Every day brings with it a fresh batch of work, and a man throws himself into his bed late at night without having completed what he had expected to do; then in the morning he hurries to the unfinished task of the previous day. Life goes, and there is no time left to think, no time to consider the direction that one's life is taking. So it was with me. — Pyotr Kropotkin

She had scooped Lydia up and smoothed her hair and told her how clever she was, how proud her father would be when he came home. But she'd felt as if she'd found a locked door in a familiar room: Lydia, still small enough to cradle, had secrets. Marilyn might feed her and bathe her and coax her legs into pajama pants, but already parts of her life were curtained off. She kissed Lydia's cheek and pulled her close, trying to warm herself against her daughter's small body. — Celeste Ng

My ability to adapt has always stood out. I've been immersed in many worlds and have had the influence of many things in my upbringing so I'm familiar with so many styles of living, so many characters, so many life paths and its just easy to simulate for me. — Aeriel Miranda

By choosing comfort we are in the very same decision choosing to miss every great thing in life, and that thought should be anything but comforting. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one's own-be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid. — Thomas Merton

They say: misfortunes and sufferings,' remarked Pierre, 'yes, but if right now, right this minute they asked me: "Would you rather be what you were before you were taken prisoner, or go through this all again?" For God's sake let me again have captivity and horse flesh! We imagine that when we are thrown out of our familiar rut all is lost, but that is only when something new and good can begin. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much before us. I say this to you,' he added, turning to Natasha. — Leo Tolstoy

It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places of her life, like a familiar cafe that exists someone outside geography and beyond time zones.
There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F:, and some muchlarger and uncounted number of lurkers. And right now there are three people in Chat. But there's no way of knowing exactly who until you are in there, and the chat room she finds not so comforting. It's strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. the hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counmter-purposes, deter her. — William Gibson

In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it. Then comes the alchemist Mind who transmutes the symbols. The sparsely spread nuclei of electric force become a tangible solid; their restless agitation becomes the warmth of summer; the octave of aethereal vibrations becomes a gorgeous rainbow. Nor does the alchemy stop here. In the transmuted world new significances arise which are scarcely to be traced in the world of symbols; so that it becomes a world of beauty and purpose - and, alas, suffering and evil. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

Here are a few of the mantras I commonly received - see if any of them sound familiar: "Make sure you can support yourself; it's a tough world out there!" "You're so smart; you don't want to waste your intelligence [implied: by getting married too soon]." "We're expecting big things from you." "You have your whole life ahead of you - have fun while you can!" "Relax; marriage will happen when it happens." "I wish I'd had all the opportunities you have. — Lisa Anderson

I think it's quite tough for people like Tom Cruise where you can never really get away from being Tom Cruise in something. You're so familiar to people and people know so much about your life. — Michael Sheen

Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale. — Arthur C. Clarke

Because that happened to me when I was little, this is how I will now treat other people"; "Because so and so beat me up and hurt me a long time ago, that gives me the right to treat people the way I treat them, today"; "Because life was hard on me, life should be hard on everyone else around me" - does this sound/ look familiar? It's called victim mentality. When people choose to be the direct product of everything that happened to them, the direct product of every single pair of hands that hurt them. And the world, to these people, must bend over backwards in order to accommodate their wounds. Some people don't want to be loved; they just want to make the world pay. — C. JoyBell C.

It would be a hard life, but it would be theirs alone. Here at the world's edge, far from everything familiar and safe, they would build a new home in the wilderness and do it as partners. — Eowyn Ivey

Nostalgia washes over me with tons of memors and lifetime rolled on this land. Every oblivious memory from the childhood wraps open in the fragrance of these busy roads and familiar land, long signals, irritating traffic,honking cars,rushing people,excessive pollution defining Delhi at its best. — Parul Wadhwa

Each of the essays in this volume ranges widely across technical and philosophical domains. They examine both familiar automatons from throughout history and delight us with yet more that will likely be unfamiliar to most readers. But the real treat of the essays is how they will make Artificial Life researchers squirm as they recognize their own intellectual sleights of hand exposed for all to see. Those researchers and the Genesis Redux contributors are all ultimately interested in what it is that truly distinguishes us beings from other lumps of matter. — Rodney Brooks

Microbes are invisible to our naked eye, with a few exceptions that reinforce the rule. Millions can fit into the eye of a needle. But if you were to gather them all up, not only would they outnumber all the mice, whales, humans, birds, insects, worms, and trees combined - indeed all of the visible life-forms we are familiar with on Earth - they would outweigh them as well. Think about that for a moment. Invisible microbes comprise the sheer bulk of the Earth's biomass, more than the mammals and reptiles, all the fish in the sea, the forests. — Martin J. Blaser

This cruel age has deflected me,
like a river from this course.
Strayed from its familiar shores,
my changeling life has flowed
into a sister channel.
How many spectacles I've missed:
the curtain rising without me,
and falling too. How many friends
I never had the chance to meet. — Anna Akhmatova

Not my job to judge, boy." Baba Yaga filled and lit the pipe again. "But I do observe that its difficult to escape familiar patterns. When you live your life with cruel words, you look for people to give them to you. When you escape and evil stepmother, you take an uncaring bride. When your father throws you out, you love someone who won't love you back. And to keep yourself in cruelty, you're willing to risk head and hands on the mayors side board. Keep the pattern going. Hm." ~ Baba Yaga, Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables, Steven Harper, Pg. 32. — Steven Harper

If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face.
My name once meant daughter, grandaughter, friend, sister, beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out; Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness.
I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am. — Alice Hoffman

Dorrie gave Larry's hand an excited, distracted squeeze that said: almost home. They were about to be matter-of-factly claimed by familiar streets and houses and the life they'd chosen or which had chosen them. — Carol Shields

Gosh, it's easy!' he marveled, open-mouthed. 'I never knew before how easy it is to kill anyone! Twenty years to grow 'em, and all it takes is one little push!'
He was suddenly drunk with some new kind of power, undiscovered until this minute. The power of life and death over his fellowmen! Everyone had it, everyone strong enough to raise a violent arm, but they were afraid to use it. Well, he wasn't! And here he'd been going around for weeks living from hand to mouth, without any money, without enough food, when everything he wanted lay within his reach all the while! He had been green all right, and no mistake about it!
Death had become familiar. At seven it had been the most mysterious thing in the world to him, by midnight it was already an old story. ("Dusk To Dawn") — Cornell Woolrich

It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came. And, like one of those ghosts who are said to linger around depots late at night, asking passersby for the timetable of the Midnight Express that derailed twenty years before, I wandered from light to light until that dreaded hour when all the doors closed and, stepping from the world of warmth and people and conversation overhead, I felt the old familiar cold twist through my bones again and then it was all forgotten, the warmth, the lights; I had never been warm in the life, ever. — Donna Tartt

They also bring to mind what sometimes seems to be a rapt predilection of small but influential cults of intellectuals or esthetes for what is generally regarded as perverse dispirited or distastefully unintelligible. The award of a Nobel Prize in literature to Andre Gide who in his work fervently and openly insists that pederasty is the superior and preferable way of life for adolescent boys furnishes a memorable example of such judgments. Renowned critics and some professors in our best universities reverently acclaim as the superlative expression of genius James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake a 628page collection of erudite gibberish indistinguishable to most people from the familiar word salad produced by hebephrenic patients on the back wards of any state hospital. — Hervey M. Cleckley

Mom says,'What are you going to do when it's time to go to college?' I choose not to think about that yet. That is years away. For now, I just watn things all safe and familiar. My life may not be perfect, but it is what I have known.
~pg 16; Hattie on change — Ann M. Martin

I had the elated, otherworldly feeling I sometimes get entering the sphere of another's life, when for a moment changing my banal habits and living like that seems entirely possible, a feeling that always dissolves by the next morning, when I wake up to the familiar, unmovable shapes of my own life. — Nicole Krauss

My work involves the physical manifestation of emotional reality. Thus, the invisible becomes visible; the normal, abnormal; and the familiar, unfamiliar. Ordinary life is an endless source of fascination to me in its ritualistic objects and behavior. — Sandy Skoglund

At a certain age, death becomes familiar to you-or a loss becomes familiar-the tragedies that are more commonplace in life. — Jessica Lange

Home is less a location than a discipline. It is a way of being, a domestic, considered attention to familiar routines and the small, essential details of everyday life. From now on, I promised myself, home would be wherever I was, not the place that I one day hoped it to be. I would create it by being present. I would try to do better. — Katrina Kenison

Magic is a sudden opening of the mind to the wonder of existence. It is a sense that there is much more to life than we usually recognize; that we do not have to be confined by the limited views that our family, our society, or our own habitual thoughts impose on us; that life contains many dimensions, depths, textures, and meanings extending far beyond our familiar beliefs and concepts. — John Welwood

Just the minute another person is drawn into some one's life, there begin to arise undreamed-of complexities, and from such a simple beginning as sexual desire we find built up such alarming yet familiar phenomena as fetes, divertissements, telephone conversations, arrangements, plans, sacrifices, train arrivals, meetings, appointments, tardiness, delays, marriages, dinners, small pets and animals, calumny, children, music lessons, yellow shades for the windows, evasions, lethargy, cigarettes, candies, repetition of stories and anecdotes, infidelity, ineptitude, incompatibility, bronchial trouble, and many others, all of which are entirely foreign to the original urge and way off the subject. — E.B. White

In the apartment, the answering machine blinked fiercely, two gnats drag-raced around the apparently sweet, rotting hole of the kitchen drain, and life was difficult once again, and familiar, and a disappointment. — Meg Wolitzer

I think in my life I have so many things that changed so much with work and my career, and I don't really get to plan out a lot of my days. So when I have something that's familiar - just something that's there - I don't really like to switch it up. — Sevyn Streeter

I think the important thing about sisters is that they share the same minute, familiar life-style, the same little sets of rules. Therefore they can keep house with each other late in life, because they share the same bunch of housewifely prejudices. The important thing about women today is, as they get older, they still keep house. It's one reason they don't die, but men die when they retire. Women just polish the teacups. — Margaret Mead

She had just realized there were two things that prevent us from achieving our dreams: believing them to be impossible or seeing those dreams made possible by some sudden turn of the wheel of fortune, when you least expected it. For at that moment, all our fears suddenly surface: the fear of setting off along a road heading who knows where, the fear of a life full of new challenges, the fear of losing forever everything that is familiar. — Paulo Coelho

God desires all believers to be so familiar with His love that our approach toward Him is bold. — Andrew Wommack

Newt spun, making her robe unfurl. "He's my familiar, bought and paid for. I can claim anything of his. Even his life." Al cleared his throat nervously. "That's good to know," he said lightly. "Important safety tip. Rachel, write that down somewhere as lesson number one. — Kim Harrison

Having lived in Utah all of my life, I can tell that in many ways I know of no place more lonely, no place more unfamiliar. When I talk about how it is both a blessing and a burden to have those kinds of roots, it can be terribly isolating, because when you are so familiar, you know the shadow. — Terry Tempest Williams

The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our distinctiveness. — Gail Sheehy

I'm too old for change," she explained. "I'm too old to pursue good health and new relationships. The past breathes for me. It is my life. You are young, Dr. Scarpetta. Someday you will see what it is like to look back. You will find it inescapable. You will find your personal history drawing you back into familiar rooms where, ironically, events occurred that set into motion your eventual estrangement from life. You will find the hard furniture of heartbreak more comfortable and the people who failed you friendlier with time. You will find yourself running back into the arms of the pain you once ran away from. It is easier. That's all I can say. It is easier." "Do — Patricia Cornwell

Francis seems familiar because Catholics have already known him in the Vatican II priests who have been their pastors and sacramental ministers over the years since that council brought new life to an old church. Catholics have known him in the bishops and priests who brought the spirit of the council to their dioceses and parishes. — Eugene Kennedy

Don't hold together what must fall apart. The familiar life crumbles so the new life can begin. — Bryant H. McGill

Prayerless people cut themselves off from God's prevailing power, and the frequent result is the familiar feeling of being overwhelmed, overrun, beaten down, pushed around, defeated. Surprising numbers of people are willing to settle for lives like that. Don't be one of them. Nobody has to live like that. Prayer is the key to unlocking God's prevailing power in your life. — David Jeremiah

Layla had always just been there. In my life. I wasn't sure who said, 'hi,' first, or maybe who smiled at who first - all I really remembered was staring at her, and her staring back at me, neither of us looking away. Both of us standing frozen, and life falling into the background with a distant hum. As if the world had stopped spinning. Just for us.
I remembered not caring if it had. She'd seemed so familiar, and even as a little kid, I'd known she was special. Like something bigger than me, older than me, had taken over my emotions in a way I didn't understand. She just felt like ... home.
I could have gazed into her eyes forever. Happy to stand in that powerless state for the rest of my life — Laney McMann

In a way, the fearful fundamentalists are right: globalism does undermine systems of absolute value and belief. But in a way they are wrong: the systems of value and belief do not immediately disappear - people simply inhabit them in a different fashion, and sometimes the old ways turn out to have a surprising amount of life left in them. The human mind has a great repertoire of ways to accept and honor social constructions of reality without swallowing them whole. Globalizing processes require us to renegotiate our relationships with familiar cultural forms, and remind us that they are things made by people: human, fallible things, subject to revision. Globalism — Walter Truet Anderson

The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world. There must be a very different way in which t hings as they are make sense, and that includes the physical world, since the problem cannot be quarantined in the mind. — Thomas Nagel

How could she have gone from the most exhilarating thing that has ever happened in her life to a moment filled with pure humiliation? She tries to conjure up the light that skipped in her veins earlier when Charles held her. But it only fades in the familiar darkness. — Nicole Y. Dennis-Benn

Before you ever get the person you really want in your life, you will be tested with every person that was wrong for you. You will be tempted with what was easy, what was familiar, what was only physical, what was safe and what was simply a friend to pull you out of a difficult situation because you didn't want to be alone. When you finally meet the person you were meant to be with you won't have to guess, decide or choose. You will be drawn to them. They will seem to fit who you are, but at the same time have the missing pieces that makes you want to become a better person. There is no need to be guarded because this soul is like your own and talking to them about the deepest things in life are effortless. They won't be like any other you have met and you will find yourself looking for parts of them in everyone you meet. — Shannon L. Alder

Question 1: What is the chief end of man? This most basic question confronts each of us. Why am I here? What is the reason for my existence? What is the purpose of my life? The catechism on the basis of 1 Corinthians 10:31 and Psalm 73:25 provides the familiar answer. Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever. — Alistair Begg

In contrast to earlier textually-focused studies, recent scholarship on worship also highlights diversity and change. Projects to create new rituals and to redesign familiar ones, particularly in ways that make them more fluid and open-ended, have been a hallmark of much Western religious life since the 1960s.7 To take one example within Judaism, some couples now personalize or customize the traditional huppah or canopy beneath which they are married. In some instances, guests decorate a panel of cloth, and meet before the ceremony to offer the bride and groom their encouragement and advice, and join the pieces together. Vanessa Ochs characterizes this as part of a broader, explicit drive 'to personalize and to create community' within contemporary Judaism. — Melanie J. Wright

Ahead of me lies the familiar litany: weakening of the heart, hardening of the arteries, increasing brittleness of bones, decreases in kidney filtration rates, lower resistance of the immune system, and loss of memory. The list could be extended almost indefinitely. Evolution seems indeed to have arranged things so that all our systems deteriorate, and that we invest in repair only as much as we are worth. — Jared Diamond

At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life. — Milan Kundera

The rising in life of our familiar friends is, perhaps, the bitterest morsel of the bitter bread which we are called upon to eat in life. — Anthony Trollope

Right, wrong, good, bad, heaven, hell. I think that is the theme of my life. I think you have to know both in order to honestly choose one. So I'm familiar with both sides of the fence. — DMX

Her life was no more than a ghostly pageant of exhausted endurance, no more real than a television drama. Death, who now stood by her side, was as familiar to her as a family member, missing for a long time but now returned. — Han Kang

Or else she stayed in and nursed a mood with which she was becoming too familiar for her own comfort and peace of mind. It was not despair; but it seemed to her as if life were passing by, leaving its promise broken and unfulfilled. — Kate Chopin

The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality - the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings. It is part of the kaleidoscope of life that these feelings are not only happy, beautiful, or good but can reflect the entire range of human experience, including envy, jealousy, rage, disgust, greed, despair, and grief. But this freedom cannot be achieved if its childhood roots are cut off. Our access to the true self is possible only when we no longer have to be afraid of the intense emotional world of early childhood. Once we have experienced and become familiar with this world, it is no longer strange and threatening. — Alice Miller

Although it pains me to admit it, I am quite familiar with the holes in life. And this familiarity is due to the fact that I spend far more time in these holes than I spend on the paths that brought me to them. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Long before we've had a chance to become truly familiar with our loved one, we may be filled with the curious sense that we know them already. It can seem as though we've met them somewhere before, in a previous life, perhaps, or in our dreams. — Alain De Botton

It seemed like most of the memories faded before they had time to form. And after a while, my life with my father seemed like a familiar story or a distant dream. — Kara Swisher

High Pasture
Come up
come up: in the dim vale below
The autumn mist muffles the fading trees,
But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breeze
Has stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow,
Night is not, autumn is not
but the flow
Of vast, ethereal and irradiate seas,
Poured from the far world's flaming boundaries
In waxing tides of unimagined glow.
And to that height illumined of the mind
he calls us still by the familiar way,
Leaving the sodden tracks of life behind,
Befogged in failure, chilled with love's decay
Showing us, as the night-mists upward wind,
How on the heights is day and still more day. — Edith Wharton

In each experience of my life, I have had to step out of one little space of the known light, into a large area of darkness. I had to stand awhile in the darkness, and then gradually God has given me light. But not to linger in. For as soon as that light has felt familiar, then the call has always come to step out ahead again into new darkness. — Mary McLeod Bethune

From the perspective of the radicals, the habitus basis of human existence is, as a whole, no more than a spiritually worthless puppet theatre into which a free ego-soul must be implanted after the fact, and through the greatest effort. If this fails, one experiences an effect in most people that is familiar from many athletes and models: they make a promising visual impression - but if one knocks, no one is at home. According to these doctrines, the adept can only rid themselves of their baggage by subjecting their life to a rigorous practice regime by which they can de-automize their behaviour in all important dimensions. At the same time, they must re-automatize their newly acquired behaviour so that what they want to be or represent becomes second nature. — Peter Sloterdijk

Then there is Annileen. I was tempted to call her 'the Intrepid Annileen' just now - because she seems to be able to deal with whatever horror this planet can imagine. That's what I need to become: absolutely familiar with all the dangers here. She takes them in stride. Not because she's fearless, but because she knows she has to go on, to take care of all the people in her life. — John Jackson Miller

My new 9mm didn't fit my hand as well as my old one, but it was rapidly becoming a familiar weight. At first I'd decided it was okay to wear as long as I shot only at supernatural bad guys who were already shooting at me. Lately, I'd had to broaden that definition to anytime my life was in danger. I was currently leaning toward a slightly more comprehensive rule somewhere between proactive self-defense and the-bastards-had-it-coming, which, if I survived long enough, I intended to blame on my deranged partner rubbing off on me. — Karen Chance

Life itself today has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to an amalgam of reality and fantasy. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

And that was is. Life sometimes flips on you like that. One minute you're looking at your reflection in the water, not entirely sure you like what you see, and the next minute you are upside down, submerged in a world where even familiar things look new. — Vicki Pettersson

The first thing I did when I got inside was turn on the kitchen light. Then I moved to the table, putting my dad's iPod on the speaker dock, and a Bob Dylan song came on, the notes familiar. I went into the living room, hitting the switch there, then down the hallway to my room, where I did the same. It was amazing what a little noise and brightness could do to a house and a life, how much the smallest bit of each could change everything. After all these years of just passing through, I was beginning to finally feel at home. — Sarah Dessen

There is a familiar play on the word "justification" that it means "just as if I'd never sinned." But there is another way of saying this that is even better
justification means "just as if I'd always obeyed." That's the way we stand before God: clothed in the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ. And that's the way we can live with the discomfort of the justified life. — Jerry Bridges

Family life, even with just one little boy, had its own familiar rhythms, and it was perfectly possible to keep right on dancing like you always have, even when your mind is somewhere else. — Liane Moriarty

How Not to Spend Your Senior Year,
Rule #3:
No matter how dire things get,
do not panic.

It will only make a bad situation even worse. Besides, by the time you've reached the hit-the-panic-button stage, it's way too late. Nothing you do will make a difference anyhow.
This is a phenomenon known to the ancients as irony. You may be more familiar with the contemporary expression of this concept: Life sucks.
Particularly weekends. — Cameron Dokey

The problem may be a literary one: we are given a single story line about what makes a good life, even though not a few who follow that story line have bad lives. We speak as though there is one good plot with one happy outcome, while the myriad forms a life can take flower - and wither - all around us.
Even those who live out the best version of the familiar story line might not find happiness as their reward. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I know a woman who was lovingly married for seventy years. She has had a long, meaningful life that she has lived according to her principles. But I wouldn't call her happy; her compassion for the vulnerable and concern for the future have given her a despondent worldview. What she has had instead of happiness requires better language to describe. There are entirely different criteria for a good life that might matter more to a person - honor, meaning, depth, engagement, hope. — Rebecca Solnit

It's tempting to tether ourselves to the familiar comfort of the way things are, but fulfillment is often discovered in the unpredictable and unknown. We can serve ourselves and our universe, best, when we can take the journey that takes us from the limited desire of our ego, to the ever-expanding love and wisdom, of our divine nature. — Jaeda DeWalt

Paracelsus At times I almost dream I too have spent a life the sages' way, And tread once more familiar paths. Perchance I perished in an arrogant self-reliance Ages ago; and in that act a prayer For one more chance went up so earnest, so Instinct with better light let in by death, That life was blotted out - not so completely But scattered wrecks enough of it remain, Dim memories, as now, when once more seems The goal in sight again. — Robert Browning