Figurative Life Quotes & Sayings

One day, you will stand at the summit of a figurative mountain and look back on your life's journey. And, to your utter amazement, you will see how your experiences with depression, dark and painful as they were, only added to the overall beauty of your life. — Seth Adam Smith

I am an abstract artist in the sense that I abstract. I cannot be called non-figurative while I am still interested in the modern magic of space, primitive sex forms, the sensual and erotic, disconcerting contours, the things of life. — Sean William Scott

It is in that inner peace and stillness that things begin to happen, and it was in that peace and stillness that I began to hear God's voice. — Eileen Caddy

[Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose] as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life ... I wonder if you ever reached it. — Wallace Stegner

The poet gives his whole life such a voluntarily steep incline that it is impossible for it to exist in the vertical line of biography where we expect to meet it. It is not to be found under his own name and must be sought under those of others, in the biographical columns of his followers. The more self-contained the individuality from which the life derives, the more collective, without any figurative speaking, is its story. — Boris Pasternak

It seemed intended by the blessed providence of God that I should be blind all my life, and I thank him for the dispensation. If perfect earthly sight were offered me tomorrow I would not accept it. I might not have sung hymns to the praise of God if I had been distracted by the beautiful and interesting things about me. — Fanny Crosby

Many Buddhists understand the Round of birth-and-death quite literally as a process of reincarnation, wherein the karma which shapes the individual does so again and again in life after life until, through insight and awakening, it is laid to rest. But in Zen, and in other schools of the Mahayana, it is often taken in a more figurative way, as that the process of rebirth is from moment to moment, so that one is being reborn so long as one identifies himself with a continuing ego which reincarnates itself afresh at each moment of time. Thus the validity and interest of the doctrine does not require acceptance of a special theory of survival. — Alan W. Watts

People can lie in letters, but they tend not to. They certainly lie in memoirs. — Lois Lowry

Love was its own transparent bubble-dome: you could see the two inside it, but you couldn't get in there yourself. That — Margaret Atwood

A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory, and very few eyes can see the mystery of his life, a life like the scriptures, figurative. — John Keats

There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love ... In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of a frightened and hopeful humanity. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

Best friends are literal and figurative life savers that we should thank as often as possible for rescuing us from ourselves. — Joshunda Sanders

We must endure, Alyosha. That was the only thing she could say in response to my accounts of the ugliness and dreariness of life, of the suffering of the people - of everything against which I protested so vehemently. I was not made for endurance, and if occasionally I exhibited this virtue of cattle, wood, and stone, I did so only to test myself, to try my strength and my stability. Sometimes young people, in the foolishness of immaturity, or in envy of the strength of their elders, strive, even successfully, to lift weights that overtax their bones and muscles; in their vanity they attempt to cross themselves with two-pood weights, like mature athletes. I too did this, in the literal and figurative sense, physically and spiritually, and only good fortune kept me from injuring myself fatally or crippling myself for life.
For nothing cripples a person so dreadfully as endurance, as a humble submission to the forces of circumstance. — Maxim Gorky

Forget about teaching the children about numbers and colors and the like, and just play with them. — Brian Sutton-Smith

What seems interesting to me is to reproduce in the figurative representation of an object the whole complex system of impressions we receive in the normal course of everyday life, the way this affects our feelings and the shape it takes in our memory; and it is to this that I have always applied myself. — Jean Dubuffet

You take what you can get and hold on tight to it- by any means necessary. After all you only live once. — Oliver Bowden

Ages ago, my girlfriend had this little park near her house, with a bridge running over a stream ... and I set up all these candles on the bridge. But when I called her and told her she said it was too dark and she wasn't coming out. — Harry Styles

My death has not yet quite arrived, but it is near and inevitable as night follows day. — George Washington

I admire someone who in the literal sense can say, 'If it is broken, I can fix it. If it's lost I can find it. IF you fall, I can catch you.' because if you can say it in the literal sense, you can mean it in the figurative sense. The littlest things can change the world. A smile can save someone's life, and a hand freely given when you have nothing to give other than yourself, can mean the world to someone else — Jennifer Megan Varnadore

He drank, as a man is wont to do when confronted with his innermost emotions, particularly ones pertaining to the heart. — Maya Rodale

I have always directed my attempts at the figurative representation of objects by way of summary and not very descriptive brushstrokes, diverging greatly from the real objective measurements of things, and this has led many people to talk about childish drawing ... this position of seeing them (the objects, fh) without looking at them too much, without focussing more attention on them than any ordinary man would in normal everyday life.. — Jean Dubuffet

What a funny thing painting is. The abstract painters always insist on their connection with the visible reality, while the so called figurative artists insist that what they really care about, is the abstract qualities of life. — Marlene Dumas