Quotes & Sayings About Getting Life In Order

Be sure not to turn your life into a series of tasks which must always be performed... I know it can seem appealing to live in a state of accomplishing things, always succeeding, always getting things done. But consider this. A whole life lost. A sacrifice to your fragile sense of order. — Kevin Hooyman

A 'harmonized' life these days sounds like a tall order. Between housework, homework, workwork, and busywork, there are perpetually too many things to do, and not enough time to find that mythical balance. Nothing is more frustrating than feeling like you're doing doing doing but getting nothing truly done that you really want. — Jack Canfield

Rick told me, a little later, I should be living in community. He said I should have people around bugging me and getting under my skin because without people I could not grow
I could not grow in God, and I could not grow as a human. We are born into families, he said, and we are needy at first as children because God wants us together, living among one another, not hiding ourselves under logs like fungus. You are not a fungus, he told me, you are a human, and you need other people in your life in order to be healthy. — Donald Miller

Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain but when one has it there's no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it. Don't think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn't happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don't need company, whether you are not in the mood to go out. No, don't worry, they'll ring up the evening you are not alone, when life is beautiful. As for suicide, they would be more likely to push you to it, by virtue of what you owe to yourself, according to them. May heaven protect us, cher Monsieur, from being set upon a pedestal by our friends! — Albert Camus

There's a phenomenon I call the Helpless Traveler. If you're traveling with someone who's confident, organized, and decisive you become the Helpless Traveler: "Are we there yet?" "My bags are too heavy." "My feet are getting blisters." "This isn't what I ordered." We've all been that person. But if the person you're traveling with is helpless, then you become the one able to decipher train schedules, spend five hours walking on marble museum floors without complaint, order fearlessly from foreign menus, and haggle with crooked cabdrivers. Every person has it in him to be either the Competent Traveler or the Helpless Traveler. Because Joe is so clearheaded and sharp, I've been able to go through life as the Helpless Traveler. Which, now that I think about it, might not be such a good thing. It's a question for Joe. His — Maria Semple

And uh, forget the money. Because, if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life wasting your time. You will be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is, in order to do things you don't like doing, which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of things you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way. — Allan Watts

Now the work of art also represents a state of final equilibrium, of accomplished order and maximum relative entropy, and there are those who resent it. But art is not meant to stop the stream of life. Within a narrow span of duration and space the work of art concentrates a view of the human condition; and sometimes it marks the steps of progression, just as a man climbing the dark stairs of a medieval tower assures himself by the changing sights glimpsed through its narrow windows that he is getting somewhere after all. — Rudolf Arnheim

You are constantly looking for some solution, the thing you can do that will make you better and kinder and - and burn fifty pounds using this one weird trick. You're looking for the answer, like once you find it, getting your life in order will be easy. Stop looking for an answer and just do the things. Even when you don't know how. — Eve Tushnet

Our souls, that is our selves, are like a jumbled heap of pins: interests, thoughts, emotions, volitions, and feelings -- our life at work, our life of play, our domestic and social life, our life in the limelight, and our life alone -- all a heap of pins pointing in all directions and getting in one another's way. But the slow approach of a magnet sorts the jumble out in a remarkable way, confusion becomes a pattern, each pin points in the same direction, and all is achieved by the focus of magnetic power. It is superfluous to add that the only magnet which can sort out all the intricacies of the human soul is God. In short the state of perfect recollection is that most characteristic expression of the work of the Holy Ghost; the creation of order out of chaos. — Martin Thornton

Joey glanced at his alarm clock and saw it was just before midnight. His eyes drifted to his bookshelf. Lined up in a row, in the order of their publication, were all of the Spook Boys books, a series of kids' books about two adventurous brothers who were constantly getting into mischief as they explored haunted houses and spooky old castles, or tried to solve mysteries involving missing diamonds or stolen paintings. Joey envied the characters in those books - he wanted his own life to be made up of such exciting, implausible adventures. But maybe his imagination had gotten carried away. Maybe his mind, saturated with such fictional tales, was more than willing to play tricks on him when it came to houses like the one on Creep Street. — The Blood Brothers

I realize that in a happy life, making your bed should play a very small part, I don't know why this is so helpful to people getting started on a happiness project, but for some reason, making your bed - it's concrete, it's manageable. There's a big difference between having a bed that's unmade and a bed that's made. That little bit of outer order in people's lives seem to help them get started. So, that's a very small thing that you can do. — Gretchen Rubin

I'm not a freak. I'm not really crazy or anything. I don't think I'm really abnormal. It's just, like anybody else, I have interests I cultivate, and one of my interests is not getting too used to things. I've sacrificed a lot of things in my life in order to keep that sense of things being unfamiliar. — Jim Woodring

Cancer came back into my life twice in order for me to understand something, and I guess I still wasn't getting it. And my husband wasn't getting it, either. — Mariel Hemingway

FACULTY PSYCHOLOGY is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology I mean, roughly , the view that many fundamentally different kinds of psychological mechanisms must be postulated in order to explain the facts of mental life . Faculty psychology takes seriously the apparent heterogeneity of the mental and is impressed by such prima facie differences as between, say, sensation and perception, volition and cognition, learning and remembering, or language and thought. — Jerry Fodor

Revolution is not 'showing' life to people, but making them live. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its objective is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation. — Guy Debord

Getting your house in order and reducing the confusion gives you more control over your life. Personal organization some how releases or frees you to operate more effectively. — Larry King

There are also hunger strikes. Hunger strikes are noble and sometimes necessary. If you're a political prisoner in China or North Korea (where the entire country is on a hunger strike, not by choice), I get it. For you, it's life or death. But at Harvard, it's about a press clipping and maybe getting a better grade or a higher class of hand job. So when an undergrad adopts a hunger strike in order to get someone to divest from oil, I say, let the twerp starve. Most of them are overfed, pudgy masses of soft tissue - it wouldn't hurt if these sad sacks lost a few pounds. They might even understand the plight of the average Venezuelan, who operates under conditions American activists see as utopian, when they're really nightmarish. How about the next time one of our coeds feels a hunger strike coming on, we exchange her with someone who's genuinely starving? — Greg Gutfeld

I've been studying the Bible for a long time. I remember that after the first five years or so of diligently studying the Word, I didn't feel like I had made any progress. There were a lot of things in my life that were out of order, and I didn't feel like I was getting anywhere. — Joyce Meyer

Struggle is another place you might be getting your self-worth from. Struggle is often celebrated and worn like a badge of honor. The struggle to overcome something. The struggle that makes you fight and teaches you how tough you are. Those are struggles to be celebrated, but continuing to create struggle day in and day out, when you don't have to, in order to justify your existence is a waste of a life. — Cassie Parks

If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid. — Alan W. Watts

Getting ink felt right, like it would help her put her life in order, to move forwards. It was her body, despite the things that'd been done to it, and she wanted to claim it, to own it, to prove that to herself. She knew it wasn't magic, but the idea of writing her own identity felt like the closest she could get to reclaiming her life. Sometimes there's power in the act; sometimes there's strength in words. She wanted to find an image that represented those things she was feeling, to etch it on her skin as tangible proof of her decision to change. — Melissa Marr

[Myne] shouldn't be enjoying the feeling of closeness, of holding someone who didn't belong to him, but damn, this felt good. He didn't get to be with females often, not when his bite caused excruciating pain, and he definitely didn't get to save a life ... ever. Nicole was depending on him in order to survive, and he began to shake with the magnitude of it all. Rike, he whispered to himself. If you come back and don't mate this female before the next daybreak, I'll kill you myself. Of course, that was if Riker didn't kill him first for getting a raging erection for his female. — Larissa Ione

Actors sometimes immerse themselves into it so deeply that the line between who they are and their character can become blurred. For me, I think it's just about getting clearer on my whole life and who I am in order to make it possible for me to play whatever character is presented to me at a particular time. — Christian Slater

Maybe it's just getting older. You become so palpably aware this is not a dress rehearsal. There's a big sign in blazing neon that says You Haven't Got Long. But I think it takes a beat to learn that. Life has to knock you down in order for you to realise it, because when you're a kid you think you're immortal. — Tom Hiddleston

In fact, when we listen to the church today, at least in the West, we are often left with impression that Christianity actually has very little to do with truth. Christianity is only about feeling better about ourselves, about leaping over our difficulties, about being more satisfied, about have better relationships, about getting on with our mothers-in-law, about understanding teenage rebellion, about coping with our unreasonable bosses, about finding greater sexual satisfaction, about getting rich, about receiving our own private miracles, and much else besides. It is about everything except truth. And yet this truth, personally embodied in Christ, gives us a place to stand in order to deal with the complexities of life, such as broken relations, teenage rebellion, and job insecurities. — David F. Wells

I'd done all the things I thought a person had to do in order to be successful and fulfilled, like getting a great education and becoming a lawyer, and yet there was zero spark in my life. But there was no light-bulb moment. It was gradual. In the early 1990s, I decided to experiment and try some new ways of living. — Robin S. Sharma

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and sub-atomic, and galactic
structure of things today. And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature! And you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? — Paddy Chayefsky

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it. — Ellen Goodman