Quotes & Sayings About Great Moments In Life

I've always felt that my life's been at the right place at the right time; I feel like there's been some really dull moments, really high moments, really low moments, but it's always felt like everything's moved in the right direction; it always feels great, and everything feels right. — Olly Murs

When I was twenty-three I began seeing a psychotherapist because I couldn't bear the idea that, after the end of an affair, all our shared memories might be expunged from the mind of the other, that they might no longer exist outside my own belief they'd happened. I couldn't accept the possibility of being the only one who would remember everything about those moments as carefully as I tried to remember them. My life, which exists mostly in the memories of the people I've known, is deteriorating at the rate of physiological decay. A color, a sensation, the way someone said a single word - soon it will all be gone. In a hundred and fifty years no one alive will ever have known me. Being forgotten like that, entering that great and ongoing blank, seems more like death than death. — Sarah Manguso

I take the rawest, realest moments in anyone's life and I open them up and lay them bare. The innocence of a five year old child, the awkwardness of a teenager's first sexual encounter, the heartbreak of longing for a relationship you can't have, confronting the possibility of the death of your newborn child, whatever it is, you open your soul and put it out there and dare the world to read it, ready to have them stomp on you and laugh, but ready to do it again the next day. You have to put yourself out there as a writer, you can't play it safe. Great writing isn't safe. — Dan Alatorre

This obsession is a curious thing. Sometimes wonder about the merits of devoting so much of myself to a singular climbing objective. Much of the time it beats me down, leaves me hanging my head in despair. But then there are the moments that bring me to life. When excitement wells up inside my chest in a way that doesn't happen in every day life. Today my fingertips were cracked and bleeding. I made no progress despite great conditions. Now I am on the ground and can hardly contain my excitement to get back on the wall. It's a crazy rollercoaster and I owe my family and partners a great deal for encouraging me through it all. — Tommy Caldwell

One great concern that plagues very ambitious people is this: in the end, they'll get all the precious things they ever dreamed of and every precious accomplishment most expected and conceived they'd achieve . . . but on that path of ambition, they'd lose precious moments with the most precious people they've come across. However, they forge ahead on that path hoping, somehow, they might make up for it, sometime, in future. — Ufuoma Apoki

This moment is precious and full of great potential: all we have to do is figure out the little changes that will make a huge impact on how wonderful life can be in this moment. — Daphne Oz

A sweeping vista of Northern sky opens up between the warehouses and hangs motionless above the cobbled streets. It's a world of unrequited love beneath the smoke stacks and awkward moments in the underpass. A great crashing wave of romantic despair that washes over my dramatic heart, dousing it with a thin grey rinse. I'm James Dean, I'm Albert Camus, I posture in doorways with a lit cigarette dangling from the corner of my mouth. My great iron bedstead, my kitchen sink drama, the grainy black and white days of this life... — Neil Schiller

While many of us admire nice things, materialism and suffering may share a connection. When we place a great deal of our happiness in material things, we run the great risk of losing our happiness when our material things become lost, old, or damaged. Toys break. Cars get dents. Clothes get ripped. Jewels get lost or stolen. Riches come and go.
If we collect moments rather than things, these are ours to keep. If we redefine wealth by the amount of love and kindness we afford ourselves to give to others, we can transform our lives. — Ann Brasco

If you think back to the moments when you've gone through the most pain in your life, or the most severe anxiety, your body is very much involved in that. Your body is expressing those emotions. So, when we, as actors, try to access those feelings, the body is a great tool to use. — Joel Kinnaman

My relationship with my body is like that of an egomaniac with a self-esteem problem. mostly i think about myself and how much i suck. but there are rare moments when i walk around for hours and think i look amazing. either i feel great about myself or i've decided some guy is checking me out. then i catch a side view of myself in a store window or a department store mirror and i'm plunged into despair. if i could always life in a place with no mirrors or disapproving glances, i would think i was the prettiest girl around. — Liza Palmer

I think my life in general, like that of any human being, has highs and lows, has moments of great light and moments of great darkness. — Thalia

To fail to experience gratitude when walking through the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum, when listening to the music of Bach or Beethoven, when exercising our freedom to speak, or ... to give, or withhold, our assent, is to fail to recognize how much we have received from the great wellsprings of human talent and concern that gave us Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, our parents, our friends. We need a rebirth of gratitude for those who have cared for us, living and, mostly, dead. The high moments of our way of life are their gifts to us. We must remember them in our thoughts and in our prayers; and in our deeds. — William F. Buckley Jr.

It is only in exceptional moods that we realize how wonderful are the commonest experiences of life. It seems to me sometimes that these experiences have an "inner" side, as well as the outer side we normally perceive. At such moments one suddenly sees everything with new eyes; one feels on the brink of some great revelation. It is as if we caught a glimpse of some incredibly beautiful world that lies silently about us all the time. — J. W. N. Sullivan

Writers and filmakers, that is, people who describe the world, suffer from an occupational disease. They never experience moments in life quite spontaneously. You always look at yourself from the outside. Even as a child I always observed myself and the world. I believe that everyone who chooses this path in any way, who chooses to be a describer of life, suffers from this condition. It's like a mental obsession. It can be a great pity too. It robs you of a certain joy in spontaneity. — Michael Haneke

We must have one love, one great love in our life, since it gives us an alibi for all the moments when we are filled with despair. — Albert Camus

The great moments of life are but moments like the others. Your doom is spoken in a word or two. A single look from the eyes; a mere pressure of the hand, may decide it; or of the lip,s though they cannot speak. — William Makepeace Thackeray

Looked into remote space, where petty worldliness hiding itself in misty distance had seemed to him great and infinite merely because it was not clearly seen. And such had European life, politics, Freemasonry, philosophy, and philanthropy seemed to him. But even then, at moments of weakness as he had accounted them, his mind had penetrated to those distances and he had there seen the same pettiness, worldliness, and senselessness. Now, however, he had learned to see the great, eternal, and infinite in everything, and therefore - to see it and enjoy its contemplation - he naturally threw away the telescope through which he had till now gazed over men's heads, and gladly regarded the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him. And the closer he looked the more tranquil — Leo Tolstoy

In this noisy, restless, bewildering age, there is a great need for quietness of spirit. Even in our communion with God we are so busy presenting our problems, asking for help, seeking relief that we leave no moments of silence to listen for God's answers. By practice we can learn to submerge our spirits beneath the turbulent surface waves of life and reach that depth of our being where all is still, where no storms can reach us. Here only can we forget the material world and its demands on us. — Alice Hegan Rice

In spite of her desire for a contained universe, her life felt scattered, full of many small moments, without great purpose. That is what she thought, though what is most untrustworthy about our natures and self-worth is how we differe in our own realities from the way we are seen by others. — Michael Ondaatje

He was not sure that there were any great moments. Things were not the same and now life only came in flashes. He had flashes of the old greatness with his bulls, but they were not of value because he had discounted them in advance when he had picked the bulls out for their safety, getting out of a motor and leaning on a fence, looking over at the herd on the ranch of his friend the bull-breeder. So he had two small, manageable bulls without much horns, and when he felt the greatness again coming, just a little of it through the pain that was always with him, it had been discounted and sold in advance, and it did not give him a good feeling. It was the greatness, but it did not make bull-fighting wonderful to him any more. — Ernest Hemingway,

I sometimes wonder whether the act of surrender is not one of the greatest of all - the highest. It is one of the [most] difficult of all ... You see it's so immensely complicated. It needs real humility and at the same time, an absolute belief in one's own essential freedom. It is an act of faith. At the last moments, like all great acts, it is pure risk. This is true for me as a human being and as a writer. Dear Heaven, how hard it is to let go - to step into the blue. And yet one's creative life depends on it and one desires to do nothing else. — Katherine Mansfield

When we are children, we believe that our elders know all and that even when we cannot understand the world, they can make sense of it. Even after we are grown, in moments of fear or sorrow, we still turn instinctively to the older generation, hoping to finally learn some great hidden lesson about death and pain. Only to learn instead that the only lesson is that life goes on. — Robin Hobb

I have to tell you, I'm proudest of my life off the court. There will always be great basketball players who bounce that little round ball, but my proudest moments are affecting people's lives, effecting change, being a role model in the community. — Magic Johnson

Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these. — Susan B. Anthony

If you believe the world will be a better place because you have both the desire and the means to take charge, that's the time for you to jump in. It doesn't matter if you rise up to take the lead only once or twice in your entire working life or if you do it daily. There are so many moments when you can make a difference--by enriching an outcome, saving a great idea, defending the beleaguered or downtrodden, and not least, expressing your own gifts and wisdom. — Charlotte Beers

do not only describe your situation, that event, that person, place or that thing. By describing, we limit our thoughts in pondering. We ought to prescribe. The sick describes his illness to the doctor and the doctor prescribes an antidote. We all do have stories to tell in life, we all do face challenges each day, and likewise we experience joyous moments; that is life. To espouse an unpopular cause, prescribe a great antidotes to every life occurrence from daybreak to sunset. Remember prefer prescribe to describe! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated "dose" of life. I said, almost indignantly, "That's the danger of it, it prepares you to live, but at the same time, it exposes you to disappointments because it gives a heightened concept of living, it leaves out the dull or stagnant moments. You, in your books, also have a heightened rhythm, and a sequence of events so packed with excitement that I expected all your life to be delirious, intoxicated."
Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm. Trying to live up to Dostoevskian scenes every day. And between writers there is a straining after extravagance. We incite each other to jazz-up our rhythm. — Anais Nin

In too many households prayer is neglected. Parents feel that they have no time for morning and evening worship. They cannot spare a few moments to be spent in thanksgiving to God for his abundant mercies - for the blessed sunshine and the showers of rain, which cause vegetation to flourish, and for the guardianship of holy angels. They have no time to offer prayer for divine help and guidance and for the abiding presence of Jesus in the household. They go forth to labor as the ox or the horse goes, without one thought of God or heaven. They have souls so precious that rather than permit them to be hopelessly lost, the Son of God gave his life to ransom them; but they have little more [144] appreciation of his great goodness than have the beasts that perish. — Ellen G. White

In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal. — Douglas Adams

Legacies are not just for legends. Whether a million people know your name, or only one person does, you still have the right to leave your mark on the world, even if it's only in your tiny corner of it, in the tiniest of ways.

Not all of us will achieve great heights and feats. Most of us will never leave our hometown or country, let alone conquer Everest. And you know what? That's okay.

Because real life is what happens in between moments of greatness. It's the little things that at the end of it all, you realize were greater than the sum of their parts. It's the amount of times you laughed, or cried, danced, sang, created, inspired, and made someone smile.

The best kind of legacies are the ones that are unseen. You'll never fully be able to measure the effect of a smile or a kind word, but I promise you, the most whispered phrase can send a shockwave around the world that lasts for centuries, or even an eternity. — A.J. Compton

Oh, glorious Art!" thus mused the enthusiastic painter, as he trod the street. "Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable forms that wander in nothingness start into being at thy beck. The dead live again. Thou recallest them to their old scenes, and givest their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeing moments of History. With thee, there is no Past; for at thy touch, all that is great becomes forever present; and illustrious men live through long ages in the visible performance of the very deeds which made them what they are. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

I just read this great quote by Junot Diaz, he was talking about true intimacy, and he was saying that it was the willingness to be vulnerable and to be found out. That's what I felt that YA did. It wasn't pretentious, and it wasn't hiding its heart. It wanted to be found out ...
It felt like those moments when you go to a party and you're standing around for a long time, going, I don't fit in here, what am I going to talk to these people about? And everybody's getting drunk, and then you find this one person, and you end up sitting in some corner talking about all these arcane things.
And then before you know it you're having a conversation about the meaning of life and it's four o'clock in the morning. That kind of feeling, that kind of intimacy - I felt like that's what I got from YA. — Libba Bray

The great gift of a spiritual path is coming to trust that you can find a way to true refuge. You realize that you can start right where you are, in the midst of your life, and find peace in any circumstance. Even at those moments when the ground shakes terribly beneath you - when there's a loss that will alter your life forever - you can still trust that you will find your way home. This is possible because you've touched the timeless love and awareness that are intrinsic to who you are. — Tara Brach

It is true that the Muslim world is not totally mistaken when it reproaches the West of Christian tradition of moral decadence and the manipulation of human life ... Islam has also had moments of great splendor and decadence in the course of its history. — Pope Benedict XVI

For the next two weeks, the world and all other issues would be omitted. We were two people alone in a hospital room. We allowed no visitors. We had two weeks of near-silence with each other and my increasing helplessness. I tended to tangle the IV and misplace the oxygen tube. As I started to say earlier, I could feel no sensible interest in the future. The moments became extraordinarily dimensionless - not without value but flat and a great deal emptier. When you learn you're fatally ill, time becomes very confusing, perhaps uninteresting, pedestrian. But my not caring if I lived or died hurt Ellen. And I was grateful that I could indulge my cowardice toward death in terms of living for her. — Harold Brodkey

We've had musical stuff in the show [ South Park] forever. That's mostly because Trey's a big musical fan, and he's a great songwriter. He's been writing songs his whole life. So since the beginning, we've always put a lot of musical moments. — Matt Stone

There are moments in one's life which are like frontier posts marking the completion of a period but at the same time clearly indicating a new direction. At such a moment of transition we feel compelled to view the past and the present with the eagle eye of thought in order to become conscious of our real position. [ ... ] At such moments, however, a person becomes lyrical, for every metamorphosis is partly a swan song, partly the overture to a great new poem, which endeavors to achieve a stable form in brilliant colors that still merge into one another. Nevertheless, we should like to erect a memorial to what we have once lived through in order that this experience may regain in our emotions the place it has lost in our actions. — Karl Marx

That's what scares me the most, Paul. That I'll just pass through life and all the people I know will just disappear, without a trace, without me ever telling them how much they mean to me, no matter how small the time spent was or how great the friendship was. That they'll be gone and they'll forget me and I'll end up with nothing."
I saw in my head Charley laughing, Charley sticking his head out the window and screaming, Charley playing a video game so intensely he was a foot from the screen. Moments flashed before my eyes in a quick, unrelenting sequence.
I shook my head. "I know. Believe me, I know. — J.C. Joranco

Vergil waited no longer. He took Boris's sword and plunged it into his chest. Boris went limp gently, as if he were drifting into a nap. Vergil held on to the sword for a second, and then pulled it out of the fallen angel, clutching it with fervor. Sadly, I realized that this wouldn't be the last time great force would have to be used against my fellow angels. I had no words for the rest of them in the Fellowship Hall. My optimism was very low and I saw no sign of the situation getting better. God's angelic host was divided. My friends, scattered. Lucifer's army was intimidating and many of his soldiers were dispersed among us, ready to strike at our most vulnerable moments. I myself was unsure how we were going to succeed. But one thing I did know - we all needed to pray. Unlike Lucifer, I needed God in my life. — Julius St. Clair

It was, of course, a great failure in a woman's life - to never have achieved even a doomed and unsuccessful love. But she was not quite sure whether she had failed or not.
When she was young there had been moments, of course. But those moments had never amounted to much more than a little fever of admiration - a little flutter and agitation in a ballroom - so slight a feeling that the cautious Dido had never considered it a secure foundation for a lifetime of living together. And then, sooner or later, she had always made and odd remark, or laughed at the wrong moment, and the young men became alarmed or angry - and the flutter and the agitation all turned to irritation.
Dido could laugh and gossip about love as well as any woman but, deep down, she suspected that she had not the knack of falling into it. — Anna Dean

The three great moments of my life had to be the concerts of Ellington in 1938, Dizzy in '48, and Ella in '52. — Boris Vian

Avoid trivial pursuits. You are a child of God, destined for glory, and called to do great things in His Name. Do not waste your life on hobbies, sports, and other recreational pursuits. Do not throw away the precious moments of your life on entertainment, movies, and video games. Though some of these things can properly have a 'small place' in the Christian's life, we must be careful not to give undue attention to temporal and fruitless activities. Do not waste your life. Employ the time of your youth in developing the character and skills necessary to be a useful servant of God. — Paul David Washer

Go forward in life with a smile on your face, a sparkle in your eyes, and with great and strong purpose in your heart. The best things in life are the people in your life, the moments we live, and memories we made along the way. — Gordon B. Hinckley

THERE ARE moments of great luxury in the life of a secret agent. There are assignments on which he is required to act the part of a very rich man; occasions when he takes refuge in good living to efface the memory of danger and the shadow of death; and times when, as was now the case, he is a guest in the territory of an allied Secret Service. — Ian Fleming

Thinking about such a situation, one becomes aware of the human lack of detachment; our inexperience and immaturity in the complex problems of the human condition. But it should not be so. We have the 'breathing spaces' when we can take a detached point of view. If it was of life-or-death importance that we learned by these moments of insight, men would quickly become something closer to being godlike. But most of us can drift through life without making any great moral decisions. And so the human race has shown no advance in wisdom in three thousand years. — Colin Wilson

We are plunged into the midst of a scene of things which obviously does not match our capacities. There is a great deal more in every man than can ever find a field of expression, of work, or of satisfaction in anything beneath the stars. And no man that understands, even superficially, his own character, his own requirements, can fail to feel in his sane and quiet moments, when the rush of temptation and the illusions of this fleeting life have lost their grip upon him: 'This is not the place that can bring out all that is in me, or that can yield me all that I desire. — Alexander MacLaren

I studied in Britain and spent great moments of my life there as a student living in Belsize Park. I admire the British trait of the stiff upper lip in the face of adversity. My wife studied in Britain, too, and both of us have many friends there. — Asif Ali Zardari

There is little we can point to in our lives as deserving anything but God's wrath. Our best moments have been mostly grotesque parodies. Our best loves have been almost always blurred wtih selfishness and deceit. But there is something to which we can point. Not anything that we ever did or were, but something that was done for us by another. Not our own lives, but the life of one who died in our behalf and yet is still alive. This is our only glory and our only hope. And the sound that it makes is the sound of excitement and gladness and laughter that floats through the night air from a great banquet. — Frederick Buechner

The night above. We two. Full moon.
I started to weep, you laughed.
Your scorn was a god, my laments
moments and doves in a chain.
The night below. We two. Crystal of pain.
You wept over great distances.
My ache was a clutch of agonies
over your sickly heart of sand.
Dawn married us on the bed,
our mouths to the frozen spout
of unstaunched blood.
The sun came through the shuttered balcony
and the coral of life opened its branches
over my shrouded heart.

- Night of Sleepless Love — Federico Garcia Lorca

I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.' — Robert Fisk

At times of great emotion, good or bad, I find I am gone, somewhere else, watching it happen to me, a different me. I miss a lot of my own life, my own moments, because I step outside myself. I feel it all more in retrospect than in actual time. — Rosie O'Donnell

The man who said 'I'd rather be lucky than good' saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net and for a split second it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck it goes forward and you win. Or maybe it doesn't and you lose. — Woody Allen

Poets and songwriters speak highly of spring as one of the great joys of life in the temperate zone, but in the real world most of spring is disappointing. We looked forward to it too long, and the spring we had in mind in February was warmer and dryer than the actual spring when it finally arrives. We'd expected it to be a whole season, like winter, instead of a handful of separate moments and single afternoons. — Barbara Holland

Historical context apart, Klemperer's journals can be read for their own sake as a gnawing meditation on the disappointments of life and the irrevocability of choices. He is intensely aware at all moments, perhaps because of his consciousness of being a "survivor," that death is only a breath away. He is one of the great kvetches of all time, endlessly recording aches and pains, bad dreams, shortages of food and medicine, snubs and humiliations. And, like everyone else, he wants everything both ways. In — Christopher Hitchens

I see the possibility of being 'made new' again and the gift of rebirth is all that lets anyone really live ... The great secret ... is never to get stuck, imprisoned in common social patterns. They always paralyse the real quality of life - the 'going onward' is all that matters, and the dead moments in one's life through trying to be a unit in any society or social concept are terrifying really. — Marsden Hartley

Sexual frenzy is our compensation for the tedious moments we must suffer in the passage of life. 'Nothing in excess,' professed the ancient Greeks. Why if I spend half the month in healthy scholarship and pleasant sleep, shouldn't I be allowed the other half to howl at the moon and pillage the groins of Europe's great beauties? — Roman Payne

She was in that highly-wrought state when the reasoning powers act with great rapidity: the state a man is in before a battle or a struggle, in danger, and at the decisive moments of life - those moments when a man shows once and for all what he is worth, that his past was not lived in vain but was a preparation for these moments. — Leo Tolstoy

What has mattered are the moments of exposure to every life, when habit is no longer enough, and choices have to be made. That's when everyone becomes a great man, for a moment; and the choices made in those moments, which come all too frequently, then combine to make history. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Meditation means cleansing the mirror, dropping thoughts, letting thoughts disappear, attaining to moments when thinking ceases. And those are the most blissful moments in life. Once you have tasted a single moment of no-thought, you have taken a great leap into truth; then things will become more and more easy every day. — Rajneesh

I never took the fame too seriously. It was a great period in my life, but it doesn't define me. When I think back on the time, I look at it with a wink. I focus on the good moments I had, not that I was on a lot of magazine covers. — Jonathan Taylor Thomas

I really do think inspiration comes from day-to-day life. I think there's things that pique our interest - not necessarily aha! moments - but things that just kinda make you raise your eyebrows. And those are often the moments that are the seeds of inspiration. Sometimes they're in a great conversation with friends, sometimes they're things you see live, something you read, a movie trailer you watch ... I think inspiration is kind of laid out there. One thing we have to practice is recognizing when it happens, and recording that moment so we can come back to it. — Phil Kay

Let me begin with a heartfelt confession.
I admit it. I am a biblioholic, one who loves books and whose life would seem incomplete without them. I am an addict, with a compulsive need to stop by nearly any bookstore I pass in order to get my fix. Books are an essential part of my life, the place where I have spent many unforgettable moments. For me, reading is one of the most enjoyable ways to pass a rainy afternoon or a leisurely summer day. I crave the knowledge and insights that truly great books bring into my life and can spend transported hours scouring used book stores for volumes which "I simply must have". I love the smell and feel of well-loved books and the look of a bookcase full of books waiting to be taken down and read. — Terry W. Glaspey

The measure of our success will not be determined by how we act during the great times in our life but rather by how we think and respond to the challenges of our most difficult moments. — Jon Gordon

Great events, but it all seemed of small importance compared to what happened now, in this room. Who knew? The course of his life might turn on the next few moments if he could find the right words, and make himself say them. — Joe Abercrombie

It's about moments in life that are great but don't last. They don't go on, but you always have the memory and they have an effect on you. That's what I was thinking about. — Sofia Coppola

It is a great moment in every freak's life when he or she finds out that at least they are not the only one. — Mat Johnson

I have thought I am creature of a day, passing through life as an arrow through the air. I am a spirit come from God and returning to God; just hovering over the great gulf, till a few moments hence I am no more seen. I drop into an unchangeable eternity! I want to know one thing, the way to heaven
how to land safe on that happy shore. God himself has condescended to teach the way: for this very end he came from heaven. He hath written it down in a book. O give me that book! At any price give me the Book of God! I have it. Here is knowledge enough for me. Let me be homo unius libri [a man of one book]. — John Wesley

Told him to keep the change. The barman looked at it and then looked at Ford. He suddenly shivered: he experienced a momentary sensation that he didn't understand because no one on Earth had ever experienced it before. In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal. This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth. — Douglas Adams

Good habits are developed in the workshops of our daily lives. It is not in the great moments of test and trial that character is built. That is only when it is displayed. The habits that direct our lives and form our character are fashioned in the often uneventful, commonplace routine of life. — Delbert L. Stapley

The present is a great treasure, live in the present. — Lailah Gifty Akita

There have been so many moments in our young life and our young career, but looking back it would have been great to share some of those with my family members, or have not worked so hard, I would always just be working during some of the fun times. — Sean Mackin

Before they had kids, if asked to conjure images of parenthood they would have said things like "Reading in bed," and "Giving a bath," and "Running while holding the seat of a bicycle." Parenthood contains such moments of warmth and intimacy, but isn't them. It's cleaning up. The great bulk of family life involves no exchange of love, and no meaning, only fulfillment. Not the fulfillment of feeling fulfilled, but of fulfilling that which now falls to you. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Night of Sleepless Love The night above. We two. Full moon. I started to weep, you laughed. Your scorn was a god, my laments moments and doves in a chain. The night below. We two. Crystal of pain. You wept over great distances. My ache was a clutch of agonies over your sickly heart of sand. Dawn married us on the bed, our mouths to the frozen spout of unstaunched blood. The sun came through the shuttered balcony and the coral of life opened its branches over my shrouded heart. — Federico Garcia Lorca

We call them survivors, but once the vampires get you, the person you were dies, like any traumatized part of you never leaves that room, that car, that moment, and you walk forward a ghost of your former self. You rebuild yourself over the years, but the person you were isn't the person you become. The great bad thing happens, and you become a ghost in your own life, and then you become flesh and blood and remake your life, but the ghosts of what happened don't go away completely. They wait for you in low moments, and then they wail at you, shaking their chains in your face and trying to strangle you with them. — Laurell K. Hamilton

In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments - which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. — Atul Gawande

My foot slips on a narrow ledge; in that split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice, sun, fear, and self are one. What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness into ordinary moments, in the moment-by-moment experiencing of the lammergeier and the wolf, which, finding themselves at the center of things, have no need for any secret of true being. In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us ... the present moment. The purpose of mediation practice is not enlightenment' it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life. — Peter Matthiessen

Great joys,why do they bring us sadness? Because there remains from these excesses only a feeling of irrevocable loss and desertion which reaches a high degree of negative intensity. At such moments, instead of a gain, one keenly feels loss. sadness accompanies all those events in which life expends itself. its intensity is equal to its loss. Thus death causes the greatest sadness. — Emil Cioran

It is our daily duty to consider that in all circumstances of life, pleasurable, painful, or otherwise, the conduct of others, especially of those in the same house; and that, as life is made up, for the most part, not of great occasions, but of small everyday moments, it is the giving to those moments their greatest amount of peace, pleasantness, and security, that contributes most to the sum of human good. Be peaceable. Be cheerful. Be true. — Leigh Hunt

We eat pancakes to escape loneliness, yet within moments we want nothing more than our freedom from ever having so much as thought about pancakes. Nothing can prevent us, after eating pancakes, from feeling the most awful regret. After eating pancakes, our great mission in life becomes the repudiation of the pancakes and everything served along with them, the bacon and the syrup and the sausage and coffee and jellies and jams. But these things are beneath mention, compared with the pancakes themselves. It is the pancake
Pancakes! Pancakes!
that we never learn to respect. — Donald Antrim

Without the dark there isn't light. Without the pain there is no relief. And I remind myself that I'm lucky to be able to feel such great sorrow, and also such great happiness. I can grab on to each moment of joy and live in those moments because I have seen the bright contrast from dark to light and back again. I am privileged to be able to recognize that the sound of laughter is a blessing and a song, and to realize that the bright hours spent with my family and friends are extraordinary treasures to be saved, because those same moments are a medicine, a balm. Those moments are a promise that life is worth fighting for, and that promise is what pulls me through when depression distorts reality and tries to convince me otherwise. — Jenny Lawson

Thankfully, our disappointments matter to God, and He has a way of taking even some of the bitterest moments we go through and making them into something of great significance in our life. It's hard to understand it at the time. Not one of us wants that thread when it is being woven in. Not one of us says, 'I can hardly wait to see where this is going to fit.' We all say at that moment, 'This is not the pattern I want. — Ravi Zacharias

It takes the passage of time before an image of a commonplace subject can be assessed. The great difficulty of what I attempt is seeing beyond the moment; the everydayness of life gets in the way of the eternal. — George A Tice

There were moments, Hasan, when I like to think that the stars are bullet-holes. For every bullet shot by an oppressor there springs to life a star, with so great a radiance that it can never be put out, it can never be imprisoned. But if that really were true, the last three months in this city would have erased every trace of blackness from the sky. — Kamila Shamsie

He reaches over, takes my face in his hands and pulls me to him. In my idle moments, imagining such a scene, I have always assumed that it would be the other way round, that I would reach for him and he would pull away, denouncing me as a degenerate and a false friend. But now I am neither shocked nor surprised by his initiative, nor do I feel any of the great urgency that I thought I would, should this moment ever come to pass. Instead, it feels perfectly natural, everything he does to me, everything that he allows to happen between us. And for the first time since that dreadful afternoon when my father beat me to within an inch of my life, I feel that I have come home. — John Boyne

I wanted to say two further things to you today: irony: Do not let yourself be governed by it, especially not in unproductive moments. In productive ones try to make use of it as one more means of seizing life. Used purely, it is itself pure, and one need not be ashamed of it; and when you feel too familiar with it, when you fear the growing intimacy with it, then turn towards great and serious subjects, before which it becomes small and helpless. Seek for the depth of things: there irony never descends - and when you have thus brought it to the edge of greatness, test at the same time whether this mode of perception springs from a necessity of your being. — Rainer Maria Rilke

As I have encountered difficult moments in my own life, I have been privileged to learn from the great men I have come to know as a writer. — Candice Millard

A day after I got my eye cut out, Gus showed up at the hospital. I was blind and heart-broken and didn't want to do anything and Gus burst into my room and shouted, 'I have wonderful news!' and I was like, 'I don't really want to hear wonderful news right now,' and Gus said, 'This is wonderful news you want to hear,' and I asked him, 'Fine, what is it?' and he said, 'You are going to live a good long life filled with great and terrible moments you cannot even imagine yet! — John Green