Quotes & Sayings About How Life Shapes Us

When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exist. I can't suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy - or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn't shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet, if none are there at all. — Dorothea Lasky

It's not the events that shape my life that determine how I feel and act, but, rather, it's the way I interpret and evaluate my life experiences. — Tony Robbins

Life's impermanence, I realized, is what makes every single day so precious. It's what shapes our time here. It's what makes it so important that not a single moment be wasted. — Wes Moore

Everyone has the heartbreak that shapes them in a way that they could never go back to the innocence that they had before. — Zooey Deschanel

Over the years I have come to believe that life is full of unchosen circumstances, that being human has to do with the evolution of our individual consciousness and with it, responsibilities for choice. Pain and joy both come with life. I believe that how we respond to what happens to us and around us shapes who we become and has to do with the psyche or the soul's growth. — Jean Shinoda Bolen

I am nature. Nature is me. What I create is what I must create. That I create it is fundamental. I am both anonymous and very precious since I belong to all growth which is life. Therefore I must grow well. What I shape I must shape well. — Jack Shadbolt

There's always hope, Apostolos. Of all men, you know that. It's only when you stop trying to affect the outcome of your life that you're truly defeated. What will come will come. It's how we deal with the shit in between that shapes us. (Savitar) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

What I complain of is that life is not like a novel where there are hard-hearted fathers, and goblins and trolls to fight with, enchanted princesses to free. What are all such enemies taken together compared to the pallid, bloodless, glutinous nocturnal shapes with which I fight and to which I myself give life and being. — Soren Kierkegaard

I just want to make a point that it's not just great teachers that sometimes shape your life. Sometimes it's the absence of great teachers that shapes your life and being ignored can be just as good for a person as being lauded. — Julia Roberts

In Zen, there is an old saying: The obstacle is the path. Know that a whole and happy life is not free of obstacles. Quite the contrary, a whole and happy life is riddled with obstacles-they simply become the very stepping-stones that help lift us to a new perspective. It is not what happens to us in this life that shapes us, it is how we choose to respond to what happens to us. — Dennis Merritt Jones

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

There was no question in my mind. This state of complete and utter love is our collective birthright, the state we are born to inhabit, the way of being that is eagerly awaiting humanity at the end of a long, perilous journey. We either walk toward love as a way of being, or we walk away from it. There are only two directions. This decision shapes our life and our world. — Jeff Brown

I always work directly from life, partly because I really enjoy having an interaction with the person in front of me but also because I love having a direct response to shape and color. — Mary Beth McKenzie

A person who is severely impaired never knows his hidden sources of strength until he is treated like a normal human being and encouraged to shape his own life. — Helen Keller

A giant octopus living way down deep at the bottom of the ocean. It has this tremendously powerful life force, a bunch of long, undulating legs, and it's heading somewhere, moving through the darkness of the ocean ... It takes on all kinds of different shapes - sometimes it's 'the nation,' and sometimes it's 'the law,' and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that. You can try cutting off its legs, but they just keep growing back. Nobody can kill it. It's too strong, and it lives too far down in the ocean. Nobody knows where its heart is. What I felt then was a deep terror. And a kind of hopelessness, a feeling that I could never run away from this thing, no matter how far I went. And this creature, this thing doesn't give a damn that I'm me or you're you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and their faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers. — Haruki Murakami

He waved away the whiskeybottle with a smile. In this tall room, the cracked plaster sootstreaked with the shapes of laths beneath, this barrenness, this fellowship of the doomed. Where life pulsed obscenely fecund. In the drift of voices and the laughter and the reek of stale beer the Sunday loneliness seeped away.
Aint that right Suttree?
What's that?
About there bein caves all in under the city.
That's right.
What all's down there in em?
Blind slime. As above, so it is below. Suttree shrugged.
Nothing that I know of, he said. They're just some caves. — Cormac McCarthy

Union with Christ highlights God's character as it relates to all aspects of redemption and our inclusion in the gospel story. As Colijn remarks, "For Paul, 'being in Christ' is not a transaction but a real spiritual union between Christ and the believer that determines the believer's identity and shapes all of the believer's life. — Lynn H. Cohick

It's an honor and privilege to be next to the great mysteries, and that's what I get to do every day. Why are we here? How beautiful the Earth is. Whatever it is, large and small. There's so much that's beautiful and moving and sad, to experience that and find shapes for it, to deeply enter that meditative space. There's nothing like it. Everything else seems so pale. — Carole Maso

Rage is really only for the good days. The truth is there's little of that left. the truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out. They no longer have any content. They are shapes only. A train, a wall, a world. Or a man. A thing dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void. No meaning to its life. Its words. Why would I seek the company of such a thing? Why? — Cormac McCarthy

You are responsible for how your life turns out, and your attitude shapes that life for better or worse. — Earl Nightingale

Each day I move toward that which I do not understand. The result is a continuous accidental learning which constantly shapes my life. — Yo-Yo Ma

How we prepare our food, how we consume our food really makes a difference in how our food satisfies us and shapes the role we give food in our lives. Is it something we stuff in to satisfy an urge or something we savor to feed us physically and sustain us spiritually? — Mary DeTurris Poust

Life is a puzzle. Every piece fits together to create who we are, what we do, how we feel. Every experience shapes us into who we will eventually become. — Kyle

It's only when you stop trying to affect the outcome of your life that you're truly defeated. What will come will come. It's how we deal with the shit in between that shapes us." Ash — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Life hands out challenges that we all unwillingly accept. We have no choice in the acceptance really because that is essentially what life is; a series of unavoidable challenges thrown our way, and how we assess them, deal with them, and progress through them, shapes our life to be what it will be.
Some of us assess challenges in different ways, either seeing them as a hurdle that one can easily jump over, or as a brick wall that seems impossible to climb. — K.M. Golland

As an introverted person, I struggle even writing about community because I know how difficult it often is for me to walk across the room to converse with people. People often drain the energy out of me, and too often I prefer to protect myself rather than engage in relationships with people. For some of us who are more extroverted, community is a way of life, yet I wonder how intentional even the most extroverted person is about making community a holiness-shaping thing. Community with God's people ultimately shapes us to reflect more of who God is. — Tyler Braun

Amphibians are dying out like crazy, and frogs and salamanders may be largely extinct by the end of the twenty-first century. Imagine an animal that begins its life in the water, but ends it on land - already, that's pretty weird. But, also, a lot of them are incredibly tiny and look wildly improbable. They have funny little toes, they stretch their throats into weird bubble shapes when they croak, and some of them are poisonous to the touch. I think kids from the twenty-second century might mythologize amphibians the way kids today mythologize dinosaurs. — Annalee Newitz

A bitter sweet tale of how life cannot be planned and love comes when we don't expect it in all shapes and forms. — Annette J. Dunlea

I was in the gym working on my triceps, and I was thinking, just as I did the 50-pound pulldown, I am going to be in better shape by the end of the year [2016] than I've ever been in my life. I really just smiled at the notion: Wow, what a thing. — Oprah Winfrey

The world of shapes, lines, curves, and solids is as varied as the world of numbers, and it is only our long-satisfied possession of Euclidean geometry that offers us the impression, or the illusion, that it has, that world, already been encompassed in a manageable intellectual structure. The lineaments of that structure are well known: as in the rest of life, something is given and something is gotten; but the logic behind those lineaments is apt to pass unnoticed, and it is the logic that controls the system. — David Berlinski

Never give up.
This applies to more than goals and dreams, it is a maxim for basic daily struggles. It shapes one's life, including the will to continue to live. It supports love and committed relationships; it bolsters hope, faith, and charity; it is power in every area of existence. Never give up on anything or anyone of any worth, especially yourself. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Stadiums fill up with people to see what's going to happen between the lines. But life isn't only about visible realities. There are invisible and unseen nuances ... things that shape us into who we are. — Orel Hershiser

I've kind of fashioned my life after a Slinky. Bend me in a million shapes, and eventually I'll spring back to what I originally was. — Sylvester Stallone

The truths that are found in the Bible are universal truths. And it shapes who you are and guides you throughout your life. — Ernie Hudson

We never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think think that we are invincible because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestation. — John Green

The content of a book holds the power of education and it is with this power that we can shape our future and change lives. — Malala Yousafzai

A lot of dudes can't function too long in mainstream life because they've been indoctrinated into that penal system where that shapes their life. — Sadat X

Any concept of biology is not only sterile and profitless, it is distorted and untrue, if it puts its primary focus on unnatural conditions rather than on those vast forces not of man's making that shape and channel the nature and direction of life. — Rachel Carson

A kaleidoscope consists of a tube (or container), mirrors, pieces of glass (or beads or precious stones), sunlight, and someone to turn it and observe and enjoy the forms. Metaphorically, perhaps the sun represents the divine light, or spark of life, within all of us. The mirrors represent our ability to serve as mirrors for one another and each other's alignment, reflecting sides of ourselves that we may not have been aware of. The tube (or container) is the practice of community yoga. We, as human beings, are the glass, the beads, the precious stones. The facilitator is the person turning the Kaleidoscope, initiating the changing patterns. And the resulting beauty of the shapes? Well, that's for everyone to enjoy... — Lo Nathamundi

The object of art is to give life shape. — Jean Anouilh

I have found that to tell the truth is the hardest thing on earth. Harder than fighting in a war, harder than taking part in a revolution.
"If you try it, you will find that at times sweat will break upon you. You will find that even if you succeed in discounting the attitudes of others to you and your life, you must wrestle with yourself most of all. Fight with yourself. Because there will surge up in you a strong desire to alter facts, to dress up your feelings.
"You'll find that there are many things you don't want to admit about yourself and others.
"As your record shapes itself, an awed wonder haunts you. And yet there is no more exciting an adventure than trying to be honest in this way. The clean, strong feeling that sweeps you when you've done it makes you know that. — Richard Wright

For life is but a dream whose shapes return, some frequently, some seldom, some by night and some by day. — James Thomson

Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out He's not sufficiently skilled to have done so. In point of fact, He unintentionally knocked over the first domino by creating a palette of atoms with different shapes. Electron clouds bonded, molecules bloomed, proteins embraced, and eventually cells formed and learned how to hang on to one another like lovebirds. He discovered that by simmering the Earth at the proper distance from the Sun, it instinctively sprouted with life. He's not so much a creator as a molecule tinkerer who enjoyed a stroke of luck: He simply set the ball rolling by creating a smorgasbord of matter, and creation ensued. — David Eagleman

Playing Super Mario Bros. 2 again, in the two-bedroom apartment I share with my wife, is to re-learn the productivity of cussing. Playing any game, for that matter, bends my larynx into the saltiest shapes imaginable. With time comes an understanding that the game on your screen is nothing compared to life's true challenges. Still, with each fall down a pit or graze of a fireball-spitting plant, my mild-mannered speech pattern gives way to filth. Super Mario Bros. 2 is not even known as a difficult game. But to a player of limited and rusty skills, i.e., your author, it pushes back. — Jon Irwin

No skill shapes a child's future success in school or in life more than the ability to read. — Bob Riley

We shape our life by deciding to pay attention to it. It is the direction of our attention and its intensity that will determines what we accomplish and how well. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi