Labels In Life Quotes & Sayings

But failure and success are labels placed upon people's lives the way a child values winning a game whether or not they have to bend the rules in order to do it. But life is not a game and the rules cannot be bent without repercussions that prove damaging later on. We must play the game for all we are worth, and we must play it fairly. We play and lose and play again, over and over. We lose and we pick up and start again a little wiser. We learn the game a little better in the playing, learn lessons for the next game. And should we lose today it is only a step towards the winning of the larger game. We move our piece on the board one step at a time, but it is all part of some larger process. — James Rozoff

The greatest hunger in life is not for food, money, success, status, security, sex, or even love from the opposite sex. Time and again people have achieved all these things and wound up still feeling dissatisfied- indeed, often more dissatisfied than when they began. The deepest hunger in life is a secret that is revealed only when a person is willing to unlock a hidden part of the self. In the ancient traditions of wisdom, this quest has been likened to diving for the most precious pearl in existence, a poetic way of saying that you have to swim far out beyond shallow waters, plunge deep into yourself, and search patiently until the pearl beyond price is found. The pearl is also called essence, the breath of god, the water of life ... labels for what we, in our more prosaic scientific age, would simply call TRANSFORMATION. — Deepak Chopra

when people ask me what I believe now, I don't want to weigh them down with "I'm a Unitarian Universalist Neo-Pagan scientific pantheist humanist who practices Buddhist insight meditation (Vipassana)," even though that's the truth. Sometimes, however, I have the personal need to privately unpack these labels which usually blend seamlessly in my daily life in order to get a better sense of who I am and where I'm going on this spiritual journey. — John Halstead

Whatever happens, whatever you experience, feel, think, do - it's always now. It's all there is. And if you continuously miss the now - resist it, dislike it, try to get away from it, reduce it to a means to an end, then you miss the essence of your life, and you are stuck in a dream world of images, concepts, labels, interpretations, judgments - the conditioned content of your mind that you take to be yourself. — Eckhart Tolle

We give people political labels, sexual labels, and religious labels. But in the process, we strip them of their individuality and complexity. Prejudice is pre-judging. It's assuming that bad stories end badly, but Jesus is in the business of turning bad beginnings into happily ever afters.
...
God cannot give up on you. It's not in His nature. His goodness and mercy will follow you all the days of your life. All you have to do is turn around. All you have to do is crash the party! — Mark Batterson

People, shadows, good, bad, Heaven, Hell: all of these were names, labels, that was all. Humans had created these opposites: Nature recognised no opposites. Even life and death weren't opposites in Nature: one was merely an extension of the other. — John Marsden

Product Warning
If this book were a medication with a label, it would read something like this:
Side Effects Include but Are Not Limited to
renewed sense of self-esteem
increased motivation in all areas of life
You may also lose weight, fall in love, leave a bad marriage, create a better one, have closer relationships with your family, or find the job of your dreams.
Some Users Have experienced
a kick in their step
a swing in their hips
a twinkle in their eye
Hair-tossing (commercial-style) is common, but seek medical attention if you pinch a nerve or can't stop doing it. — Stacy London

Don't put people, or anything else, on pedestals, not even your children. Avoid global labels such as genius or weirdo. Realize those closest get the benefit of the doubt and so do the most beautiful and radiant among us. Know the halo effect causes you to see a nice person as temporarily angry and an angry person as temporarily nice. Know that one good quality, or a memory of several, can keep in your life people who may be doing you more harm than good. Pay attention to the fact that when someone seems nice and upbeat, the words coming out of his or her mouth will change in meaning, and if that same person were depressive, arrogant, or foul in some other way, your perceptions of those same exact words would change along with the person's other features. — David McRaney

People know me by the way I live my life, not by the labels I wear, and that means we can hold all sorts of conversations and learn from each other in a way that would not happen if there were the walls of ignorant prejudice between us.
Oisce — Arin Murphy-Hiscock

I am certainly a devoted homosexual. Nobody could doubt my credentials. But I think, politically, we allowed this word gay to...It buggers up a nice word. It doesn't cover what we are. A lot of us are not very joyous. We have a hard life to live, against the current. Gay doesn't cover that - and worst of all, it labels us. They can dismiss you and put you off in a corner: "Oh, he's gay," and that's it. That's the end. You can no longer be central to what's going on. That's tragic....The world loses central contact with some of the most beautiful, sentient, sensitive and agitated, creative and emotional people in our society. The result is that a lot of people who operate centrally in our society can't let on that they're gay. It's tragic. It's very dangerous. — Scott Symons

I want to
peel away all the labels
I had once given to others
and place them
upon the fabric
of my own identity.

They have reflected back to me,
everything that I refuse
to See in myself. — Meraaqi

Kate lost a mother," I said, "but I lost a nothing."
Kate doesn't feel that way," Jack assured me.
But what about everybody else besides Kate? How can I ever explain to anyone what she was when she and I had no name? People need names for everything. I wasn't a relative or a friend, I was just an object of her kindness."
He wiped my cheeks, saying Ssshh. I buried my face in his shoulder.
True kindness is stabilizing," I went on. "When you feel it and when you express it, it becomes the whole meaning of things. Like all there is to achieve. It's life, demystified. A place out of self, a network of simple pleasures, not a waltz, but like whirls within a waltz."
You're the one now," Jack said definitively. "That's why you met her. She had something she had to pass on." (p. 95) — Hilary Thayer Hamann

If you want to, you can let go of any feelings of resentment, of regret, of anger. You can accept that you are a fabulous human being because of all the bad things that have happened to you, not in spite of them. What is done is done, and you need to just get on with your life. Don't use the labels "good" and "bad." Yes, I know some of it is indeed bad, but it is how we let it affect us that is the real "bad." You could let all these things get you down, fizzle away internally like some emotional acid making you ill and resentful and stuck. But you will let them go, embrace them as character forming, and in general as positive rather then negative. — Richard Templar

A mother comforts, a mother cleans. A mother gives when any reasonable person would deny. Life might affix any number of labels to Vera- Russian, pensioner, widow, daughter- but when she looked to her washed-out reflection in the bathroom mirror, she saw only Lydia's mother. — Anthony Marra

I have a whole system down for returning online shopping: a tape gun, a printer for return labels. That has replaced traditional window shopping in my life, as I've gotten busier. — Mindy Kaling

But "the first act of the Christian life," says Schmemann, "is a renunciation, a challenge." In baptism, the Christian stands naked and unashamed before all these demons - all these impulses and temptations, sins and failures, empty sales pitches and screwy labels - and says, "I am a beloved child of God and I renounce anything or anyone who says otherwise."12 — Rachel Held Evans

No matter what our past is, or what labels have been placed on us, when we come to Him He erases all the labels, all the hurt and all the pain and He writes "I Love You" on our hearts. You are not who you have been told you are. In fact He says there is a stone with a name on it that only He knows. He doesn't even call you by your name. That is a name your parents gave you, but your Father in Heaven has named you too. What does He call you? What name does your Father speak over you? God has so much in store for your life, just receive His love today and know that He has a new name in store for you. — David M. Snyder

I liked labels; I liked putting people and things into categories. It helped me calibrate my expectations of people and relationships. If I didn't label my sisters as bad, I would be an enabler of their behavior, just like my father was. I didn't plan on spending my life as a doormat, or living in the waiting room of perpetual disappointment, hoping they would change. "So, — Penny Reid

We inhabit a world in which we tend to put labels on each other and expect that we will then march through life wearing them like permanent sandwich boards. — Nick Webb

Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture. To acquire happiness you don't have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired. Does anybody know why? Because we have it already. How can you acquire what you already have? Then why don't you experience it? Because you've got to drop something. You've got to drop illusions. You don't have to add anything in order to be happy; you've got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It's only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings. Do you know where these things come from? From having identified with all kinds of labels! — Anthony De Mello

He can be made to take a positive pleasure in the perception that the two sides of his life are inconsistent... by exploiting his vanity. He can... enjoy kneeling beside the grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he inhabited on Saturday evening; and contrariwise, to enjoy the bawdy and blasphemy over the coffee with these admirable friends all the more because he is aware of a "deeper," "spiritual" world within him which they can not understand. You see the idea - the worldly friends touch him on one side and the grocer on the other, and he is the complete, balanced, complex man who sees round them all. Thus, while being permanently treacherous to at least two sets of people, he will feel, instead of same, a continual under-current of self-satisfaction... and that to cease to do so would be "priggish," "intolerant," and... "Puritanical. — C.S. Lewis

Leaving the record companies tweaked something inside me and I realised I don't have to deal with labels to make something happen. If I want to meet someone, I don't have to go through the label - I'll just go to them. I took my life in my hands and social media has just helped me do that more. — Imogen Heap

In fact we put so many things in our mouths we constantly have to be reminded what not to eat. Look at that little package of silicon gel that's inside your sneakers. It says DO NOT EAT for a reason. Somewhere sometime some genius bought a pair of sneakers and said Ooooh look. They give you free mints with the shoes — Morgan Spurlock

Does that new man in your life call his ex "a slut", "a whore", "a bitch", "psycho" , "crazy", "a nutter" etc etc. Chances are, whatever he's calling his ex right now, he'll be calling you when things don't go his way. Be warned. — Miya Yamanouchi

A label is a mask life wears. We put labels on life all the time. "Right," "wrong," "success," "failure," "lucky," "unlucky," may be as limiting a way of seeing things as "diabetic," "epileptic," "manic-depressive," or even "invalid." Labeling sets up an expectation of life that is often so compelling we can no longer see things as they really are. This expectation often gives us a false sense of familiarity toward something that is really new and unprecedented. We are in relationship with our expectations and not with life itself. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Yet above all this, she insists on vigilance. Gluten is hiding everywhere in everything, and even the tiniest crumb - the tiniest crumb of a crumb - could get me sick. It's more important than the mere stomach issues; failure to follow a gluten-free diet grossly increases one's chances of developing thyroid cancer, diabetes, and other life-threatening diseases. These, she taught me, are the real reasons to check and double-check. The reasons she uses separate pasta strainers and knives. I learned to read labels for hidden ingredients, to call the company and ask the source of the caramel color and the modified food starch. To avoid foods fried in the same oil that had fried breaded meat. To speak with chefs at restaurants and ask to use a clean part of the grill, a clean salad bowl, a flourless dressing. We were careful. We were the best. And at home I never, ever got sick. — Marina Keegan

Demetrious was studying Law on the Open University and was, in all ways, a ray of sunshine into her life: warm and glorious, achingly temporary. He lived just off the high street with his boyfriend Rob, who worked in the City, doing something neither Demi nor Sukie pretended to understand.
"All the cute guys are gay," Sukie had laughed, that first day, holding her coffee mug high to her face to hide her genuine disappointment. Demi had just tilted his head and looked at her playfully, an expression she would get to know well.
"I'm not gay," he had clarified, matter-of-factly.
"Living with a boyfriend called Rob doesn't sound very straight!" Sukie had pointed out.
"Labels!" Demi had scorned, with one of his characteristic and very Greek hand gestures. "I fall in love with the person, not the gender. — Erin Lawless

Living your life through negative feelings and memories is doing yourself a dishonour.If you want to change you need to be willing to leave your past wounds behind you. -If you wish to remain stuck in your attachment to past pains then dare to ask yourself exactly why you feel the need to define yourself by your past traumas or tragedies. — Miya Yamanouchi

As the years go by those relationships are tested, and only then do you realize their true nature. Only after they've been tested through weddings, moves, funerals, divorces, births and other stages in life are you able to judge them. Until then, 'best friend', 'good guy', etc are only labels. In the end, it's interesting; often surprising to see the results. — Benjamin J. Carey

People say, "I have heart disease," not "I am heart disease." Somehow the presumption of a person's individuality is not compromised by those diagnostic labels. All the labels tell us is that the person has a specific challenge with which he or she struggles in a highly diverse life. But call someone "a schizophrenic" or "a borderline" and the shorthand has a way of closing the chapter on the person. It reduces a multifaceted human being to a diagnosis and lulls us into a false sense that those words tell us who the person is, rather than only telling us how the person suffers. — Martha Manning

I think I'm heading into a time in my life where words and labels will lose their meaning. It will only be the intent behind them that will matter. — Taylor Jenkins Reid

[The] insistence on the absolutely indiscriminate nature of compassion within the Kingdom is the dominant perspective of almost all of Jesus' teaching.
What is indiscriminate compassion? 'Take a look at a rose. Is is possible for the rose to say, "I'll offer my fragrance to good people and withhold it from bad people"? Or can you imagine a lamp that withholds its rays from a wicked person who seeks to walk in its light? It could do that only be ceasing to be a lamp. And observe how helplessly and indiscriminately a tree gives its shade to everyone, good and bad, young and old, high and low; to animals and humans and every living creature
even to the one who seeks to cut it down. This is the first quality of compassion
its indiscriminate character.' (Anthony DeMello, The Way to Love) ...
What makes the Kingdom come is heartfelt compassion: a way of tenderness that knows no frontiers, no labels, no compartmentalizing, and no sectarian divisions. — Brennan Manning

The world, every day, is New. Only for those born in, say, 1870 or so, can there be a meaningful use of the term postmodernism, because for the rest of us we are born and we see and from what we see and digest we remake our world. And to understand it we do not need to label it, categorize it. These labels are slothful and dismissive, and so contradict what we already know about the world, and our daily lives. We know that in each day, we laugh, and we are serious. We do both, in the same day, every day. But in our art we expect clear distinction between the two ... But we don't label our days Serious Days or Humorous Days. We know that each day contains endless nuances - if written would contain dozens of disparate passages, funny ones, sad ones, poignant ones, brutal ones, the terrifying and the cuddly. But we are often loathe to allow this in our art. And that is too bad ... — Dave Eggers

Labels are OK for marketing something, but does the Unschooling philosophy of life need any marketing? No. In so many ways, Unschooling stands for a refusal of marketing and a rejection of any consumerist approach to learning.
Your learning IS your life, not something you purchase subject by subject in the big education supermarket to hang on the wall like a diploma or certificate. Unschooling by its nature does not need to set up an 'Institute of Unschooling' or an 'Unschooling Foundation': that would be the purest contradiction-in-terms, to institutionalize the very practice that most undermines institutionalization! — Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

A label is a soul-tattoo that is ingrained deep in our hearts, so much so that it determines how we see ourselves, And how we see ourselves determines how we live ... A destructive label leads to a destructive life. There is a soul thief, a dark enemy, who wants to nail ruinous labels to your heart so that he can steal your life. Jesus wants to give you life giving labels that release your potential for the good of the world. — Derwin L. Gray

I came to live in a country I love; some people label me a defector. I have loved men and women in my life; I've been labeled the bisexual defector. Want to know another secret? I'm even ambidextrous. I don't like labels. Just call me Martina. — Martina Navratilova

Perspective makes all the difference. It's not what you look at; it's what you see ... Remember that the sun never actually sets; it's our perspective that makes it appear to. Our sunset is another's sunrise. It's all perspective. How would your life be different if you applied this truth to the things that cause you stress? Letting go isn't about erasing the past; it's about looking at the same event and seeing something different. Activate this power in your life! Take the pain and poison of the past and allow it to nourish a new found wisdom. Remember, you can't change the past, but you can change the labels you place on events. Perspective - it's not what you look at; it's what you see. — Steve Maraboli

Travel is rebellion in its purest form.
- we follow our heart
- we free ourselves of labels
- we lose control willingly
- we trade a role for reality
- we love the unfamiliar
- we trust strangers
- we own only what we can carry
- we search for better questions, not answers
- we truly graduate
- we, sometimes, choose never to come back. — Anonymous

It is true you can be successful without [college], but this is a hard world, a real world, and you want every advantage you can have. I would suggest to people to do all that you can. When I dropped out of school, I had worked in the music industry and had checks cut in my name from record labels and had a record deal on the table, and when I wasn't successful and Columbia said, 'We'll call you,' I had to go back and work a telemarketing job, go back to the real world, and that's how life is. Life is hard. Take advantage of your opportunities. — Kanye West

The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about
these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time. — Eudora Welty

The word 'feminist' is a word that discriminates, and I'm not into that. I don't think there has to be a separation in life in anything. [ ... ] Labels are for other people to understand us, so for me, I know how I feel and I don't need to call myself a 'feminist' or 'not a feminist' because I know what my truth is ... — Shailene Woodley

People are tagged with other labels that point to the lowest-status group they belong to, as in "woman doctor" or "black writer," but never "white lawyer" or male senator". Any category that lowers our status relative to others' can be used to mark us; to be privileged is to go through life with the relative ease of being unmarked. — Allan G. Johnson

Before label yourself and before you decide that there is something irreparably wrong with your thoughts or emotions, ask yourself: "Do I have a caring, unconditionally loving best friend in myself?" If the answer is "No," then you will not find the solution to your suffering until you address this serious, life-threatening absence of self-compassion. Self-love is not a dinner mint. Self-love matters. Self-love saves lives. — Vironika Tugaleva

The band has always been such a huge part of my life and it kept me very busy. That, in combination with something like running a record label, just means my whole life revolves completely around metal music and I can't do that anymore. — Blake Judd