Life Intensely Quotes & Sayings

How could I, who loved life so intensely, have let myself be entangled for so long in that balderdash of books and paper blackened with ink! — Nikos Kazantzakis

Life is wonderful so love deeply.
Life is short so live it intensely. — Debasish Mridha

If Barack Obama had come up in a time when the drug war was being waged as intensely as it is now, we probably would never have heard of him. A single arrest could have precluded student loans, resulted in jail time, and completely ruined his life, posing a far greater threat to him than the drugs themselves did, including the risk of addiction to marijuana or cocaine. — Carl Hart

The Law of Attraction states that whatever you focus on, think about, read about, and talk about intensely, you're going to attract more of into your life. — Jack Canfield

There are indeed millions of Christians in the United States, but most Americans who think that they are Christians truly are something else, intensely religious but devout in the American Religion, a faith that is old among us, and that comes in many guises and disguises, and that overdetermines much of our national life. — Harold Bloom

Life is so short, no time to spare, so choose carefully, love intensely and live blissfully. — Debasish Mridha

She is intensely human, and lives to look upon life. — Rudyard Kipling

Sometimes life is intensely interesting and meaningful, and this meaning seems to be an objective fact, like sunlight. At other times it's as meaningless and futile as the wind. We accept this eclipse of meaning as we accept changes in the weather. If I wake up with a bad cold or a headache, I seem to be deaf to meaning. Now if I woke up physically deaf or half-blind, I'd feel there was something wrong and consult a doctor. But when I'm deaf to meaning, I accept it as something natural. Esmond didn't accept it as natural. And he also noticed that every time we're sexually stimulated, meaning returns. We can hear again. So he pursued sex as a way of recovering meaning. — Colin Wilson

Out of all these people, Zarathustra is unique. He is the only one who is not against life, who is for life; whose god is not somewhere else, whose god is nothing but another name for life itself. And to live totally, to live joyously and to live intensely, is all that religion is based on. I — Osho

They loved so intensely that moments of their life have been etched into the very fabric of the mansion. Some say the king designed it that way, so if one day he lost her he could come live with her residue. — Karen Marie Moning

Golf gives no margin: either you win or you fail. You cannot hedge; you cannot bluff; you cannot give a stop order. One chance is given you, and you hit or miss. There is nothing more rigid in life. And it is this ultra and extreme rigidity that makes golf so intensely interesting. — Arnold Haultain

But the more intensely he thought, the clearer it became to him that it was indubitably so, that in reality, looking upon life, he had forgotten one little fact-that death will come, and all ends; that nothing was even worth beginning, and that there was no helping it anyway. Yes it was awful, but it was so. — Leo Tolstoy

Tallent notes that the days surrounding the death are marked not by keening or weeping but instead by a dignified, almost majestical, sense of quiet and contemplation. The deceased's immediate family continues to go about their daily rituals, but their silence, their lack of chatter in this busy, intimate community, is a ritual in itself, and the other villagers give them peace until the bereaved signal their intention to return to the life of the community. Sometimes this silent mourning takes only days; sometimes it takes months. But it is a remarkable demonstration of being absent in a place so intensely present, of being granted solitude while surrounded by many — Hanya Yanagihara

I'm not intensely private - I talk a great deal about my life and my work - I just don't play the game to excess. — Annie Lennox

Everything can become a meditation if you live it totally and intensely. And then your life becomes whole. — Rajneesh

It was the first time that he'd cried in a very long time. All of his emotions poured out now, in a great rush of release: it was sadness tinged with bitterness, but mostly an intensely deep feeling of loss. — EXO Books

All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. — Tennessee Williams

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

For the virtuoso, musical works are in fact nothing but tragic and moving materializations of his emotions; he is called upon to make them speak, weep, sing and sigh, to recreate them in accordance with his own consciousness. In this way he, like the composer, is a creator, for he must have within himself those passions that he wishes to bring so intensely to life. — Franz Liszt

We need music the most when we're feeling things really intensely. I think the most intense times in your life are when you're either falling in love or losing it — Taylor Swift

There was once a man who lost his shadow. I forget what happened to him, but it was dreadful. As for me, I've lost my own image. I did not look at it often; but it was there, in the background, just as Maurice had drawn it for me. A straightforward, genuine, "authentic" woman, with out mean-mindedness, uncompromising, but at the same time understanding, indulgent, sensitive, deeply feeling, intensely aware of things and of people, passionately devoted to those she loved and creating happiness for them. A fine life, serene, full, "harmonious." It is dark: I cannot see myself anymore. And what do the others see? Maybe something hideous. — Simone De Beauvoir

I know a bit about his [Sirk] life, but it's more about his style than biography. He was European and came out of a theater background, and could easily be defined as 'Brechtian.' He was expressionistic in his films, and was an example of those intensely intellectual artists who ended up working for American studios, and was handed the Ladies Home Journal and asked to adapt the stories for the screen. He found ways to use his artistry to make them interesting and nuanced, while critiquing American values in the process. — Todd Haynes

I'm an intensely competitive guy who is driven by the idea that accepting mediocrity or accepting defeat is not the way you succeed in life. — John W. Thompson

She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts if family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the led; if there was a draft she sat in it
in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others ... I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self defense. Had I not killed her, she would have killed me. — Virginia Woolf

He wanted to live life so intensely that he could die at any moment without regrets. — Ryunosuke Akutagawa

There is a distinction between failing and being a failure. Few things are learned in life without failing at least once. Did you learn to roller skate without falling a few times? Did you learn to ride a bike without losing your balance? Chances are you didn't. You may have wanted to do those things so intensely that you quickly put unsuccessful attempts behind you and kept trying. Soon you acquired the skill to do the thing you wanted. Even though in the process of learning you may have failed many times, you were not a failure. "Failing" simply became an open door to try again. — John Templeton

I want to live fully, very intensely. I would never want to live partially, suffering from illness or injury. If I ever happen to have an accident that eventually costs my life, I hope it happens in one instant. — Ayrton Senna

What I wanted to express very clearly and intensely was that the reason these people had to invent or imagine heroes and gods is pure fear. Fear of life and fear of death. — Frida Kahlo

Because it has lived its life intensely
the parched grass still attracts the gaze of passers-by.
The flowers merely flower,
and they do this as well as they can.
The white lily, blooming unseen in the valley,
Does not need to explain itself to anyone;
It lives merely for beauty.
Man, however, cannot accept that 'merely'.

If tomatoes wanted to be melons,
they would look completely ridiculous.
I am always amazed
that so many people are concerned
with wanting to be what they are not;
what's the point of making yourself look ridicuolous?

You don't always have to pretend to be strong,
there's no need to prove all the time that everything is going well,
you shouldn't be concerned about what other people are thinking,
cry if you need to,
it's good to cry out all your tears
(because only then will you be able to smile again). — Mitsuo Aida

When you practice Dynamic Meditation for the first time this will be difficult, because we have suppressed the body so much that a suppressed pattern of life has become natural to us. It is not natural! Look at a child: he plays with his body in quite a different way. If he is crying, he is crying intensely. The cry of a child is a beautiful thing to hear, but the cry of an adult is ugly. Even in anger a child is beautiful; he has a total intensity. But when an adult is angry he is ugly; he is not total. And any type of intensity is beautiful. — Rajneesh

One day a hummingbird flew in
It fluttered against the window til I got it down where I could reach it with an open umbrella
When I had it in my hand it was so small I couldn't believe I had it
but I could feel the intense life
so intense and so tiny
... You were like the humming bird to me ...
And I am rather inclined to feel that you and I know the best part of one another without spending much time together
It is not that I fear the knowing
It is that I am at this moment willing to let you be what you are to me
it is beautiful and pure and very intensely alive. — Georgia O'Keeffe

For this very short time in your life, and possibly never again, you will be given a very unique gift: a supremely rich environment with ample time, space, safety and people to explore whatever interests you intensely, to push yourself, to make mistakes and recover from them, and to live as deeply as you'd like in the hope of finding yourself or, at least, the beginnings of yourself.
Such an opportunity may never present itself again. So, embrace it and ... Carpe College! — Michael Metzler

All my life I have been intensely repelled by the idea of 'making an effort'. I hate this idea today as much as I did as a child. I don't know why I hate it so much; I just do. — Raymond Smullyan

The conversation with the dead is one of the great pleasures of life. Somebody who is sitting reading Chekhov, Beckett, reading Toni Morrison - you are not in any way dead, in many ways you are intensely alive. — Cornel West

I think very often when we think we are aiming at the best for our children, what we are really doing is trying to position them for competitive success in an intensely driven kind of society. I'm not sure that always leads to the good life or to happiness. — Michael Sandel

And it started out fun. We were chattering enthusiastically, flipping between CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News. But as the evening wore on, and the numbers rolled in, it got quieter, and I found myself becoming intensely depressed. Why was I putting myself through this? The issues I've devoted my life to have become so marginalized by the coverage that they have no possible relevance to me. I can't even blame the media - people simply don't care about alternate-party politics. And why should they? I'm so far in the minority that my activism is a joke, a punchline that stopped being funny years ago. It goes beyond rooting for the underdog. It's not rooting for the Giants: it's more like, say, rooting for the Twins. But during the Super Bowl. — Phillip Andrew Bennett Low

The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life's challenges when they come. Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious. You can use a challenge to awaken you, or you can allow it to pull you into even deeper sleep. The dream
of ordinary unconsciousness then turns into a nightmare. — Eckhart Tolle

She understood now why so many members of her kind died so young. It was possible to squeeze an entire lifetime of living into a single day: to live more, to feel more, in the span of twenty-four hours than most did in eighty years.
Shape-shifters lived in a world of color and brightness, of heightened senses. They felt everything more intensely, and so they lived their lives more intensely - anything to make their hearts pound harder. Life could be like a drug.
But how does one wean oneself off life? — Nenia Campbell

Long before art and science and philosophy arose, consciousness had but one function: not to merely implement motor commands, but to mediate between commands in opposition. In a submerged body starving for air, it's difficult to imagine two imperatives more opposed than the need to breathe and the need to hold your breath. As one Prismatic told me, Put yourself in one of those things, and tell me you aren't more intensely conscious than you've ever been in your life. — Peter Watts

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally. — Fernando Pessoa

To be a success, intensely focus on success oriented action not on roadblocks or obstacles. — Debasish Mridha

I believe that love between people is the greatest life-giving force in the world. It's intensely frustrating and inevitably makes a fool of you, but you can't stop going back to it, and it's pretty much the defining experience of a human being. — Sebastian Faulks

For Edwards, George Claghorn writes, the "Resolutions" were "neither pious hopes, romantic dreams, nor legalistic rules."4 Instead, they were intensely positive and practical, comprising "instructions for life, maxims to be followed in all respects."5 The "Resolutions" reveal Edwards' "strong sense of duty and discipline, in private and public matters, in intellect and spirituality."6 Collectively, they form an emphatic statement, Stephen Nichols notes, of how he sought to "chart out his life - his relationships, his conversations, his desires, his activities."7 — Steven J. Lawson

You don't ever have to apologize for feeling, Marlin. Life's not worth living if we don't feel intensely. — Amanda Richardson

I believe that life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that thoughts of another life, or of a longer life, are not necessary. — Marjory Stoneman Douglas

To most teenagers, life is a strange uncharted land filled with a mixture of new joys, intensely felt, and painful confusions for which they know no anodyne. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Jesus says, "I want you to follow me so fully, so intensely, so enduringly that all other attachments in your life look weak by comparison" — Timothy Keller

Since the death of Nikola Tesla in 1943, his life has deserved a worthy biography. Bernard Carlson has delivered that in Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, which portrays Tesla as intensely human ... Anyone, whether simply an interested reader or a professional historian, engineer, or physicist, will finish Tesla with a deepened understanding of his world, character, and accomplishments. — Robert Rosenberg

She opened her eyes and looked into his rather intensely.
"What?" Alex asked.
"This cannot be."
"What can't be?" Alex asked her, more bafflement in his voice this time.
"I have been reading people all my life. I can even read cats and dogs. I've been doing it all my life and i've been here longer than the two of you put together."
"And?" Alex wanted to get to the point. Whatever the truth may be, he just wanted to hear it, wanted it on the table before them so he could get this over with and they can go home.
"AND ... you are the first person that has nothing for me to see."
"And here I was hoping you'd say I'd win the lottery or get married to a supermodel or something." Alex said, starting to laugh.
"You don't understand. I don't see anything, anything at all. There is nothing to you, nothing but what I see before me."
"So ... what does that mean?"
"It means you don't exist. — J.C. Joranco

Umar, despite his strong character and impressive personality, had lost control of himself for a short while, his emotions seizing him so strongly that it brought out a heretofore unsuspected fragility, causing him to react like a child refusing the ruling of God, of reality, of life. By contrast, Abu Bakr, who was normally so sensitive, who wept so abundantly and so intensely when he read the Quran, had received the news of the Prophet's death with deep sorrow but also with extraordinary calm and unsuspected inner strength. At that particular moment, the two men's roles were inverted, thus showing that through his departure the Prophet offered us a final teaching: in the bright depths of spirituality, sensitivity can produce a degree of strength of being that nothing can disturb. Conversely, the strongest personality, if it forgets itself for a moment, can become vulnerable and fragile. The — Tariq Ramadan

Why do we focus so intensely on our problems? What draws us to them? Why are they so attractive? They have the magnet power of love: somehow we desire our problems; we are in love with them much as we want to get rid of them ... Problems sustain us
maybe that's why they don't go away. What would a life be without them? Completely tranquilized and loveless ... There is a secret love hiding in each problem — James Hillman

Everyone must decide for himself whether it is better to have a brief but more intensely felt existence or to live a long and ordinary life. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

However, whatever frightening mask it might assume, the national spirit in its original state was of pristine whiteness. Traveling through a country like Thailand, Honda realized more clearly than ever the simplicity and purity of things Japanese, like transparent stream water
through which one could glimpse pebbles below, or the probity of Shinto rites. Honda's life was not imbued with such spirit. Like the majority of Japanese he ignored it, behaving as though it did not exist and surviving by
escaping from it. All his life he had dodged things fundamental and artless: white silk, clear cold water, the zigzag white paper of the exorciser's staff fluttering in the breeze, the sacred precinct marked by a torii, the gods'
dwelling in the sea, the mountains, the vast ocean, the Japanese sword with its glistening blade so pure and sharp. Not only Honda, but the vast majority of Westernized Japanese, could no longer stand such intensely native elements. — Yukio Mishima

What do you want? You can't want to be happy, because that's too easy and too boring. You can't want only to love, because that's impossible. What do you want? You want to justify your life, to live it as intensely as possible. That is at once a trap and a source of ecstasy. Try to be alert to that danger and experience the joy and the adventure of being that woman who is beyond the image reflected in the mirror. — Paulo Coelho

Most importantly, of course, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero. — Daniel Kahneman

The Science of Mind is intensely practical because it teaches us how to use the Mind Principle for definite purposes, such as helping those who are sick, impoverished, or unhappy. — Ernest Holmes

He knew that all things human are transitory and therefore that it must cease one day or another. He looked forward to that day with eager longing. Love was like a parasite in his heart, nourishing a hateful existence on his life's blood; it absorbed his existence so intensely that he could take pleasure in nothing else. — W. Somerset Maugham

Only the passionate were immortal, it seemed. If you fought, screwed, screamed, laughed, or otherwise experienced life intensely, for better or worse, you left a record. Those who lived a quiet, well-behaved, well-tempered life? Gone without a trace. — Magnus Flyte

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

I have to retain the illusion of things happening, I have to make Henry feel more and more intensely loved, I have to give him the belief that things are getting better and better because he is a king and all his life everyone has told him that he shall have the very best. He has been promised cream and gold and honey, I cannot give him 'wait.' How am I to keep going? How am I to do it?" I — Philippa Gregory

As a teenager I clearly remember mornings when I was getting ready for school when something would -just still me- and
I would lean forward and peer very intensely into the eyes of the girl in that mirror.
who is that? I didn't know . I looked into those eyes as if they had the answer to who I am
or who I could be.
So I would search the depths of those green and blue flecked eyes.
Calmly searching the eyes of this stranger as if I thought that if I looked deep enough, or long enough, I would find the answer to why I was even here.
I didn't know what I know now.
That I could only find out my identity,
who I was
when I stopped looking into my own eyes
and instead searched in the eyes of Jesus. Only He could REALLY tell me who I am. Who I can be. Who I will be ... — Laura A. Diaz

Lonely and isolated people who feel their solitude more intensely within the busy life of the streets. They are what George Gissing called the anchorites of daily life, who return unhappy to their solitary rooms. — Peter Ackroyd

Your life, my life, the life of each one of us is going to serve as either a warning or an example. A warning of the consequences of neglect, self-pity, lack of direction and ambition ... or an example of talent put to use, of discipline self-imposed, and of objectives clearly perceived and intensely pursued. — Jim Rohn

As the classes in modern life come together, we have become much more intensely class conscious. It's a very curious thing. But I deal with human beings with whom I've come in contact and have had a chance to closely observe. Their upper-classness is not a matter of particular fascination for me. — Louis Auchincloss

I like youth, and I like stories about feeling things intensely and about transitional moments in human life. I reflect on my life and that's just a moment when I felt things probably the most intensely. — Joseph McGinty Nichol

Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ... each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition
all such distortions within our own egos
condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other's naked hearts. — Tennessee Williams

An apostle does not just set up an 'empire of churches' over which he reigns and from which he receives glory and honor. Instead, the charge of all the local churches that God gives him becomes a gut-wrenching, intensely emotional, heartfelt, passionate ministry of life to precious souls! It is an awesome responsibility. It is not an arms-length transaction. The apostle must feel the very heart-beat, the pulse of the church, and be in touch with the lives of its people. — David Cannistraci

In the life cycle of an intense emotion, if it isn't acted upon, it eventually peaks and then decreases. But as Dr. Linehan explains, people with BPD have a different physiological experience with this process because of three key biological vulnerabilities (1993a): First, we're highly sensitive to emotional stimuli (meaning we experience social dynamics, the environment, and our own inner states with an acuteness similar to having exposed nerve endings). Second, we respond more intensely and much more quickly, than other people. And third, we don't 'come down' from our emotions for a long time. One the nerves have been touched, the sensations keep peaking. Shock waves of emotion that might pass through others in minutes keep cresting in us for hours, sometimes days. — Kiera Van Gelder

And if ever you need encouragement, remember at least two sober facts which nobody can rationally deny: that you are a new and unique living force in nature, and that you can, by taking thought and pursuing it, become more and more intensely alive. — John Steeksma

Dr. Ambrose himself told Mark Nechtr ... that the problem with young people, starting sometime in about the 1960s, is that they tend to live too intensely inside their own social moment, and thus tend to see all existence past age thirty or so as somehow postcoital. It's then that they'll relax, settle back, sad animals, to watch- and learn, as Ambrose himself said he learned from hard artistic and academic experience- that life instead of being rated a hard R, or even a soft R, actually rarely even makes it into distribution. Tends to be too slow. — David Foster Wallace

When one has once had the good luck to love intensely, life is spent in trying to recapture that ardour and that illumination. — Albert Camus

Insisting that his writing did not offer a philosophy of life, Hardy claims that each poem was an 'impression', intensely subjective and evanescent. — Geoffrey Harvey

Whoever wants God intensely, finds Him. Go and verify it in your own life. — Ramakrishna

The Socialists have found good the equality, and bad the inequality. Good the servants and bad the tyrants. I crossed the threshold of good and evil in order to live my life intensely. I live today and can not await tomorrow. The wait is of peoples and of humanity, so could not be my affair. — Renzo Novatore

Neither agreeable nor disagreeable," I answered. "It just is."
Istigkeit - wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." The Being of Platonic philosophy - except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were - a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence. — Aldous Huxley

One conceals oneself standing silently beside the trunk of a tree and what there is of a reflective tendency in his nature is intensified. One shudders at the thought of the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant, and if the people of the town are his people, one loves life so intensely that tears come into the eyes. — Sherwood Anderson

I'm such an incredibly, stupidly sensitive person that everything that happens to me, I experience it really intensely. I feel everything very deeply. And when you feel things deeply and you think about things a lot and you think about how you feel, you learn a lot about yourself. And when you know yourself, you know life. — Fiona Apple

Taking a hypersensitive approach to life had come to seem so much more pure and honest then joining the ranks of the numb masses who could let it all slide by. What I stopped realizing was that if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all. Everything registers at the same decibel ... — Elizabeth Wurtzel

They were not unfortunate girls who, as outcasts or in the belief that they were cast out by society, grieved wholesomely and intensely and, once in a while at times when the heart was too full, ventilated it in hate or forgiveness. No visible change took place in them; they lived in the accustomed context, were respected as always, and yet they were changed, almost unaccountably to themselves and incomprehensibly to others. Their lives were not cracked or broken, as others' were, but were bent into themselves; lost to others, they futilely sought to find themselves. — Soren Kierkegaard

Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete — Kay Redfield Jamison

I don't define lust as anything evil or nasty. Lust as defined by me, is the feeling of desire: a desire to eat cake, a desire to feel the touch of another's skin moving over your own skin, a desire to breathe, a desire to live, a desire to laugh intensely like it was the best thing God ever created ... this is lust as defined by me. And I think that's what it really is. — C. JoyBell C.

The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour, and all the trace of life that I could see at first was the intensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point on their south-eastern face. — H.G.Wells

He was trying to accept that there were certain things that would never conform to his idea of how life should be, no matter how intensely he hoped or pretended they might. — Hanya Yanagihara

Before you sweat the logistics of focus: first, care. Care intensely ... Obsessing over the slipperiness of focus, bemoaning the volume of those devil "distractions," and constantly reassessing which shiny new "system" might make your life suddenly seem more sensible - these are all terrifically useful warning flares that you may be suffering from a deeper, more fundamental problem ... Know in your heart that what you're making or doing matters ... First, care. Then, as you'll happily and unavoidably discover, all that "focus" business has a peculiar way of taking care of itself. — Merlin Mann

That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone changed my life. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Enthusiasm "wants" nothing because it lacks nothing. It is at one with life and no matter how dynamic the enthusiasm-inspired activities are, you don't lose yourself in them. And there remains always a still but intensely alive space at the center of the wheel, a core of peace in the midst of activity that is both the source of all and untouched by it all. Through enthusiasm you enter into full alignment with the outgoing creative principle of the universe, but without identifying with its creations, that is to say, without ego. Where there is no identification, there is no attachment - one of the great sources of suffering. — Eckhart Tolle

A man is never so truly and intensely himself as when he is most possessed by God. It is impossible to say where, in the spiritual life, the human will leaves off and divine grace begins. — William Ralph Inge

We know, from ordinary life, that we are not able to direct our attention perfectly steadily and uniformly to one and the same object ... At times the attention turns towards the object most intensely, and at times the energy flags. — Wilhelm Wundt

You take the books, you lie there in the pools of light and you drink life. That is how intensely I have loved libraries. — Ray Bradbury

We often just accept the things that we like, and complain a lot about the things that we don't like. But if we could, like, intensely dwell on the really great things in life the way we intensely dwell on the negative things in life; I think that would be fantastic. — Hank Green

You mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?"
"That is about the size of it," said the Sergeant.
I felt so sad and so entirely disappointed that tears came into my eyes and a lump of incommunicable poignancy swelled tragically in my throat. I began to feel intensely every fragment of my equal humanity. The life that was bubbling at the end of my fingers was real and nearly painful in intensity and so was the beauty of my warm face and the loose humanity of my limbs and the racy health of my red rich blood. To leave it all without good reason and to smash the little empire into small fragments was a thing too pitiful even to refuse to think about. — Flann O'Brien

Don't bother trying to explain your emotions. Live everything as intensely as you can and keep whatever you felt as a gift from God. The best way to destroy the bridge between the visible and invisible is by trying to explain your emotions. — Paulo Coelho

No effort should be made to destroy those habits or qualities that we may not desire. Whatever we think about deeply or intensely, the subconscious will take up and develop further. Therefore, if we think about our failings, shortcomings or bad habits, the subconscious will take them up and give them more life and activity than they ever had before. If there is anything in our nature therefore that we wish to change, we should simply proceed to build up what we want and forget completely what we wish to eliminate. When the good develops the bad disappears. When the greater is built up, the lesser will either be removed or completely transformed and combined with the greater. — Christian D. Larson

I think if you do not enjoy your time, your life, if you do not live intensely and do not spend time with your family, in one way or another it will be reflected in your career. — Novak Djokovic

I'm afraid of committing myself," she thought to herself.

"When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes. Disappointment, defeat, and despair are the tools God uses to show us the way."

"Don't bother trying to explain your emotions. Live everything as intensely as you can and keep whatever you felt as a gift from God. The best way to destroy the bridge between the visible and invisible is by trying to explain your emotions."

"But how will I know who my Soulmate is?" Brida felt that this was one of the most important questions she had ever asked in her life.
"By taking risks" she said to Brida. ' By risking failure, disappointment, disillusion, but never ceasing in you search for Love. As long as you keep looking, you will triumph in the end."

Nothing is completely wrong. Even a broken watch is right twice a day. — Paulo Coelho

You have no right to say that I am not sincere. I have found a happiness in art that real life has never given me. I am intensely in earnest about art. There is is a magic and mystery in art that you know nothing of. — George Bernard Shaw

They were all intensely excited, and all overflowing with noisy expressions of their loyalty to the Law. Yet I felt an absolute assurance in my own mind that the Hyena-Swine was implicated in the rabbit-killing. A strange persuasion came upon me that, save for the grossness of the line, save for the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form. — H.G.Wells

An examined life, an enigmatic investigation of reality, is required in order for a person to realize a transcendent spiritual journey. A contemplative soul is bound to live life more intensely than someone whom is concerned exclusively with living an external existence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Life never stops. The torment of men will be eternal, unless the function of creating and acting and changing, living intensely through each day, be considered an eternal joy. — Le Corbusier

This intensely lyrical vision of the pregant woman in [i]Hope I[i] is set in an ambiguous context peopled with masks, death's heads and allegorical monsters such as Sin, Disease, Poverty and Death, all threatening the incipient life. — Gilles Neret