Life Is Meant To Be Lived Quotes & Sayings

For a year, Johnny lived the new, brutal truth that he was on his own.
But that's the way it was. What had been concrete one day proved sand the next; strength was illusion; faith meant shit. So what? So his once-bright world had devolved to cold, wet fog. That was life, the new order. Johnny had nothing to trust but himself, so that's the way he rolled - his path, his choices, and no looking back. — John Hart

...always remember one thing, life is and will always be meant to be lived. Taste it, savor it, consume it and let it consume you. Get lost in it. Life is intoxicating if it's lived right. You should never be afraid of life. — Nicole Banks

Life on Earth indeed can seem but one hard-earned lesson after another, with moments of grace and beauty in between to keep people sane, and hopeful. While some die peacefully at the natural end of a long, well-lived life, even they still haven't completed everything they meant to, or lived without regret.

And some of us thought we'd have more time to things right. I tell myself that at least we planted some seeds- ideas of love, and faith, and loyalty- that are starting to show signs of growth. Time will tell. — Lorna Jane Cook

Alma's existence at once felt bigger and much, much smaller - but a pleasant sort of smaller. The world had scaled itself down into endless inches of possibility. Her life could be lived in generous miniature ... She would probably die of old age before she understood even half of what was occurring in this one single boulder field. Well, huzzah to that! It meant that Alma had work stretched ahead of her for the rest of her life. She need not be idle. She need not be unhappy. Perhaps she need not even be lonely. She had a task. — Elizabeth Gilbert

When Pat asked me the life, he didn't mean just that I should travel and have fun, although that was certainly part of it. He also meant that there's a weight to all of our lives, and he didn't want me to be frivolous with mine. If was a tragedy that Pat's life - while fully lived - was cut short. But it's also a tragedy to live a long life that isn't meaningful. — Marie Tillman

You are a story worthy of being told,
A person made to be loved,
With a life meant to be lived. — Nadia Hasan

There was once a tiger-striped cat. This cat died a million deaths, and lived a million lives, and in those lives, various people owned him. None of those people he cared for. This cat was not afraid of death. One life, the cat became a stray cat, which meant it was free. And it met a white female cat. They became mates, and lived together. Time passed, the white cat passed away of old age. And the tiger- striped cat cried a million times. Eventually, the cat died again. But this time, it didn't come back to life. — Keiko Nobumoto

We were in Greenville, South Carolina, where he lived, and he was coming the next day to the show, but he passed away the night before. I was very close to my grandfather. He was the first guy to teach me how to ride a motorcycle, so (his death) meant a lot to me. It just gave me a perspective on life and how important it is to live it and enjoy it while we're here. Sometimes we're looking for the grass to be greener, and what's awesome is right in front of you. — Bret Michaels

Believe it or not, the first spark for everything I've done today came down to me meeting one person in college who changed my life. A student named Anthony Adams who lived across the hall from me in our freshman dorm showed me what it meant to be an 'entrepreneur' when I saw him launch his own start-up company. — Elliott Bisnow

Have you noticed how children never bypass a puddle of water, but jump, splash, and slosh right through it? That's because they know an important truth: Life was meant to be lived; puddles were meant to be experienced. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Leo, listen to me." Hazel gripped his hand. "I won't allow you to take the blame. I couldn't bear that after--after Sammy . . ."
She choked up, but Leo knew what she meant. His bisabuelo had blamed himself for Hazel's disappearance. Sammy had lived a good life, but he'd gone to his grave believing that he'd spent a cursed diamond and doomed the girl he loved. — Rick Riordan

Couple this discovery with the realization that my things shouldn't own me and that life's meant to be lived, not displayed on Pinterest, and my sense is I've finally achieved something close to balance. I feel excellent about actually having — Jen Lancaster

But it doesn't happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrary, each man is an island complete unto himself, and as he sinks, the moving feet go on around him, from nowhere to nowhere and with no time to lose. The world is long past the Boy Scout stage of its development; now each man dies as he was meant to die, and as he was born, and as he lived: alone, all alone. Without any God, without any hope, without any record to show for his life.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

Life was never meant to be safe. It was meant to be lived right to the end. — Caroline Myss

Life was meant to be lived. That was God's ultimate plan for everyone: live life and give thanks to the Lord. Too many Englische people sacrificed their health - physical, psychological, and spiritual - to chase after material things. But at the end of the day, whatever had been acquired seemed insignificant in light of their desires for more. The — Sarah Price

A great empire cannot bring freedom by its own decay to those corners in it where a subject people are prevented from discussing the fundamentals of life. The people feel like children turned adrift to fend for themselves when the imperial routine breaks down; and they wander to and fro, given up to instinctive fears and antagonisms and exaltation until reason dares to take control. I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood. I learned now that it might follow, because an empire passed, that a world full of strong men and women and rich food and heady wine might nevertheless seem like a shadow-show: that a man of every excellence might sit by a fire warming his hands in the vain hope of casting out a chill that lived not in the flesh. — Rebecca West

But she wondered if, in moving outside of the natural flow of time, they had forgotten the most crucial point of life - that it wasn't meant to be lived for the past, or even the future, but for each present moment. — Alexandra Bracken

There were always risks in life. Life was meant to be lived like that because if it wasn't, then what was the purpose of living it at all? Measuring — Terry Brooks

We left behind the other kids; their path-working, drinking, and being grown up- and rejected all that made them grumpy, uncreative and lifeless. We dumpstered, squatted, and shoplifted our lives back. Everything fell into place when we decided our lives were meant to be lived. Life serves the risk taker ... — CrimethInc.

A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It's as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be. — Christopher Isherwood

Life is funny sometimes. Of course it isn't as funny as smashing your brand new Mustang convertible into your house and having your life flash before your eyes. Sitting here in my car in the middle of my den, I can't help but think that things could have worked out differently - that could have been happier - that could have lived the life that was meant for me. That was, if I didn't have to keep up with the Greenbergs. — Phil Wohl

He realized now that to be afraid of this death he was staring at with animal terror meant to be afraid of life. Fear of dying justified a limitless attachment to what is alive in man. And all those who had not made the gestures necessary to live their lives, all those who feared and exalted impotence - they were afraid of death because of the sanction it gave to a life in which they had not been involved. They had not lived enough, never having lived at all. And death was a kind of gesture, forever withholding water from the traveler vainly seeking to slake his thirst. But for the others, it was the fatal and tender gesture that erases and denies, smiling at gratitude as at rebellion. — Albert Camus

The Northwestern Carpathians, in which I was raised, were a hard place, as unforgiving as the people who lived there, but the Alpine landscape into which Zlee and I were sent that early winter seemed a glimpse of what the surface of the earth looked and felt and acted like when there were no maps or borders, no rifles or artillery, no men or wars to claim possession of land, and snow and rock alone parried in a match of millennial slowness so that time meant nothing, and death meant nothing, for what life there was gave in to the forces of nature surrounding and accepted its fate to play what role was handed down in the sidereal march of seasons capable of crushing in an instant what armies might--millennia later--be foolish enough to assemble on it heights.

And yet there we were, ordered to march ourselves, for God, not nature, was with us now, and God would deliver us, in this world and next, when the time came for that. — Andrew Krivak

That was one of the most fundamental and sacred duties good friends and families performed for one another! They tended the flame of memory, so no one's death meant an immediate vanishment from the world; in some sense the deceased would live on after their passing, at least as long as those who loved them lived. Such memories were an essential weapon against the chaos of life and death, a way to ensure some continuity from generation to generation, an order of endorsement and meaning. — Dean Koontz

A life is not meant to be half lived. It is meant to be fully, wholly embraced. If you want to make a change in the world you have to be strong. You have to take chances. You have to persevere. Sometimes you must blindly go in a direction that you may be unsure of, but one that you have faith will lead you to the right place. — Esther Earl

This was life, really lived, a passage of magic that would flash before our eyes when we died. And to share it, to live through these experiences together, meant that Laura and I were closer than ever. — Mark Edwards

Let us not become so busy making a living that we forget to enjoy our Life. Every day of Life is meant to be Lived and Enjoyed.-RVM — R.v.m.

The worst mistake is to live life day by day, life was meant to be lived like there will be no tomorrow. — Steven Redhead

Life is a spiral.
As long as we lived, we would keep moving forward. But on a spiral path, getting closer to your destination meant periodically passing the same things - emotions, issues, character flaws - over and over again, the way a person walking up a spiral staircase would continually find himself facing north every ten steps or so. — Sierra Simone

At the age of forty the life you have lived so far, always pro tem, has for the first time become life itself, and this reappraisal swept away all dreams, destroyed all your notions that real life, the one that was meant to be, the great deeds you would perform, was somewhere else. When you were forty you realized it was all here, banal everyday life, fully formed, and it always would be unless you did something. Unless you took one last gamble. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Cass Mastern lived for a few years and in that time he learned that the world is all of one piece. He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but spring out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things. You happy foot or you gay wing may have brushed it ever so lightly, but what happens always happens and there is the spider, bearded black and with his great faceted eyes glittering like mirrors in the sun, or like God's eye, and the fangs dripping. — Robert Penn Warren

Which is crueler, an old man's lost memories of a life lived, or a young man's lost memories of the life he meant to live? — Diane Ackerman

Socrates famously said that the unconsidered life is not worth living. He meant that a life lived without forethought or principle is a life so vulnerable to chance, and so dependent on the choices and actions of others, that it is of little real value to the person living it. He further meant that a life well lived is one which has goals, and integrity, which is chosen and directed by the one who lives it, to the fullest extent possible to a human agent caught in the webs of society and history. — A.C. Grayling

Life was meant to be lived. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Whenever that happened, Joey clung to Troy's hand, willing him to know that Riker meant nothing.
Well, maybe not nothing. He'd given Joey a valuable gift; he'd taught him what love wasn't. During their showdown in the men's room, it had dawned on Joey what love was. Love took long walks, spent time together talking about nothing. It gave smiles, and hugs, and trips to the beach when it really didn't want to go, because it wanted to share a special place with someone else. Love gave away possessions it valued, knowing the receiver valued them more. Love admitted being wrong, said it was sorry, and did whatever it took to make things right. It called in favors and put a town on the map to make life better for one person who lived there.
Love was Troy. — Eden Winters

Life is meant to be lived in 'the zone', not the stands. — Orrin Woodward

They couldn't understand that every time I entered the slum I felt the urge to let go and surrender to a simpler, poorer life that was yet richer in respect, and love, and a vicinal connectedness to the surrounding sea of human hearts. They couldn't understand what I meant when I talked about the purity of the slum: they'd been there, and seen the wretchedness and filth for themselves. They saw no purity. But they hadn't lived in those miraculous acres, and they hadn't learned that to survive in such a writhe of hope and sorrow the people had to be scrupulously and heartbreakingly honest. That was the source of their purity: above all things, they were true to themselves. — Gregory David Roberts

Your nightmare, mama, was my dream." My heart clenched. He kept going. "Never had a home until you gave me one." My breath started sticking. "Never had anyone give to me the way you gave to me." My breath stopped sticking and clogged. "Never thought of findin' a woman who I wanted to have my baby." Oh God. "Never had light in my life, never, not once. I lived wild but I didn't burn bright until you shined your light on me." Oh God. "Whacked, fuckin' insane, but, at night, you curled in front of me, didn't mind I did that time that wasn't mine 'cause it meant I walked out to you." He had to stop. He had to. He didn't. "Your nightmare," he whispered, turned his head and against my neck he finished, "my dream. — Kristen Ashley

You know full well that it was past time for you to come out in the open. And by admitting the truth, there are no more secrets, for either of us." She smiled. "That means we're able to discontinue playing the parts we've been playing for far too long and begin living our lives as they were meant to be lived - you as an author, and me as . . . well, I haven't figured that out exactly yet, but I have a few ideas in mind." Bram smiled. "I have to hope that I figure in somewhere with those few ideas, but . . ." He nodded to the shoreline. "We're almost to Ravenwood, so now is hardly the time to discuss such matters." Knowing he was right but finding herself unable to keep from smiling at the idea of having Bram Haverstein as part of her future plans - although what part he would play in her life it was certainly too soon to tell - Lucetta set her sights on the shore, anxious to see Ravenwood from the vantage point of the Hudson. "Do — Jen Turano

The young man regained consciousness in the ambulance, but his mother insisted that he give no evidence to the police because, had he done so, her lover would have gone to jail: and she was most reluctant to give up a man who was, in his own words to the young man's 11-year-old sister, 'a better f - k than your father.' A little animal pleasure meant more to the mother than her son's life; and so he was confronted by the terrifying realisation that, in the words of Joseph Conrad, he was born alone, he lived alone, and would die alone. — Theodore Dalrymple

To the degree that each part of our life will support and complement every other and all are ordered to our ultimate goal, our lives will be beautiful. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the essential attributes of beauty is due proportion, which means that all parts are in harmony with each other. Another attribute of beauty is integrity, which means that the overall purpose of the thing is in harmony with what it is meant to be, which for the Christian is the love of God. The final attribute is clarity - it must be radiant and perceptible by others. When people see a life well lived, they are drawn by its beauty and then beyond to the source to which it points, and to which that life is ordered: God. — David Clayton

Over the years I have written many a letter for the wedding of one of the brothers and preached many a wedding sermon. The chief characteristic of such occasions essentially rested in the fact that, in the face of the "last" times (I do not mean this to sound quite so apocalyptic), someone dares to take a step of such affirmation of the earth and its future. It was then always very clear to me that a person could take this step as a Christian truly only from within a very strong faith and on the basis of grace. For here in the midst of the final destruction of all things, one desires to build; in the midst of a life lived from hour to hour and from day to day, one desires a future; in the midst of being driven out from the earth, one desires a bit of space; in the midst of the widespread misery, one desires some happiness. And the overwhelming thing is that God says yes to this strange longing, that here God consents to our will, whereas it usually meant to be just the opposite. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

About 80 percent of the stuff I live with is old. I like letting things take on the character they're meant to have by really being used. ... when you own things that have the imperfections they deserve, that they've earned from a well-lived life, it frees you from feeling as though they're untouchable. — Nate Berkus

I was insanely jealous of Lucille. More jealous than I'd ever been of anyone in my entire life. Because she truly meant it. All I could think was, why can't I be as stupid as Lucille? Why can't I blame all my successes and all my failures on The Lord Jesus Christ Almighty? I would be so fucking happy if I lived like that. — Tiffanie DeBartolo

The truth of living is proved not by the inevitability of death but by the wonder that we lived at all. Remembering lives from the past ratifies that truth, more and more so the older we get. When I was growing up, my father told me once, "Do by look for happiness; life itself is happiness." It took me years to understand what he meant. The value of a life lived; the sheer value of living. — Nina Sankovitch

I understood why those who had lived through war or economic disasters, and who had built for themselves a good life and a high standard of living, were rightly proud to be able to provide for their children those things which they themselves had not had. And why their children, inevitably, took those things for granted. It meant that new values and new expectations had crept into our societies along with new standards of living. Hence the materialistic and often greedy and selfish lifestyle of so many young people in the Western world, especially in the United States. — Jane Goodall

I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organised religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptised. — Lance Armstrong

Your life is not meant to be lived in a way to satisfy someone's expectation out of you! Live your life in your own way. — Avijeet Das

The Doctor had a remarkable memory. The problem was, there was so much of it. He had lived eleven lives (or more: there was another life, was there not, that he tried his best never to think about) and he had a different way of remembering things in each life.
The worst part of being however old he was (and he had long since abandoned trying to keep track of it in any way that mattered to anybody but him) was that sometimes things didn't arrive in his head quite when they were meant to. — Neil Gaiman

The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC. But nobody realised what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done. Paradoxically, a series of 'improvements', each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the necks of these farmers. Why — Yuval Noah Harari

Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life. — Eleanor Roosevelt

The Christian life was never meant to be lived alone. Together we're a body. A family. The people of God. — Matthew West

I bent my head and breathed the fresh new scent of her. I looked into her deep blue eyes and saw reflected there the dawn of my own new life. This little girl seemed to me, at that moment, answer enough to all my questions. To have saved this small, singular one - this alone seemed reason enough that I lived. I knew then that this was how I was meant to go on: away from death and toward life, from birth to birth, from seed to blossom, living my life amongst wonders. — Geraldine Brooks

It's hard to explain what those two weeks every summer meant to me. I lived for them, I breathed for them, and the rest of my life seemed to be spent waiting. — Jane Harvey-Berrick

The sharper your knife, the less you cry ... for me, it also means cutting those things that get in the way of your passion and living your life the way it is meant to be lived. — Kathleen Flinn

Echo lived her life according to two rules, the first of which was simple: don't get caught.
........ Some rules it would seam were meant to be broken..........
Rule number two, Echo thought snagging a pork bun from a food stall as she sailed past it. If you do get caught, run. — Melissa Grey

There are questions that are not meant to be answered with words. Some questions take a lifetime to answer. Take action. — J.R. Rim

The world is more than black and white. Seeing everything in color helps me raise my spirit and find my happy. Life is meant to be lived in color! — Jodi Livon

Life is not meant to be lived on the sidelines or the edge of the pool. It is meant to be embraced, inhaled, and devoured. It is meant to be tasted, chewed and swallowed, savoring each and every experience as if it were the most delicious delicacy ever eaten. — Monica E. Tunnell

Now and again, one could detect in a childless woman of a certain age the various characteristics of all the children she had never issued. Her body was haunted by the ghost of souls who hadn't lived yet. Premature ghosts. Half-ghosts. X's without Y's. Y's without X's. They applied at her womb and were denied, but, meant for her and no one else, they wouldn't go away. Like tiny ectoplasmic gophers, they hunkered in her tear ducts. They shone through her sighs. Often to her chagrin, they would soften the voice she used in the marketplace. When she spilled wine, it was their playful antics that jostled the glass. They called out her name in the bath or when she passed real children in the street. The spirit babies were everywhere her companions, and everywhere they left her lonesome - yet they no more bore her resentment than a seed resents uneaten fruit. Like pet gnats, like phosphorescence, like sighs on a string, they would follow her into eternity. — Tom Robbins

But what his life had really meant, Hoshino had no idea. Not that anybody's life had more clear-cut meaning to it. What's really important for people, what really has dignity, is how they die. Compared to that, he thought, how you lived doesn't amount to much. Still, how you live determines how you die.
- pg 408 — Haruki Murakami

Live life as it was meant to be lived. Half asleep, preferably.

[...]

She preferred [...] to go to sleep at once, sleep now being one of the very few aspects of existence for which she felt any degree of enthusiasm [...] — Jonathan Coe

I do not believe that God intended the study of theology to be dry and boring. Theology is the study of God and all his works! Theology is meant to be LIVED and PRAYED and SUNG! All of the great doctrinal writings of the Bible (such as Paul's epistle to the Romans) are full of praise to God and personal application to life. — Wayne Grudem

My mother had died when I wrote my first book. I was twenty-seven, so it was right at the beginning of my writing life. I don't know if she had lived, if I would have done it, certainly not quite like I did. But, you can't rethink it. You wrote what you wrote, it meant something to other people, and that's your good. — Anne Roiphe

Life's meant to be lived blind - that's how you don't take shit for granted. — J.R. Ward

Ninety percent of the population spends time imagining their future and forgetting that now is where we live and breathe. The ten percent who live in the present are the ones who have the stories to tell, the ones who live life the way it's meant to be lived. — Everly Drummond

Life was meant to be lived full measure, flat out, pedal to the metal. Don't live the rest of your life like a Porsche that never leaves the garage because somebody's afraid to scratch it. — J. Michael Straczynski

As in most obituaries, the author said little about the man; they rarely do. But the reticence here was greater than usual. It mentioned that Ravenscliff left a wife, but did not say when they married. It said nothing at all about his life, nor where he lived. There were not even any of the usual phrases to give a slight hint: 'a natural raconteur' (loved the sound of his own voice); 'Noted for his generosity to friends' (profligate); 'a formidable enemy . . .' (a brute); 'a severe but fair employer . . .' (a slave-driver); 'devoted to the turf' (never read a book in his life); 'a life-long bachelor' (vice); 'a collector of flowers' (this meant a great womaniser. Why it came to mean such a thing I do not know.) More browsing — Iain Pears

The utter failure came at the Crucifixion in the tragic words, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' If you want to understand the full tragedy of those words you must realize what they meant: Christ saw that his whole life, devoted to the truth according to his best conviction, had been a terrible illusion. He had lived it to the full absolutely sincerely, he had made his honest experiment, but it was nevertheless a compensation. On the cross his mission deserted him. But because he had lived so fully and devotedly he won through to the Resurrection body. — Carl Jung

Life is meant to be lived, and if you're offered the chance to experience things with an extraordinary person, then there isn't one reason in the world to say no. — Amber L. Johnson

If I am only sure of one thing in life, it's that it's meant to be lived! — Alex Gaskarth

Life is meant to be lived. — Eleanor Roosevelt

I could hear them and the simple bloodlust that pulsed from them. They lived to kill. Not for hate or power. But still, they killed. They killed because death meant food. Death meant life. Death meant that their blood pounded hotter in their veins, and their flesh grew thicker on their bones. They were simple monsters, but monsters all the same.
And they were hungry. — Amy Harmon

I am a man that finds Death beautiful. If I have lived a million lives before this one, I know that I have spent each one searching for Death. It's hard to be entranced by those who aren't your soulmate, which is I why I don't acknowledge those like her, but her. Our hearts are meant to join again. Our souls are meant to join again. I am a man that finds Death beautiful, for Death doesn't wear a mask or lie. She simply smiles, and takes the breath of life away ... — Lionel Suggs