Life Maze Quotes & Sayings

I have always been tormented by the image of multiplicity of selves. Some days I call it richness, and other days I see it as a disease, a proliferation as dangerous as cancer. My first concept about people around me was that all of them were coordinated into a WHOLE, whereas I was made up of multiple selves, of fragments. I know that I was upset as a child to discover that we had only one life. It seems to me that I wanted to compensate for this by multiplying experience. Or perhaps it always seems like this when you follow all your impulses and they take you in different directions. In any case, when I was happy, always at the beginning of a love, euphoric, I felt I was gifted for living many lives fully. It was only when I was in trouble, lost in a maze, stifled by complications and paradoxes that I was haunted or that I spoke of my "madness," but I meant the madness of the poets. — Anais Nin

Life is no straight and easy corridor along which we travel free and unhampered, but a maze of passages, through which we must seek our way, lost and confused, now and again checked in a blind alley. But always, if we have faith, a door will open for us, not perhaps one that we ourselves — Spencer Johnson

These are just stories, you know. They are part of what we are, but they are not the real thing. All this year I've been thinking, What would White Raven do? And today, every time I thought it, I just didn't care what White Raven would do. So today I've just done what I would do. I've just done what I think is right. I'm not going to stop making up stories. But I'm thinking now that they aren't just for pretending to be someone else, someone more exciting, someone braver than you really are. They are not always jut a maze to get lost in so you can run away from life. They can just as well be maps to help you navigate. — Elizabeth Wein

Man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn't bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does. He uses all kinds of techniques, which we call the "character defenses": he learns not to expose himself, not to stand out; he learns to embed himself in other-power, both of concrete persons and of things and cultural commands; the result is that he comes to exist in the imagined infallibility of the world around him. He doesn't have to have fears when his feet are solidly mired and his life mapped out in a ready-made maze. All he has to do is to plunge ahead in a compulsive style of drivenness in the "ways of the world. — Ernest Becker

Life's journey does not take place down an easy roadway, as some might imagine. It takes place inside a giant house with a million doorways. Every day of our lives we are faced with decisions to make, doorways to walk through. It can be confusing at times, like walking through a carnival maze. Some decisions we make are big, some small, but they all have consequences.. — K. Martin Beckner

The fact that the Gladers hadn't given up said more about these people than anything else. And now he was one of them. This is my life, he thought. Living in a giant maze, surrounded by hideous beasts. Sadness filled him like a heavy poison. — James Dashner

The Maze is a painting of the inside of my skull, which I painted when I was in England as a patient in Maudsley and Netherne psychiatric hospitals. It is a story of my life, well in the sense that people tell stories by the fireplace to entertain their guests, trying to make them accept you. In this case I wanted to be accepted, as an interesting specimen. — William Kurelek

Well, we actually never went around. We worked together, struggled through the corporate maze, shared our dreams, and, somewhere along the way, we came closer to each other. At the end, we touched each other's heart. The impact was profound, much more than I thought it was initially. — Sandhya Jane

Language, at least, may give up the secrets of life and death, leading us through the maze to the original Word as monster or angel, to the mournful place where we may meet Job and hear his cry, 'How long will you vex my soul and break me in pieces with words? — Janet Frame

I shuffle along, letting the current pull me, and i have the sense that I am like a rat caught in a maze of tunnels, moving endlessly toward some promise of ... of what? Light? Life? Cheese? — Lisa Ann Sandell

Life is like a maze of doors and then all open on the side you're on.
Just keep on pushing hard, boy, try as you may ... you're going to wind up where you started from. — Yusuf Islam

Of course if a person looked at his life from above, he could see the whole thing for what it was; he'd only feel lost while he was living it, when he still hadn't figured out that it was in fact a maze and that both the way in and the way out led to the same enormous empty place surrounding it. (From The Thin Place) — Kathryn Davis

Just as treasures are uncovered from the earth, so virtue appears from good deeds, and wisdom appears from a pure and peaceful mind. To walk safely through the maze of human life, one needs the light of wisdom and the guidance of virtue. — Buddha

No matter how much I tried to justify the affair, the fact remained that I was a deceitful person. One moment I was making out with a man and an hour later I was in bed with another man. Who had I become? What had I lost in life that led me to do this? Did I not have a perfect life? Was I not happy? Of course, I was happy. I knew I was happy and content. Had I become greedy? I was in a maze and I could not find a way out. — Jagdish Joghee

They only asked for punishments that fitted their crimes. Not ones that came like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. Not ones you spent your whole life in, wandering through its maze of shelves. — Arundhati Roy

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others. — Cormac McCarthy

A maze is a puzzle to be solved, with twists and turns and dead ends. It requires logical, analytical thinking and usually has a different way out than the way in. The maze could be a metaphor of struggling through life, going one way and then another until the exit takes your by surprise.

A maze signifies entrapment, while the labyrinth, with its unicursal path leading into the center and out again the same way, provides enlightenment. It's the process, the journey into your deepest self, your soul, the part where God abides. It's a passive path, a surrender even, to an order and design repeated through creation. A sacred geometry. — Kristen Heitzmann

I wanted to go higher than Rockefeller Center, which was being erected across the street from Saks Fifth Avenue and was going to cut off my view of the sky ... Flying got into my soul instantly but the answer as to why must be found somewhere back in the mystic maze of my birth and childhood and the circumstances of my earlier life. Whatever I am is elemental and the beginnings of it all have their roots in Sawdust Road. I might have been born in a hovel, but I determined to travel with the wind and stars. — Jacqueline Cochran

Life is like a maze in which you try to avoid the exit. — Roger Von Oech

The first time she had tried to kill herself, she had intuited that there was no escape. She had seen, with sudden clarity, that her life was a series of boxes, a maze that she would run and run through and never find an exit, and she thought, almost peacefully, I don't want it. I don't want my life. — Dan Chaon

And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disordered, irregular, turbulent maze, mingled with the wan moonlight. And now from these globules themselves as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things burst out; the air grew filled with them; larvae so bloodless and so hideous that I can in no way describe them except to remind the reader of the swarming life which the solar microscope brings before his eyes in a drop of water - things transparent, supple, agile, chasing each other, devouring each other - forms like nought ever beheld by the naked eye. As the shapes were without symmetry, so their movements were without order. In their very vagrancies there was no sport; they came round me and round, thicker and faster and swifter, swarming over my head, crawling over my right arm, which was outstretched in involuntary command against all evil beings. ("The House And The Brain") — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things To low ambition and the pride of kings. Let us (since life can little more supply Than just to look about us, and to die) Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man; A mighty maze! but not without a plan. — Alexander Pope

And yet, within her anxiety, secured there like a gemstone, she carries the cool and curious power of occasionally being able to see the world vividly. Clarity bursts upon her a spray of little stars. She understands this, and thinks of it as one of the tricks of consciousness; there is something almost luxurious about it.. The narrative maze opens and permits her to pass through. She may be crowded out of her own life - she knows this for a fact and has always know it - but she possesses, as a compensatory gift, the startling ability to draft alternative versions. — Carol Shields

Running through the maze of life, you come across profound ambiguities and complexities. Yet the essence of living a meaningful life remains simple- following your heart and pursuing your life purpose. — Roopleen

That language may be a compound code, and that the discovery of an enormous complexity beneath a simple surface may well be more dismaying than delightful. E.g.: the maze of termite tunnels in your joist, the intricate cancer in her perfect breast, the psychopathology of everyday life, the Auschwitz in an anthill casually DDT'd by a child, the rage of atoms in a drop of ink - in short, anything examined curiously enough. — John Barth

When I look at my life and the lives of my female friends these days - with our dizzying number of opportunities and talents - I sometimes feel as though we are all mice in a giant experimental maze, scurrying around frantically, trying to find our way through. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Men speak of blind destiny, a thing without scheme or purpose. But what sort of destiny is that? Each act in this world from which there can be no turning back has before it another, and it another yet. In a vast and endless net. Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in that maze is itself an enslavement for it voids every alternative and binds one ever more tightly into the constraints that make a life. If the dead man could have forgiven his enemy for whatever wrong was done to him all would have been otherwise. Did the son set out to avenge his father? Did the dead man sacrifice his son? Our plans are predicated upon a future unknown to us. The world takes its form hourly by a weighing of things at hand, and while we may seek to puzzle out that form we have no way to do so. We have only God's law, and the wisdom to follow it if we will. — Cormac McCarthy

Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of 'all the little emptiness of love. — Ellen Glasgow

I suppose it's easier to see the way out of anything when you've found your way out of that maze. When you're stuck in the middle, in a series of dead-ends making circles, it's difficult to make any sense of anything. — Cecelia Ahern

The reality of life and an imperfect world dictates that things cannot be held constant to guarantee your success; you have to wiggle your way through a planned path within a maze, to attain your goal. — Archibald Marwizi

Oddly enough, MS has made my life so much better than it was before. I now appreciate what I have and I am not running around like a rat in a maze. — Teri Garr

There was, Alicia realized, a single hour that all the days since your birth pointed you toward. What you thought was a maze of choices, all the possibilities of what your life might become, was, in fact, a series of steps you took along a road, and when you reached your destination and looked back, only one path - the one chosen for you - was visible. — Justin Cronin

History, the way the teachers liked it, was a racetrack, a straight shot from start to finish line; life itself was more of a maze. — Cassandra Clare

That was on the pillar stone on Ynys Bainail," I said, indicating the carving. "What does it mean?"
"It is Mor Cylch, the maze of life," Tegid told me. "It is trodden with just enough light to see the next step or two ahead, but not more. At each turn the soul must decide whether to journey on or whether to go back the way it came."
"What if the soul does not journey on? What if it chooses to go back the way it came?"
"Stagnation and death," replied Tegid with mild vehemence. He seemed irritated that anyone would consider retreating.
"And if the soul travels on?"
"It draws nearer its destination," the bard answered. "The ultimate destination of all souls is the Heart of the Heart. — Stephen R. Lawhead

No matter which part of our brains we use, there are two things we all have in common: Our need to travel successfully through the maze of life, And the fact that 90% of our brains are water. — Stilton Jarlsberg

Pain, which is the feeling of our finiteness, is not a fixture in our life. It is not an end in itself, as joy is. To meet with it is to know that it has no part in the true permanence of creation. It is what error is in our intellectual life. To go through the history of the development of science is to go through the maze of mistakes it made current at different times. Yet no one really believes that science is the one perfect mode of disseminating mistakes. The progressive ascertainment of truth is the important thing to remember in the history of science, not its innumerable mistakes. Error, by its nature, cannot be stationary; it cannot remain with truth; like a tramp, it must quit its lodging as soon as it fails to pay its score to the full. — Rabindranath Tagore

Life is a maze from which we never escape. Every decision takes us in a different direction and every time we turn one way we could just as easily have turned the other. — Chloe Thurlow

Sometimes it takes a partner to say, "What is it you want?" because I think we operate in life and sometimes we don't know. We're all in some kind of maze going after the cheese at the end, and we get it and we go, "What is it that we want?" — Kevin Costner

Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in that mazeis itself an enslavement for it voids every alternate and binds one ever more tightly in to the constraints that make a life. — Cormac McCarthy

He finally pulled it all back into his heart, sucking in the painful tide of his misery. In the Glade, Chuck had become a symbol for him - a beacon that somehow they could make everything right again in the world. Sleep in beds. Get kissed goodnight. Have bacon and eggs for breakfast, go to a real school. Be happy.
But now Chuck was gone. And his limp body, to which Thomas still clung, seemed a cold talisman - that not only would those dreams of a hopeful future never come to pass, but that life had never been that way in the first place. That even in escape, dreary days lay ahead. A life of sorrow.
His returning memories were sketchy at best. But not much good floated in the muck.
Thomas reeled in the pain, locked it somewhere deep inside him. He did it for Teresa. For Newt and Minho. Whatever darkness awaited them, they'd be together, and that was all that mattered right then. — James Dashner

A giddy feeling, in a way, except there was the dreamy edge of impossibility to it - like running a dead-end maze - no way out - it couldn't come to a happy conclusion and yet I was doing it anyway because it was all I could think of to do. — Tim O'Brien

Life is a maze. Don't just gaze. Change your pace, to win the race.-RVM — R.v.m.

She is that maze,
the one you would love to chase.
She is the faith,
quite missing nowadays.
And her heart is a rave,
with hopeless barricades.
She is the one,
whose tears flow,
just as lavishly,
as her laughter roars! — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

My life had become weariness. It had wandered in a maze of unhappiness that led to renunciation and nothingness; it was bitter with the salt of all human things; yet it had laid up riches, riches to be proud of. — Hermann Hesse

How could anyone ever be happy in a life like this? he thought. Then, How could anyone be evil enough to do this to us? He understood more than ever the passion the Gladers felt for finding their way out of the Maze. It wasn't just a matter of escape. For the first time, he felt a hunger to get revenge on the people responsible for sending him there. — James Dashner

Seeing modern health care from the other side, I can say that it is clearly not set up for the patient. It is frequently a poor arrangement for doctors as well, but that does not mitigate how little the system accounts for the patient's best interest. Just when you are at your weakest and least able to make all the phone calls, traverse the maze of insurance, and plead for health-care referrals is that one time when you have to - your life may depend on it. — Ross I. Donaldson

Turned and ran down another. They remembered the corridors that held no cheese and quickly went into new areas. Sniff would smell out the general direction of the cheese, using his great nose, and Scurry would race ahead. They got lost, as you might expect, went off in the wrong direction and often bumped into walls. But after a while, they found their way. Like the mice, the two Littlepeople, Hem and Haw, also used their ability to think and learn from their past experiences. However, they relied on their complex brains to develop more sophisticated methods of finding Cheese. Sometimes they did well, but at other times their powerful human beliefs and emotions took over and clouded the way they looked at things. It made life in the Maze more complicated and challenging. Nonetheless, Sniff, Scurry, Hem and Haw all discovered, in their own way, what they were looking for. They each found their own kind of cheese one day at the end of one of the corridors in Cheese Station — Spencer Johnson

The criers of the Mysteries speak again, bidding all men welcome to the House of Light. The great institution of materiality has failed. The false civilization built by man has turned, and like the monster of Frankenstein, is destroying its creator. Religion wanders aimlessly in the maze of theological speculation. Science batters itself impotently against the barriers of the unknown. Only transcendental philosophy knows the path. Only the illumined reason can carry the understanding part of man upward to the light. Only philosophy can teach man to be born well, to live well, to die well, and in perfect measure be born again. Into this band of the elect
those who have chosen the life of knowledge, of virtue, and of utility
the philosophers of the ages invite YOU. — Manly P. Hall

The intensity of her religious disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent: and with such a nature struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once exaggeration and inconsistency. The thing which seemed to her best, she wanted to justify by the completest knowledge; and not to live in a pretended admission of rules which were never acted on. Into this soul-hunger as yet all her youthful passion was poured; the union which attracted her was one that would deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own ignorance, and give her the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide who would take her along the grandest path. — George Eliot

The whole world seemed a maze of shifting mirrors in which I wandered alone, looking always and frenziedly for the exit back into my real life, where people had substance, did as they said they would, and were whole. — Claire Messud

At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze. — John Green

Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I dont want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to und3erstand how people answered that question and the question each of you posed in your papers
how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life. — John Green

[Writing about themselves] gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. That's the funny thing about mazes; what's baffling on the ground begins to make sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself. — Wally Lamb

The confirmed prejudices of a thoughtful life are as hard to change as the confirmed habits of an indolent life; and as some must trifle away age because they trifled away youth, others must labor on in a maze of error because they have wandered there too long to find their way out. — Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

There is law enough all about us
in almanack and season, anniversary
days come round, the round earth's carnivale
of chimes and recessionals.
Good to be included
there. Good also what is not
fixed or sure even,
the second breath of being
here when the May-bush
snows in mid-September, as giddy
happenstance leads us
this way into
a lost one's arms, or that way
deeper into the maze. — David Malouf

Life is not a maze where you have your eyes on the gaps, life is a beautiful journey, stop looking for the gaps. — Malti Bhojwani

Far away, in the meadow, shadows flickered in the Mirror's Maze, as if parts of someone's life, yet unborn, were trapped there, waiting to be lived. — Ray Bradbury

Newt reached out and grabbed Alby by the shoulders. "Alby, lay off a bit. You're hurtin' more than helpin', ya know?"
Alby let go of Thomas's shirt and stepped back, his chest heaving with breaths. "Ain't got time to be nice, Greenbean. Old life's over, new life's begun. Learn the rules quick, listen, don't talk. You get me?"
Thomas looked over at Newt, hoping for help. Everything inside him churned and hurt; the tears that had yet to come burned his eyes.
Newt nodded. "Greenie, you get him, right?" He nodded again.
Thomas fumed, wanted to punch somebody. But he simply said, "Yeah. — James Dashner

Life's a maze, you twist and you turn through it
The driest of droughts, maneuvered and I earned through it — Clipse

Life is not a Race, but we still continue the Chase and try to be an Ace. It's time to get out of this Maze and Truly Live with Grace. — R.v.m.

Everything we do - our whole life, Greenie - revolves around the Maze. Every lovin' second of every lovin' day we spend in honor of the Maze, tryin' to solve somethin' that's not shown us it has a bloody solution, — James Dashner

Everything in a movie completed. Relationships began, they developed and they ended or went on happily forever. All in less than two hours. Life, though, was not like a movie, it was ragged, an outdated map with new streets added whose direction you could never quite discern, or a maze filled with suddenly appearing walls and aimless corridors. Even when a movie didn't have a happy ending, it had a logical ending that you could live with. Life had endings that you didn't know were endings, or endings that thought were endings and then they weren't. — Marshall Thornton

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk. — Cyril Connolly

He felt full of a dense and sour substance that was blocking his chest, and it wasn't grief. After all those years, life now seemed like no more than a trap, a maze, not even a maze, just a room that was all walls, no door. — Etgar Keret