Livable Quotes & Sayings

We only have X amount of days and time on this planet - how am I going to spend that time? The way that I want to spend it is caring about the people that I love the most, and fighting to make the world a more livable place for everybody. — Michael Franti

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use. — Lao-Tzu

The most empowering thing you can do though is to create innovative ways to bring in livable wages. That begins with a debt free lifestyle. — Brandi L. Bates

Ruut Veenhoven, keeper of the database, got it right when he said: "Happiness requires livable conditions, but not paradise." We humans are imminently adaptable. We survived an Ice Age. We can survive anything. We find happiness in a variety of places and, as the residents of frumpy Slough demonstrated, places can change. Any atlas of bliss must be etched in pencil. — Eric Weiner

America is ready for livable communities. America is ready for high-speed rail. — Greg Abbott

The Bible, all of it, is livable; it is the text for living our lives. It reveals a God-created, God-ordered, God-blessed world in which we find ourselves at home and whole. — Eugene H. Peterson

I never would have made it if I could not have laughed. It lifted me momentarily out of this horrible situation, just enough to make it livable. — Viktor E. Frankl

Our world is evolving without consideration, and the result is a loss of biodiversity, energy issues, congestion in cities. But geography, if used correctly, can be used to redesign sustainable and more livable cities. — Jack Dangermond

217. "We're only given as much as the heart can endure," "What does not kill you makes you stronger," "Our sorrows provide us with the lessons we most need to learn": these are the kinds of phrases that enrage my injured friend. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to come up with a spiritual lesson that demands becoming a quadriparalytic. The tepid "there must be a reason for it" notion sometimes floated by religious or quasi-religious acquaintances or bystanders, is, to her, another form of violence. She has no time for it. She is too busy asking, in this changed form, what makes a livable life, and how she can live it. — Maggie Nelson

People jeopardize their lives for the sake of making the moment livable. Nothing sways them from the habit - not illness, not the sacrifice of love and relationship, not the loss of all earthly goods, not the crushing of their dignity, not the fear of dying. The drive is that relentless. — Gabor Mate

The only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war. — Richard M. Nixon

I think it's a great handicap to be discovered at an early age. I didn't have that burden of early success. I had the much more livable and durable career where success comes late, and comes slowly, and you ease into it. So by the time it comes, you're ready to deal with it. — Philip Glass

If things are better for women there, it is due to a profound and enduring social consensus that life should be made livable based on who they are and not on an abstract moralistic notion of how they ought to be. — Judith Warner

Once it was the fashion to represent villages as places inhabited by laughable, livable simpletons, unspotted by the worldliness of city life, though occasionally shrewd in rural concerns. Later it was the popular thing to show villages as rotten with vice, and especially such sexual vice ... incest, sodomy, bestiality, sadism, and masochism were supposed to rage behind lace curtains and in the haylofts, while a rigid piety was professed in the streets. — Robertson Davies

Women on trains
have a life
that is exactly livable
the precision of days flashing past — Audre Lorde

Sunday morning,I empty of my little tricks to make life livable. — Jack Kerouac

Global warming is a justice issue. It's a justice issue because global warming is theft - theft from our own children and grand children, of their right to a livable future. It's a justice issue, because its victims are, and will be, disproportionately poor and of color, those least able to contend with or to flee, the storms, droughts, famines, and rising tides of global warming. — Fred Small

Future generations, if there is a livable world for them,
will look back at the epochal transition we are making to a life-sustaining society.
And they may well call this
the time of the Great Turning. — Joanna Macy

Livable neighborhoods with a vibrant street life will stimulate our economic life as well. — Gavin Newsom

The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood. — Martin Luther King Jr.

You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for hourse and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory
what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our "flooding. — Toni Morrison

The Italians have long known what makes a livable town or city. — Norman Foster

I am not proposing that we bring our oil and auto industries to a screeching halt. There is still time to begin a series of gradual steps toward new transportation and energy policies, livable cities, and more humane, efficient transit systems. — Stewart Udall

Building a livable world isn't rocket science; it's far more complex than that." - Ed Ayres — Naomi Klein

Meditation is a silent heart, a peaceful mind which can make life more lovable, more livable ... — Rajneesh

Life becomes livable only to the extent that death is treated as a friend, never as an enemy. — Mahatma Gandhi

If loyalty is, and always has been, perceived as obsolete, why do we continue to praise it? Because loyalty is essential to the most basic things that make life livable. Without loyalty there can be no love. Without loyalty there can be no family. Without loyalty there can be no friendship. Without loyalty there can be no commitment to community or country. And without those things, there can be no society. — Eric Felten

A healthy environment is essential to a livable Oregon and a strong economy. — Ted Kulongoski

Working with Your Budding Adolescent: 16 to 24 Weeks

When you and your puppy reach the budding adolescent stage, you may feel like hiding in the closet. Some days are livable. However, other days you feel like moving. Your puppy doesn't listen or respond to known directions. He bolts, chases, and nips at everything that moves. He demands your attention and barks or mounts you when he doesn't get his way. He insists on being the center of attention every moment of every day.

Keep in mind that this stage is normal. I managed to live through it, and you will too. — Sarah Hodgson

Oh courage ... oh yes! If only one had that ... Then life might be livable, in spite of everything. — Henrik Ibsen

I always thought the point of life was something richer than that. Something full of great tragedy or comedy, reversal of fortune, ecstasy, that kind of thing. But no, contemporary urban theorists seem satisfied with the merely livable, which always sounds to me like the merely survivable, the not so bad. — Jonathan Raymond

I thought the world had actually ended. I thought nothing good could ever happen again. I thought anything might happen if I wasn't vigilant. I didn't eat. I didn't go out. I didn't want to see anyone. But I survived, Paul. Much to my own surprise, I got through it. And life ... well, gradually became livable again. — Jojo Moyes

I'd been trained in the art of psychotherapy, the excavation of the past as a means of untangling the present and rendering it livable. It's detective work, of sorts, crouching stealthily in the blind alleys of the unconscious. (179) — Jonathan Kellerman

Life is livable because we know that wherever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions towards us by an almost instinctive network of taboos. — Havelock Ellis

Any soldier returning home must rediscover his humanity and establish a livable peace with the discovered, liberated, permanently dark places in his own heart
the darkness that is always with us. — Larry Heinemann

The society of life on Mars, or the challenge of making Mars more livable, will have significant benefits on our attempts to modify and change in some ways the environment here on Earth. — Buzz Aldrin

Circumstances would always exist in the human's success story, but it is not controlled by destiny. Destiny is controlled by "FATE." I think it might be the optimist in me, but in America, "Dreams" are livable. — Henry Johnson Jr

It is nothing short of baffling to me how a city like Melbourne, where I struggle to find accessible facilities on a very regular basis, could be considered the most livable city in the world. I suppose it all depends on what makes a city 'livable' for you. — Stella Young

As a species, taking all in all, we are still too young, too juvenile, to be trusted. We have spread across the face of the earth in just a few thousand years, no time at all as evolution clocks time, covering all livable parts of the planet, endangering other forms of life, and now threatening ourselves. — Lewis Thomas

Yes, liquor is the thin white coat of paint you wash over the cracks in your foundation. Makes any rotten house livable for a few hours. Sometimes days. — Toby Barlow

We do not know the future, but we are creating it now. How we align the vision we have for a livable place with intelligent actions is what the future of mankind will be. It is all we can do to perfect ourselves. Nature will determine the rest. — Helen Drayton

Why do I say that I was responsible 'for the turn [your] life would take? That it was up to me 'to make [your] life livable?' In all, eleven lines of poison in three doses, over twenty pages; three tiny strokes that debase you and distort you, written seven years later, that rob us of the meaning of seven years of our life.
Who wrote those eleven lines? I mean: Who was I when I wrote those lines? I feel a painful need to give us back those seven years along with what you truly meant to me. — Andre Gorz

Teddy was reminded of Paterson, but that polyglot population had appeared healthier, more hopeful, the American mood more fertile then in its promises, and the streets of Silk City with their little yards holding a fuchsia bush or a blue-robed plaster statue of the Virgin more livable than these stacked, stinking, ill-lit dens. He had been a part of the population then, a schoolboy immersed in its details of competition and expectation and childish collusion and hierarchy, alive in its struggle and too absorbed to judge or pity, whereas now he came upon it from outside, from above, as an agent of power and ownership, an enforcer and avenger, the representative of the system which squeezed the lowly by the same iron laws whereby it generation profits for the lucky and strong. — John Updike

The Earth faces environmental problems right now that threaten the imminent destruction of civilization and the end of the planet as a livable world. Humanity cannot afford to waste its financial and emotional resources on endless, meaningless quarrels between each group and all others. there must be a sense of globalism in which the world unites to solve the real problems that face all groups alike. — Isaac Asimov

So much for the recreational side of night life in the upper-bracket-income hotels of Manhattan. And in its root-origins the very word itself is implicit with implication: re-create. Analyze it and you'll see it also means to reproduce. But clever, ingenious Man has managed to sidetrack it into making life more livable.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

Earth Day should encourage us to reflect on what we are doing to make our planet a more sustainable and livable place. — Scott Peters

I have a friend who feels sometimes that the world is hostile to human life
he says it chills us and kills us. But how could we be were it not for this planet that provided our very shape? Two conditions
gravity and a livable temperature range between freezing and boiling
have given us fluids and flesh. The trees we climb and the ground we walk on have given us five fingers and toes. The "place" (from the root plat, broad, spreading, flat) gave us far-seeing eyes, the streams and breezes gave us versatile tongues and whorly ears. The land gave us a stride, and the lake a dive. The amazement gave us our kind of mind. We should be thankful for that, and take nature's stricter lessons with some grace. — Gary Snyder

But in the end, without Earth, everything would eventually die. Humans had been out of the gravity well a long time. Long enough to have developed the technology to cut that umbilical cord, but they'd just never bothered to do it. Stagnant. Humanity, for all its desire to fling itself into every livable pocket it could reach, had become stagnant. Satisfied to fly around in ships built half a century before, using technology that hadn't changed in longer than that. Earth had been so focused — James S.A. Corey

Along with a livable wage, many parents are desperate for quality affordable child care. — Kirsten Gillibrand

No society can last in conditions of anarchy. This is self-evident and I am in full agreement. But my aim is not the establishment of an anarchist society or the total destruction of the state. Here I differ from anarchists. I do not believe that it is possible to destroy the modern state. It is pure imagination to think that some day this power will be overthrown. From a pragmatic standpoint there is no chance of success. Furthermore, I do not believe that anarchist doctrine is the solution to the problem of organization in society and government. I do not think that if anarchism were to succeed we should have a better or more livable society. Hence I am not fighting for the triumph of this doctrine.
On the other hand, it seems to me that an anarchist attitude is the only one that is sufficiently radical in the face of a general statist system. — Jacques Ellul

Why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for livable societies, is built into us? Does anyone truly believe that our ancestors lacked social norms before they had religion? Did they never assist others in need, or complain about an unfair deal? Humans must have worried about the functioning of their communities well before the current religions arose, which is only a few thousand years ago. — Frans De Waal

The least livable life is the one without coherence-nothing connects, nothing means anything. Stories make connections. They allow us to see our past, our present, and our future as interrelated and purposeful ... The stories we value most reassure us that life is worth the pain, that meaning is not an illusion, and that others share our experience with us. — Daniel Taylor

What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most. — Edward Abbey

The drug war has nothing to do with making communities livable or creating a decent future for black kids. On the contrary, prohibition is directly responsible for the power of crack dealers to terrorize whole neighborhoods. And every cent spent on the cops, investigators, bureaucrats, courts, jails, weapons, and tests required to feed the drug-war machine is a cent not spent on reversing the social policies that have destroyed the cities, nourished racism, and laid the groundwork for crack culture. — Ellen Willis

It's not how long you live, but how you live that's important. Therefore, don't make your life just livable, make it memorable. — Tony Robbins

For most Americans, their primary aspiration is to achieve a better life ... to earn a livable wage in a good job. To have the time to spend with family and do the things they enjoy. To be able to retire with security. And to give their own kids a chance to do as well or better than themselves. — Marco Rubio

Love just seems to make life not just livable, but a gallant, gallant event. — Toni Morrison

Turning corporations loose and letting the profit motive run amok is not a prescription for a more livable world. — Tom Scholz

While there is no cure, cystic fibrosis is so close to being a livable disease. There is a lot of hope. — Max Carver

Revolutions are usually started by people who are hungry. Sure, there are ideological revolutions, but, again, people rise up because they feel that the alternative is no longer livable. They have to be desperate. — Julianna Baggott

I do not believe in religion, but if I had to choose one, it would be Buddhism. It seems more livable, closer to men. — Bjork

It matters whether the government blows tens of billions of dollars on tax loopholes for billionaires or whether that same money is used to lower costs for students who have to borrow money to go to college. It matters whether Wall Street can pocket billions of dollars by cheating people on mortgages and tricking them on credit cards or if there's a cop on the beat to keep them honest. It matters whether the minimum wage is set so low that a full-time worker still lives in poverty or if minimum wage also means a livable wage. When — Elizabeth Warren

After the war of course it will be like the start of spring, which is always so brilliantly sudden. The leaves will burst back onto the trees and close the gaps between the branches and we shall be startled - shan't we? - s we are startled at the end of every winter. We shall think: oh, I had quite forgotten there were three livable seasons. — Chris Cleave

Will this massive outcry [about pollution] continue long enough to have effective results? Will federal and state laws be enacted with effective enforcement clauses? Will people be concerned long enough to pay the bill through higher prices? Will towns tole lost jobs when it proves too costly to clean obsolete plants? ... I think so, but it sure won't be as easy as the present outcry and political oratory suggest. The answers to preserving a livable environment are not all simple, and some of the nuts now pushing simplistic cure-alls won't help bring about any lasting solutions. — Malcolm Forbes

However we resolve the issue in our individual homes, the moral challenge is, put simply, to make work visible again: not only the scrubbing and vacuuming, but all the hoeing, stacking, hammering, drilling, bending, and lifting that goes into creating and maintaining a livable habitat. In an ever more economically unequal world, where so many of the affluent devote their lives to ghostly pursuits like stock trading, image making, and opinion polling, real work, in the old-fashioned sense of labor that engages hand as well as eye, that tires the body and directly alters the physical world tends to vanish from sight. The feminists of my generation tried to bring some of it into the light of day, but, like busy professional women fleeing the house in the morning, they left the project unfinished, the debate broken off in mid-sentence, the noble intentions unfulfilled. Sooner or later, someone else will have to finish the job. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Life at its best is a series of misadventures with a few sound decisions thrown in just to make it livable. — Sebastian Di Mattia

If life doesn't seem livable with the body's nature corrupted, not even with every sort of food and drink and every sort of wealth and every sort of rule, will it then be livable when the nature of that very thing by which we live is confused and corrupted, even if a man does whatever else he might want except that which will rid him of vice and injustice and will enable him to acquire justice and virtue? — Plato

I'm really not livable with when I'm rehearsing because I'm living the character. — Donald Sinden

The results of a new study are out this week saying that New Jersey is one of the most livable states in the country. The study has a margin of error of 100 percent. — Conan O'Brien

My dream is remaking and reforming a more sustainable, more livable, delicious future. — Kate Orff

The ugliest thing in America is greed, the lust for power and domination, the lunatic ideology of perpetual Growth - with a capital G. 'Progress' in our nation has for too long been confused with 'Growth'; I see the two as different, almost incompatible, since progress means, or should mean, change for the better - toward social justice, a livable and open world, equal opportunity and affirmative action for all forms of life. And I mean all forms, not merely the human. The grizzly, the wolf, the rattlesnake, the condor, the coyote, the crocodile, whatever, each and every species has as much right to be here as we do. — Edward Abbey

What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable. — Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

Every infant born is testimony to the intricacy and breadth of possibilities inherent in humanity. Yet from birth* in most homes and social groups, we teach children that only certain possibilities within them are livable; we teach them to hear only certain voices inside themselves, to feel only what we believe they ought to feel, to recognize only certain others as human. — Adrienne Rich

No, he didn't care about anything else in the world except for his woman, the sweetest kid he'd ever met, the smartest too, a kid who'd turned into the sexiest woman he'd ever seen. A woman who didn't just love with her whole heart but with her body and soul. A woman who time and time again, brought him to his fucking knees, had him prayer to a god he didn't believe in just so he could keep her by his side.
A woman whose motherfucking smile made the world and his life seem somewhat livable. Even worth it sometimes. — Madeline Sheehan

So-called global warming is just a secret ploy by wacko tree-huggers to make America energy-independent, clean our air & water, improve fuel-efficiency of our vehicles, kickstart 21st century industries, & make our cities safer & more livable. Don't let them get away with it! — Chip Giller

Besides infrastructure, there is a huge opportunity in housing and urbanisation of cities - not only building new ones, but also renewing the infrastructure of old cities to make them more livable. This provides tremendous scope for large investments to fuel growth. — Jamshyd Godrej

More and more Americans feel threatened by runaway technology, by large-scale organization, by overcrowding. More and more Americans are appalled by the ravages of industrial progress, by the defacement of nature, by man-made ugliness. If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery. — John W. Gardner

The day Stamp Paid saw the two backs through the window and then hurried down the steps, he believed the undecipherable language clamoring around the house was the mumbling of the black and angry dead. Very few had died in bed, like Baby Suggs, and none that he knew of, including Baby, had lived a livable life. Even the educated colored: the long-school people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there. You needed two heads for that. Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. — Toni Morrison

It gets lighter." I awnsered with the truth and regretted the glib taste on my tounge. "I mean, it never goes away. The feelings. They never stop, but it gets...I don't know...livable, I guess. Like when you break your leg, at first it's excruciating and you think your going to die. But eventually after you've had time to heal, it kind of fades into this constant, dull ache." A faint breeze whistled through the leaves of the trees and plants surrounding us and tickled the back of my neck like cold fingers. "You never walk the same again, but eventually you do walk. — Lisa Roecker

We all live within our belief solar systems; it's how we make it through each day. What feels "real" and "true" is based on it. Internal consistency and function means that a belief solar system is simply livable, but it says nothing about its veracity. — Daniel Ionson

We all need the living green or we'll shrivel up inside. To make the modern city livable is the task of our times. — Jens Jensen

And thus ever works the pallid academic mind, denying the real, exalting the fictitious and the false, incapable of adjusting itself to the flow of living things, to the reality and the pathos of man's follies, to the valiant hope that ever causes him to aspire, and again to aspire; that never lifts a hand in aid because it cannot . . . when what the world needs is courage, common sense and human sympathy, and a moral standard that is plain, valid and livable. — Sarah Vowell

We tell stories with maps about global warming, biodiversity; we can design more livable cities, track the spread of epidemics. That makes a difference. — Jack Dangermond

The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite; with books my life would be livable
any life. — Oscar Wilde

if one's religion is to mean anything, if it is to last, it has to stand outside of time and place. Its truths have to be transcendent. And though we moderns have to find a way to make the tradition livable in our own situations, we must never forget that we don't judge the religion; the religion judges us. To be blunt, a god that is no bigger than our own desires is not God at all, but a divinized rationalization for self-worship. — Rod Dreher

There is the GIS world that is largely managing authoritative data sources, supporting geocentric workflows like fixing roads, making cities more livable through better planning, environmental management, forest management, drilling in the right location for oil, managing assets and utilities. — Jack Dangermond

Once we realize that the boundaries between work and play are artificial, we can take matters in hand and begin the difficult task of making life more livable. — Daniel H. Pink

If you're crossing an ocean for NSConference, there's a good chance you're stopping in Amsterdam. Come a week early and check out Mdevcon. It's a great scene, and the perfect warmup, but it's also worth it just to see the most beautiful venue in the most livable city in the world. You can even attend some Appsterdam events while you're in town. ;) — Mike Lee

Nothing destroys a livable life more completely than unfounded hope — Yiyun Li

You and I shouldn't claim we love Oregon more than anyone else, but that we love Oregon as much as anyone. Our thoughts today, and our deliberations to come, must spring from our determination to keep Oregon lovable and to make it even more livable. — Tom McCall

We must develop a federal program of public works, retraining, and jobs for all - so that none, white or black, will have cause to feel threatened
... There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum and livable income for every American family. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Change biology, and you could change society--but could you change society on its own? Were we as a species simply condemned to permanent misery, all because of how we have evolved?

This was the conundrum that the Oankali books had posed to her, and the Parables had been intended (but failed) to solve: How do you create a more sustainable, more benign, more livable society when you're stuck working with human beings? — Gerry Canavan

In the Nazi Arbeit [work] camps back in '44 when a man was caught smoking one cigarette, the whole barracks would die," a patient, Ralph, once told me. "For one cigarette! Yet even so, the men did not give up their inspiration, their will to live and to enjoy what they got out of life from certain substances, like liquor or tobacco or whatever the case may be." I don't know how accurate his account was as history, but as a chronicler of his own drug urges and those of his fellow Hastings Street addicts, Ralph spoke the bare truth: people jeopardize their lives for the sake of making the moment livable. — Gabor Mate

A philosophy must be livable; it can't just be ideas. — Marty Rubin

If you design communities for automobiles, you get more automobiles. If you design them for people, you get walkable, livable communities. — Parris Glendening

Stellar Plains, New Jersey, was a town that got mentioned whenever there was an article called "The Fifty Most Livable Suburbs in America." Unlike most suburbs, this one was considered progressive. Though the turnpike that ran through it was punctuated by carpet-remnant outlets and tire wholesalers, and even an unsettling, windowless store no one had ever been to, advertising DVDS AND CHINESE SPECIALTY ITEMS, Main Street was quaint and New Englandy, with a cosmopolitan slant. There was an excellent bookstore, Chapter and Verse, at a moment when bookstores around the country were making way for cell-phone stores. — Meg Wolitzer

If I tell you that I would be disobeying the god and on that account it is impossible for me to keep quiet, you won't be persuaded by me, taking it that I am ionizing. And if I tell you that it is the greatest good for a human being to have discussions every day about virtue and the other things you hear me talking about, examining myself and others, and that the unexamined life is not livable for a human being, you will be even less persuaded. — Socrates

I see the invisible spirits, where demons still find it livable. I need a hug to hold my soul inside my body. — Lisa Lopes

Someone must transform income into the food, shelter, clothing, nurture, discipline, education, minding, nursing, transportation, and emotional support that creates life outside of the office, permits survival of the race, cares for the ill and disabled, and makes life livable when we can no longer care for ourselves. — Anne-Marie Slaughter

More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable. — Michel De Certeau