Living In Paradise Quotes & Sayings

Entranced by promises of a material paradise of limitless luxury, humanity has too long ignored the mismatch between the imperatives of our existence as living beings on a finite planet and the imperatives of the institutions of money that chart our path to the future. Created to build colonial empires in service to kings, global corporations are ill suited to the task of building just, sustainable, and compassionate civil societies that nurture sufficiency, partnership, and respect for the whole of life. — David Korten

When did your childhood end? How badly did you get hurt, when you did, when you were this little wee little hurtable thing, nothing but big eyes, a heart, a few hundred words? Isn't it wonderful how we never recover? Injuries and wounds, ladies and gents. Slights and abuses, oh, what a paradise. Living in fear, suiting the hurt to our need. What a happy life. What a good game. Who can stand the most, the most life, and still smile, still grin into the coming night and say more, more, encore, encore, you fuckers, you fates, just give me more of the bloody bloody same. — Will Eno

Many of us have things backwards. We believe that we have to wait to create the circumstances we want in life and rack up a lot of successes so we can finally relax. Actually, it works the other way around. We should leave where we are and move to where we ultimately dream of living, whether it's Boulder, Santa Monica, Chicago, or Tibet. Then once we're there, we'll figure out ways to fashion a livelihood that will enable us to survive and to prosper from there. Paradise shouldn't wait, and happiness shouldn't either. — Gary Goodman

There are two kinds of paradises in our universe: The ones which have been created by the evolutionary processes and the ones which have been created by the living beings! There exists no other paradise! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Bro, we're living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of petite bourgeoisie ideology, a petite bourgeoisie ideology whose resources and ruses are infinite and which ubiquitously permeates the world
high culture, low culture, bienpensant media, prestige literature, pop music, commerce, sports, academia, you name it. The only reasonable response to this situation is to maintain an implacable antipathy toward everything. Denounce everyone. Make war against yourself. Guillotine all groveling intellectuals. That said, I think it's important to maintain a cheery disposition. This will hasten the restoration of Paradise. I've memorized this line from Andre Breton's magnificent homage to Antonin Artaud
"I salute Antonin Artaud for his passionate, heroic negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive." Given the state of things, that's what we need to be doing, all the time
negating everything that causes us to be dead while alive. — Mark Leyner

You've heard of people living in a fool's paradise? Well, Leonora has a duplex there. — George S. Kaufman

I experienced the joy of living alone for the first time while also falling deeply in love with Eve. Genesis Eve. Mother of all the Living Eve. Paradise Lost Eve. Lover Eve. Sister Eve. My Eve. She, too, had made a decision that was both painful and liberating. I was thankful for her willingness to defy a rule for experience, for story, for possibility. --Kitty Taylor — Various

Life. This morning the sun made me adore it. It had, behind the dripping pine trees, the oriental brightness, orange and crimson, of a living being, a rose and an apple, in the physical and ideal fusion of a true and daily paradise. — Juan Ramon Jimenez

The price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life
we went soft, we lost our edge. — Frank Herbert

The danger which threatens us comes from Labour ... Those who think that the Conservative or Unionist Party, standing as such and disavowing its Liberal allies, could return with a working majority are living in a fools paradise and, if they persist, may easily involve themselves and the country in dangers the outcome of which it is hard to predict. — Austen Chamberlain

He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

You can't life in paradise- but you are living right here. Make this your paradise or make this your hell. The choice is entirely yours. Really. — Brad Warner

In the pages of a book, we are in paradise. — Lailah Gifty Akita

A world always on the heels of its appearance was a world not worth living in, one not worth living. A carcass of what used to be a world was itself a fated unthinking vagabond and a cabriole caboose can not help the fate of such world. Nor can a caracole mountain right or left ever amount to some fated paradise. — Dew Platt

On my return to Cornwall I discovered that I was living in a tropical paradise. For now I am content to explore my own home and our nearest neighbour France. — John Dyer

I'm not saying we'll live to see some sort of paradise. But just fighting for change makes you stronger. Not hoping for anything will kill you for sure. Take a chance, Jess. You're already wondering if the world could change. Try imagining a world worth living in, and then ask yourself if that isn't worth fighting for. You've come too far to give up on hope, Jess. — Leslie Feinberg

If the majority of people were right, we'd be living in paradise. But we are not living in paradise, we are living in hell. What does it mean? That means the majority of people are wrong. So I never believed what people told me. — Marjane Satrapi

If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution - then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise. — Aldous Huxley

There were many good years. Good decades, good centuries. We believed we were living in paradise. Perhaps that was our downfall. We wanted our lives to be perfect, so we ignored imperfections. Problems were magnified through inattention and war might have become inevitable if the Bore hadn't ever made. — Robert Jordan

There is no paradise except that which we create in the great tomb of the churches. There is no hell, no inferno except the frenzy of living. — Henri Barbusse

What is happiness? What is a good life? Is it a life without suffering? Something like that doesn't exist ... Life is filled with suffering and sorrow. So it's no wonder that to those who fear suffering, the world seems like a living hell! And still ... those who bravely keep going and try to push through this hell ... They'll find that it's only a small stretch of the road to happiness. The truly great are those who never lose hope, even when thrown into hell ... And as long as we have faith in ourselves, even hell itself can be a paradise! — Naoyuki Ochiai

If not for the cost burdens of fear we would all be living in paradise — Richard Gerber

They were living in some kind of movie projected by this intellectual, electromechanical machine that had been created for their happiness, saying: PARADISE PARADISE PARADISE but which had inadvertently shut them out from direct experience of life itself - and from each other. — Robert M. Pirsig

I live in the paradise of my imagination. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I realized that Eastern thought had somewhat more compassion for all living things. Man was a form of life that in another reincarnation might possibly be a horsefly or a bird of paradise or a deer. So a man of such a faith, looking at animals, might be looking at old friends or ancestors. In the East the wilderness has no evil connotation; it is thought of as an expression of the unity and harmony of the universe. — William O. Douglas

I've got no other home to go to, not anymore. When I look at England now I see a dead place, Rupert. A wasteland. I won't live in a wasteland. I'd rather die in paradise. — Lev Grossman

I think we are living in paradise with regards to the ways we can amuse ourselves, communicate. We have such a richness of possibilities. — Ian Watson

It is like falling in love. If you can notice, the grass is greener, the sky is bluer and the air is fresher. I don't know if it is the magic of the Alps or an emotional gravitational pull for the soul, but what I know is, it is truly Paradise on Earth! — Shahla Khan

Whether it is seen in personal terms or trans-personal terms, whether it is Heaven or Nirvana or Happy Hunting Ground or the Garden of Paradise, the weight and authority of tradition maintains that death is just an alteration in our state of consciousness, and that the quality of our continued existence in the afterlife depends on the quality of our living here and now. — John Smith

We're heading for a world showdown, a worldwide confrontation. If we think we can solve our problems without God, then we're living in a fool's paradise. — Billy Graham

But at the end, if we are brave enough to love, if we are strong enough to forgive, if we are generous enough to rejoice in another's happiness, and if we are wise enough to know that there is enough love to go around for us all, then we can achieve a fulfillment that no other living creature will ever know, we can reenter paradise. — Harold S. Kushner

The conclusion to which I am ever more clearly coming is that the only hope of attaining a true system of economics is to fling aside,once and forever, the mazy and preposterous assumptions of the Ricardian school. Our English economists have been living in a fool's paradise. The truth is with the French school, and the sooner we recognize the fact, the better it will be for all the world, except perhaps the few writers who are far too committed to the old erroneous doctrines to allow for renunciation. — William Stanley Jevons

I thought to myself then that it didn't matter where I ended up; I'd always be living that summer in that town, wishing that I;d done things differently, tormented by the fact that I hadn't. I'd never go far enough to be able to escape it. Maybe you're happy about that. OR maybe you're not. Maybe you're carrying your own regrets, and you understand how easy it is to let your life get away from you. I wish I could be the hero of this story, but I'm not. I'm just the one to tell it, at least my part in it- the story of Katie Mackey and the people who failed her. It's an old one, this tale of selfish desires and the lament that follows, as ancient as the story of Adam and Eve turned away forever from paradise. — Lee Martin

The plough of Time breaks up our Eden-land, And tramples down its fruitful flowery prime. Yet thro' the dust of ages living shoots O' the old immortal seed start in the furrows; And, where Love looked on with glorious eye, These quicken'd germs of everlastingness Flower lusty, as of old in Paradise! — Gerald Massey

In time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why,remember how
in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)
in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if,remember yes
in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)
and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me,remember me — E. E. Cummings

I receive grace. And through me, grace could flow on. Like a cycle of water in continuous movement, grace is meant to fall, a rain ... again, again, again. I could share the grace, multiply the joy, extend the table of the feast, enlarge the paradise of His presence. I am blessed. I can bless. — Ann Voskamp

Kessler depicts his developing intimacy with a handful of dairy goats and offers an enviable glimpse of the pastoral good life. Yet he also cautions, "Wherever the notion of paradise exists, so does the idea that it was lost. Paradise is always in the past." The title Goat Song is a literal rendering of the Greek word traghoudhia, tragedy. Reading it, I was reminded of Leo Marx's analysis of Thoreau's Walden. In The Machine in the Garden, Marx names Thoreau a tragic, if complex pastoralist. After failing to make an agrarian living raising beans for commercial trade (although his intent was always more allegorical than pecuniary), Thoreau ends Walden by replacing the pastoral idea where it originated: in literature. Paradise, Marx concludes, is not ultimately to be found at Walden Pond; it is to be found in the pages of Walden. — Heather Paxson

If what was supposed to have been destroyed in Paradise was destructible, then it was not decisive; but if it was indestructible, then we are living in a false belief. — Franz Kafka

I was a good college kid, all-American and baseball-playing, living in the dorms with a million barbarians. I did not expect to be claimed by Fitzgerald hook, line, and sinker. 'This Side of Paradise' - that sweet, sophomoric pastiche of notes, scenes, poetry, and plays - I felt like he'd written the book just for me. — Ron Carlson

Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in its struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social level's role in keeping the biological level under control. — Robert M. Pirsig

We're living as if we were in mourning for a lost paradise, he thought. As if we longed for the car thieves and safecrackers of the old days, who doffed their caps and behaved like gentlemen when we came to take them in. But those days have irretrievably vanished, and it's questionable whether they were ever as idyllic as we remember them. — Henning Mankell

A wonderful point in favor of some kind of hereafter is this: When the mind rejects as childishly absurd a paradise with musical angels or abstract colonnades with Horace and Milton in togas conversing and walking together through the eternal twilight, or the protracted voluptas of the orient or any other eternity
such as the one with devils and porcupines
we forget that if we could have imagined life before living it would have seemed more improbable than all our hereafters — Vladimir Nabokov

Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like - Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything - but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there — Clive James

I necessarily fear change except that it's so seldom for the better. It's just that I can live with any number of things going straight to hell as long as these streams continue to hold up. If this amounts to living in a fool's paradise, don't waste your time trying to explain that to the fool. — John Gierach

If you cannot predict the betrayal from the ones that you love and trust the most, then you are living in a fool's paradise. — Lionel Suggs

Why then are we here? Would God keep His children out of paradise a single moment longer than was necessary? Why is the army of the living God still on the battlefield when one charge might give them the victory? Why are His children still wandering hither and thither through a maze, when a solitary word from His lips would bring them into the centre of their hopes in heaven? The answer is - they are here that they may "live unto the Lord," and may bring others to know His love. We remain on earth as sowers to scatter good seed; as ploughmen to break up the fallow ground; as heralds publishing salvation. We are here as the "salt of the earth," to be a blessing to the world. - Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening — Larissa Murphy

There is only this world and that numbing routines and brief squabbles and financial worries are an essential part of it, that in spite of the aches and boredomes and disappointments, living in this world is the closest we will ever come to seeing paradise. — Paul Auster

This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears. — Emil Cioran

I am still in the land of the dying; I shall be in the land of the living soon. (his last words) — John Newton

Whether they really believe in their brave new world, however, is ultimately beside the point. They're building it. And in the friction-free future, jacked into paradise, we'll have the 'liberty' of living (or rather, or buying the illusion of living), through the benevolent offices of a middleman as nearly omnipotent as god himself. Freedom? A more perfect captivity is difficult to imagine. — Mark Slouka

The Earth is beautiful. If you start living its beauty, enjoying its joys with no guilt in your heart, you are in paradise. If you condemn everything, every small joy, then the same Earth turns into a hell. It is a question of your own inner transformation. It is not a change of place, it is a change of inner space. Live joyously, guiltlessly, live totally, live intensely. And then heaven is no more a metaphysical concept, it is your own experience. — Rajneesh

If we take judging ourselves and others out of our life, we will mostly be living in paradise. — Harbhajan Singh Yogi

Kitchen solace - the feeling that a delicious meal is simmering on the kitchen stove, misting up the windows, and that at any moment your lover will sit down to dinner with you and, between mouthfuls, gaze happily into your eyes. (Also known as living.)" RECIPES THE CUISINE of Provence is as diverse as its scenery: fish by the coast, vegetables in the countryside, and in the mountains lamb and a variety of staple dishes containing pulses. One region's cooking is influenced by olive oil, another's is based on wine, and pasta dishes are common along the Italian border. East kisses West in Marseilles with hints of mint, saffron and cumin, and the Vaucluse is a paradise for truffle and confectionery lovers. Yet — Nina George

To my unsuspecting love.
When I look into your eyes, I lose all sense of time and place. Reason robbed, clear thought erased, I am lost in the paradise I find within your gaze.
I long to touch your blushing cheek, to whisper in your ear how I adore you, how I have lost my heart to you, how I cannot bear the thought of living without you.
To be so near to you without touching you is agony. Your blindness to my feelings is a daily torment, and I feel driven to the edge of madness by my love for you.
Where is your compassion when I need it most? Open your eyes , Love, and see what is right before you: that I am not merely a friend, but a man deeply, desperately , in love with you.
Longing for you. — Julianne Donaldson

The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not. — Franz Kafka