Outlived Quotes & Sayings

Indeed, I have, alas! outlived almost every one of my contemporaries. One pays dear for living long. — Hannah More

The Enlightenment may have indeed outlived its usefulness, but it is only through Reason's protocols that one can make a coherent case for Reason's limitations. O ye of little skepticism, kindly acknowledge your debt to that idiom on which you so glibly heap scorn. — James K. Morrow

No republic has long outlived the discovery by a majority of its people that they could vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. — Alexander Fraser Tytler

It was not right, thought Han Fei-tzu, for his wife to die before him: her ancestor-of-the-heart had outlived her husband. Besides, wives should live longer than husbands. Women were more complete inside themselves. They were also better at living in their children. They were never as solitary as a man alone. — Orson Scott Card

I have outlived most of my more athletic contemporaries who jogged, golfed and squashed themselves into coronary occlusion. — Barry Humphries

Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen,
who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat,
who never lived and yet outlived her time,
hating men and dogs and Democrats. — Anne Sexton

I've outlived all my diet doctors. — Merv Griffin

Do you think it could be that those in charge of the guilds keep the system in operation after it has outlived its original purpose? It seems to me that the system works by suppression of knowledge. I don't see what that achieves. It has made me very discontented, and I'm sure I'm not alone. — Christopher Priest

Once something has outlived its usefulness in one area of life, its purpose for being in existence is no longer the same. The leaf that captures a stream of sunlight, and then transfers its energy to the tree, serves one purpose in the spring and summer, and another completely different one through the fall and winter. — Guy Finley

Work and its results always outlived those who labored at it as any Egyptian slave-ghost will tell you. — Dennis Lehane

The patriarchal family, with its division of functions between a providing and protective father and a home-making, submissive mother, however satisfactory it may have been in its time, has outlived its day. Bread-winning is no longer a monopoly of men, and home-making should no longer be the monopoly of women. — Alva Myrdal

Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow. — George Eliot

He was a square, pale-faced man of almost forty, and had the appearance of having outlived every emotion to which humanity is subject. — Mary Elizabeth Braddon

There was much bitterness in the family. There were even those who would liked to have considered Barnabas Collins dead. But he lived on. He lived on-and outlived his enemies. — Barnabas

Welcome, old aspirations, glittering creatures of an ardent underneath the holly! We know you, and have not outlived you yet. Welcome, old projects, and old loves, however fleeting, to your nooks among the steadier lights that burn around us — Charles Dickens

Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived. — Jane Austen

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery. — Wallace Stegner

Rules cease to exist once they have outlived their value, but forms live on eternally. There are forms of the novel which impose on the suggested topic all the virtues of the Number. Born of the very expression and of the diverse aspects of the tale, connected by nature with the guiding idea, daughter and mother of all the elements that it polarizes, a structure develops, which transmits to the works the last reflections of Universal Light and the last echoes of the Harmony of Worlds. — Raymond Queneau

Some attitudes couldn't be changed, they just had to be outlived — Lois McMaster Bujold

My friend George and I were walking on the beach in Norfolk, and there were thousands of [razor-clam] shells. They were so beautiful, I thought I had to do something with them. So, we decided to make [a dress] out of them ... The shells had outlived their usefulness on the beach, so we put them to another use on a dress. Then Erin [O'Conner] came out and trashed the dress, so their usefulness was over once again. Kind of like fashion, really. — Alexander McQueen

It was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had not encompassed yet: that doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear had earned a name, and through which ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life which the little puny humans swarmed and hacked at in fury of abhorrence and fear like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant;
the old bear, solitary, indomitable, and alone; widowered childless and absolved of mortality
old Priam reft of his old wife and outlived all his sons. — William Faulkner

To exemplify, -a beautiful glossy nut, which, blessed with original strength, has outlived all the storms of autumn. Not a puncture, not a weak spot any where. -This nut ... while so many of its brethren have fallen and been trodden under foot, is still in possession of all the happiness that a hazel-nut can be supposed capable of. — Jane Austen

But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all, they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration, accept the actual for the necessary and talk down to the young. Let them then become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and power. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I choose to believe that my father is still alive, that he has survived death, outlived us all, and possesses the soul that goes on and lives forever; We just cannot see him yet, for we have not caught up with him. our time will come just as his did. and no matter how woeful and lost I was when he passed away, I know I will be glad to go to a place where I can see him, and know he is okay and happy. It's just not my time yet and there is no way of knowing if any of it is true." - Jane Adams — Noorilhuda

To be a Jew is to belong to an old harmless race that has lived in every country in the world; and that has enriched every country it has lived in.
"It is to be strong with a strength that has outlived persecutions. It is to be wise against ignorance, honest against piracy, harmless against evil, industrious against idleness, kind against cruelty! It is to belong to a race that has given Europe its religion; its moral law; and much of its science-perhaps even more of its genius-in art, literature and music.
"This is to be a Jew; and you know now what is required of you! You have no country but the world; and you inherit nothing but wisdom and brotherhood. I do not say there are no bad Jews-userers; cowards; corrupt and unjust persons-but such people are also to be found among Christians. I only say to you this is to be a good Jew. Every Jew has this aim brought before him in his youth. He refuses it at his peril; and at his peril he accepts it. — Phyllis Bottome

The Lesson You've Got
to learn is the someday you'll someday
stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears
shed, ready to poke your bovine head
in the yoke they've shaped.
Everyone learns this. Born, everyone
breathes, pays tax, plants dead
and hurts galore. There's grief enough
for each. My mother
learned by moving man to man,
outlived them all. The parched earth's
bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched
the instants I trod it.
Other than myself, of course.
I've made a study of bearing
and forbearance. Everyone does,
it turns out, and note
those faces passing by: Not one's a god. — Mary Karr

Death -
Death can be faced,
dealt with,
adjusted to,
outlived.
It's the
not knowing
that destroys
interminably...
This
being suspended
in suspense;
waiting - weightless,
How does one face
the faceless,
adjust to nothing?
Waiting implies
something to wait for.
Is there?
There is One.
One who knows...
I rest my soul on that. — Ruth Bell Graham

This was the mother, the dead sister Ellen: this Niobe without tears who had conceived to the demon in a kind of nightmare, who even while alive had moved but without life and grieved but without weeping, who now had an air of tranquil and unwitting desolation, not as if she had either outlived the others or had died first, but as if she had never lived at all. — William Faulkner

To be a Jew is to be strong with a strength that has outlived persecutions. It is to be wise against ignorance, honest against piracy, harmless against evil, kind against cruelty — Phyllis Bottome

Anne hoped she had outlived the age of blushing; but the age of emotion she certainly had not. — Jane Austen

A man's life was five dogs long, Cortland believed. The first was the one that taught you. The second was the one you taught. The third and fourth were the ones you worked. The last was the one that outlived you. That was the winter dog. Cortland's winter dog had no name. He thought of it only as the scarecrow dog ... — Stephen King

The harm that Albertine had done me was a last bond between her and myself which outlived memory even, for with the conservation of energy which belongs to everything that is physical, suffering has no need of the lessons of memory. — Marcel Proust

And so [my brother] Gilbert and I, brought up without a formal religion, remained throughout our lifetimes just what Father was, freethinkers. And, likewise, doubters and dissenters and perhaps Utopians. Father's rule had been 'Question everything, take nothing for granted,' and I never outlived it, and I would suggest it be made the motto of a world journalists' association. — George Seldes

I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun. — Robert Louis Stevenson

When you have lived longer in this world and outlived the enthusiastic and pleasing illusions of youth, you will find your love and pity for the race increase tenfold, your admiration and attachment to a particular party or opinion fall away altogether. — Joseph Henry Shorthouse

The times do, in fact change. They change relentlessly. Inevitably. Inventively. And as they change, they set into bright relief not only outmoded honorifics and hunting jorns, but silver summoners and mother-of-pearl opera glasses and all manner of carefully crafted things that have outlived their usefulness.

Carefully crafted things that have outlived their usefulness, thought the Count. I wonder... — Amor Towles

The notion that the intense and unprecedented mixture of ethnic and religious groups in American life was soon to blend into a homogeneous end product has outlived its usefulness, and also its credibility. . . .The point about the melting pot. . . is that it did not happen. — David L. Sills

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress. — Lord Byron

A month later Billie sits at her dining room table, sifting through the pictorial record of Chris's final days. It is all she can do to force herself to examine the fuzzy snapshots. As she studies the pictures, she breaks down from time to time, weeping as only a mother who has outlived a child can weep, betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure. Such bereavement, witnessed at close range, makes even the most eloquent apologia for high-risk activities ring fatuous and hollow. - describing the mother of Chris McCandless after learning of his starvation in the wild — Jon Krakauer

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it. — Ernest Hemingway,

I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be. — Roger Zelazny

He had outlived the luxurious agonies of youthful blood, and in this very freedom from illusion he recognised the loss of something. From now on, every hour of light-heartedness would be, not a prerogative but an achievement - one more axe or case-bottle or fowling-piece, rescued, Crusoe-fashion, from a sinking ship. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Few of Caesar's assassins outlived him by more than three years, or died in their beds. — Suetonius

I have passed the period of a woman's life when as a woman she is loved; but I have have not outlived the power of loving. — Anthony Trollope

We have outlived this embryo, this human cradle, and now it's time to be up and about the great business of becoming citizens of the galaxy and at home with our own heart. — Terence McKenna

Alice Roosevelt Longworth was only a few years older than my mother but outlived her by a decade, dying in 1980. From the time they met, in 1917, they were lifelong friends of sorts, though each was a bit wary of the other. — Katharine Graham

Can man be so age-stricken that no faintest sunshine of his youth may re visit him once a year? It is impossible. The moss on our time-worn mansion brightens into beauty; and the good old pastor, who once dwelt here, renewed his prime and regained his boyhood in the genial breeze of his ninetieth spring. Alas for the worn and heavy soul, if, whether in youth or age, it has outlived its privilege of springtime sprightliness! — Nathaniel Hawthorne

The WTO has outlived its usefulness as a setting for trade negotiations. It can still be a good place to resolve disputes (though this can take years) and share ideas, but most countries would be better off choosing their own trading partners and lowering trade barriers at their own pace. — Daniel Altman

So this is where stylists go when they've outlived their use. To sad theme underwear shops where they wait for death. — Suzanne Collins

Aeschylus and Plato are remembered today long after the triumphs of Imperial Athens are gone. Dante outlived the ambitions of thirteenth century Florence. Goethe stands serenely above the politics of Germany, and I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over cities, we too will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit. — John F. Kennedy

I have outlived that care that curries public favour or dreads the public frown ... let the hand of law strike me down if it will, but I ask that my story be heard and considered. — Ned Kelly

Keith Richards outlived Jim Fixx, the runner and health nut. The plot thickens. — Bill Hicks

Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. — Mark Twain

That was the danger of being old and a politician. Habits outlived the situations that created them. Policies remained in place after the situations that inspired them had changed. — James S.A. Corey

Character has outlived its day. In ancient, primitive times, when biologically weak man struggled against omnipotent nature, character was useful, beneficial; with hideous labor it shoved the heavy stone of human impotence forward. We learned to praise ourselves, to admire character, to prostrate ourselves before it, make a fetish of it. But today no one has the courage to discredit character, although, psychologically speaking, it is now a throwback, simply reactionary. — Tadeusz Konwicki

The Pan-Africanism that envisaged the ideal of wholeness was gradually cut down to the size of a continent, then a nation, a region, an ethnos, a clan, and even a village in some instances But Pan-Africanism has not outlived its mission. Seen as an economic, political, cultural, and psychological re-membering vision, it should continue to guide remembering practices — Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

Having outlived so many of my contemporaries, I ought not to forget that I may be thought to have outlived myself. — James Madison

Speaking generally, sociability stands in inverse ratio with age. A little child raises a piteous cry of fright if it is left alone for only a few minutes; and later on, to be shut up by itself is a great punishment. Young people soon get on very friendly terms with one another; it is only the few among them of any nobility of mind who are glad now and then to be alone; - but to spend the whole day thus would be disagreeable. A grown-up man can easily do it; it is little trouble to him to be much alone, and it becomes less and less trouble as he advances in years. An old man who has outlived all his friends, and is either indifferent or dead to the pleasures of life, is in his proper element in solitude; and in individual cases the special tendency to retirement and seclusion will always be in direct proportion to intellectual capacity. For — Arthur Schopenhauer

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness. — Marshall McLuhan

To truly cherish the things that are important to you, you must first discard those that have outlived their purpose. And if you no longer need them, then that is neither wasteful nor shameful. Can you truthfully say that you treasure something buried so deeply in a cupboard or drawer that you have forgotten its existence? — Marie Kondo

Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it. — Anthony Marra

To be young means to be original, to have remained nearer to the sources of life: it means to be able to stand up and shake off the fetters of an outlived civilization, to dare
where others lack the courage
to plunge again into the elemental. — Thomas Mann

Jubal had long ago even foresworn pets, because he outlived them, or (worse yet) it was now possible that a pet would outlive him, be orphaned. — Robert A. Heinlein

I never went to college. I went to the school of hard knocks and paid for my education by getting ripped off. It's been a great adventure, and I've outlived my adversaries. — Jim "Dandy" Mangrum

You're no man." "No," said Coyote. "I am his unflattering reflection." He shook his head. "I have outlived billions of gallons of blood, and you think I somehow delight in the spilling of a few more pints. You see my hand in the affairs of a few mortals and you think that I've but wound them up so I can watch them bounce off one another in the night. Never have you asked yourself why I might do such a thing--to what end this bloodshed might serve. The trouble with human beings is that when examining the actions of others, they always apply their own ethics and point of view., hoping to understand them in the context of what they might do and why they might do such a thing. When no answer lies in that examination, they always ascribe malice. Malice, you see, is the only thing people understand without explanation. You are born with it and thus come to expect it. — C. Robert Cargill

Indolence takes many forms, but it comes to every civilization that has outlived its will. You know that as well as I. In this case it was an indolence characterized by a pursuit of knowledge, a frenzied search for answers to everything, no matter the value of such answers. — Steven Erikson

If the Olympic Games ever served a true altruistic purpose, they have long since outlived it. Yeah, the pursuit of athletic excellence, sportsmanship and international goodwill is plenty noble. But the modern Olympics are at best a vehicle for agitprop; at worst, a scandal magnet. — John Ridley

The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived. — Howard Pyle

A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure. — Peter Drucker

I have outlived the stillborn. I have outlasted my usefulness. I have become an abysmal ocean sponge, ten millennia old, and just as wise. — Logan Ryan Smith

Security can only be achieved through constant change, through discarding old ideas that have outlived their usefulness and adapting others to current facts. — William O. Douglas

There were, in Clochemerle, a number of lady 'invalids', their conversation one long jeremiad concerning their health, who had worn out their husbands and outlived them by fifteen or twenty years. Since, all their lives, they had spent themselves only drop by drop, their extreme old age was still charged with vital fluid, flowing very meagrely yet sufficient to keep them on their feet and living, so to speak, vegetatively, behind mask-like countenances of wood or old ivory. They breathed in slow motion, everything about them was almost dead excepting those feeble pulsations of the heart which kept just enough pale blood flowing beneath their wrinkled skins. — Gabriel Chevallier

Has it ever occurred to you that business as you think of it may have outlived its usefulness? Business has made its contribution and the world moves on. Business is just another dodo ... — Clifford D. Simak

We may say that all ages are dangerous to all people, in this dangerous life we live. But the thirties are a specially dangerous time for women. They have outlived the shyness and restraints of girlhood, and not attained to the caution and discretion of middle age. They are reckless, and consciously or unconsciously on the lookout for adventure. They see ahead of them the end of youth, and that quickens their pace. — Rose Macaulay

The great thing and the hard thing is to stick to thing when you have outlived the first interest and not yet the second which comes with a sort of mastery. — Janet Erskine Stuart

Man has built temples that outlived the Gods he created. Zion Rivers — James Lee Nathan III

And if he were ever animated enough to be in love, must have long outlived every sensation of the kind. It is too ridiculous! When is a man to be safe from such wit, if age and infirmity will not protect him? — Jane Austen

The redeeming feature of war is that it puts a nation to the test. As exposure to the atmosphere reduces all mummies to instant dissolution, so war passes supreme judgment upon social systems that have outlived their vitality. — Karl Marx

I outlived the bastards. — Herbert Hoover

The proprietor of the grocery store on the corner was bidding a silent farewell to a tomato which even he, though a dauntless optimist, had been compelled to recognize as having outlived its utility. — P.G. Wodehouse

Too often, it occurs to him that he's lived just long enough to have completely outlived the world that made sense to him, the world where he fit. He — Caitlin R. Kiernan

When relationships have outlived their shelf life, people often realize that at some level, they are sticking it our because they once thought in the light of their divine love that the other person would change. Sorry for breaking the poetic hope here, but that doesn't happen. People are like rubber bands. They may be able to stretch from time to time and do some amazing things, but in general they are who they are. If manipulation and machinations on your side get them to behave the way you want, I will set my clock on the fact that they will return to their previous way of behaving, or they will keep faking it. To be in a relationship with someone who is not really there doesn't make sense. People who aren't cooperating feel like a project to us, like something for us to rescue or fix. Rescuing is the province of firefighters and fairy tales, but it's not real life. The stance of sticking it out in hopes of redemption is an old story and one that has wasted many lives. — Ramani Durvasula

Earth's nobility are soon forgotten. John Bunyan, the Bedford tinker, has outlived the whole crowd of those who were the nobility in his day. They lived for self, and their memory is blotted out. He lived for God and for souls, and his name is as fragrant as ever it was. — D.L. Moody

Integrity can be neither lost nor concealed nor faked nor quenched nor artificially come by nor outlived, nor, I believe, in the long run, denied. — Eudora Welty

Anything you cannot relinquish when it has outlived its usefulness possesses you, and in this materialistic age a great many of us are possessed by our possessions. — Peace Pilgrim

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm. — Henry David Thoreau

Intelligence is overrated by any species that has it, and that's provable by the fact that all intelligent species are outlived by a factor of a hundred to one, if not a thousand to one, by nonintelligent species, who don't have the brains or perversity to destroy themselves or their environments. — L.E. Modesitt Jr.

In the perfect society, there is neither emotion nor mercy; precious space cannot be wasted on those who have outlived their usefulness. — Frank Herbert

The '80s made up for all the abuse I took during the '70s. I outlived all my critics. By the time I retired, everybody saw me as a venerable institution. Things do change. — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Man may escape from rope and gun; Nay, some have outlived the doctor's pill: Who takes a woman must be undone, That basilisk is sure to kill. The fly that sips treacle is lost in the sweets, So he that tastes woman, woman, woman, He that tastes woman, ruin meets. — John Gay