Rarest Life Quotes & Sayings

We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer. — Vladimir Nabokov

Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses. By thy might, there return into us treasures that we had abandoned. By thy grace, there are released in us all the dried-up runnels of our heart. Of the riches that exist in the world, thou art the rarest and also the most delicate - thou so pure within the bowels of the earth! A man may die of thirst lying beside a magnesian spring. He may die within reach of a salt lake. He may die though he hold in his hand a jug of dew, if it be inhabited by evil salts. For thou, water, art a proud divinity, allowing no alteration, no foreignness in thy being. And the joy that thou spreadest is an infinitely simple joy. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Mankind must work continually to produce individual great human beings - this and nothing else is the task ... for the question is this : How can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value, the deepest significance? Only by living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Human life can be liken to that of a flower, its beautiful when it blooms, though yours may delay but when it blooms, it will be the rarest and the most beautiful of all. — Amenorhu Kwaku

Wallace, King and Sanders point out in Biology: The Science of Life (that rarest thing: a readable textbook), — Bill Bryson

A useful education served women best, More thought. To 'learn how to grow old gracefully is perhaps one of the rarest and most valuable arts which can be taught to a woman.' Yet, when beauty is all that is expected or desired in a woman, she is left with nothing in its absence. It 'is a most severe trail for those women to be called to lay down beauty, who have nothing else to take up. It is for this sober season of life that education should lay up its rich resources,' she argued. — Karen Swallow Prior

The rarest of all things in American life is charm. We spend billions every year manufacturing fake charm that goes under the heading of public relations. Without it, America would be grim indeed. — Anita Loos

But we must not forget that only a very few people are artists in life; that the art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts. — Carl Jung

South Delhi is such a rich area in Delhi, you could call it the heart of Delhi or a slice of heaven for the rarest sight of Delhiites served with cherry. — Parul Wadhwa

Let no one pray that they know not sorrow,
Let no soul ask to be free from pain,
For the gall of to-day is the sweet of to-morrow,
And the moment's loss is the lifetime's gain.
Through want of a thing does its worth redouble,
Through hunger's pangs does the feast content,
And only the heart that has harboured trouble
Can fully rejoice when joy is sent.
Let no one shrink from the bitter tonics
Of grief, and yearning, and need, and strife,
For the rarest chords in the soul's harmonics
Are found in the minor strains of life. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

There's no music in rest, but there's the making of music in it. And people are always missing that part of the life melody, always talking of perseverance and courage and fortitude; but patience is the finest and worthiest part of fortitude, and the rarest, too. — John Ruskin

Oh my God, look!"
I stand and hold out my hand for Sam to inspect.
"Wow," he says, taking the glass and holding it up to the sun. "Red is, like, the rarest color there is.
You're totally lucky you even saw it."
I take the deep red, half-dollar-sized piece from him and smile, looking out across the ocean. I told Matt in my letter before we left that I'd find a piece just for him, but now that it's actually here, sparkling in my hand, I know he'd want me to do something else with it.
I raise it above my head and throw it as hard and as far as I can into the sea.
Let someone else have a lucky day, Anna.
Sam laughs. "Hey, crazy, what'd you do that for? You'll probably never see something like that again in your entire life."
"Right. But I did see it. And now someone else can, too. — Sarah Ockler

You will find as you grow older that courage is the rarest of all qualities to be found in public life. — Benjamin Disraeli

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the holy of holies of Jewish time. It is that rarest of phenomena, a Jewish festival without food. Instead it is a day of fasting and prayer, introspection and self-judgment when, collectively and repeatedly, we confess our sins and pray to be written into God's Book of Life. — Jonathan Sacks

Seeing your child for the first time is rarest of occasions. You see glimpses of yourself from the past. The potential of a brand new life happening right before your eyes. And most importantly, that life begins again. — J.R. Rim

Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side. — Logan Pearsall Smith

Still rarer is the man who thinks habitually, who applies reason, rather than habit pattern, to all his activity. Unless he masques himself, his is a dangerous life; he is regarded as queer, untrustworthy, subversive of public morals; he is a pink monkey among brown monkeys
a fatal mistake. Unless the pink monkey can dye himself brown before he is caught.
The brown monkey's instinct to kill is correct; such men are dangerous to all monkey customs.
Rarest of all is the man who can and does reason at all times, quickly, accurately, inclusively, despite hope or fear or bodily distress, without egocentric bias or thalmic disturbance, with correct memory, with clear distinction between fact, assumption, and non-fact. — Robert A. Heinlein

Napoleon Bonaparte made a distinction between two kinds of courage - regular courage and two-o'clock-in-the-morning courage. "The rarest attribute among Generals," said the Little Corporal, "is two o'clock-in-the-morning courage."2 Chasing a lion into a pit on a snowy day takes two-o'clock-in-the-morning courage. But that one act of courage completely changed the trajectory of Benaiah's life. The same is true of you. You are one idea, one risk, one decision away from a totally different life. Of course, it'll probably be the toughest decision you ever make, the scariest risk you ever take. But if your dream doesn't scare you, it's too small. — Mark Batterson

The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all. — Walt Disney Company

Connecting with someone is not necessarily a bond with a significant other, or even a friend, but can be the indefinable - perhaps the rarest and most precious thing in life to find at all. — Donna Lynn Hope

It was one of those rare times of shared happiness, of perfect contentment. We had a feeling of expectation, that what was already wonderful would only get better and better as time went on. These moments are one of the rarest, most fragile things in the world. You have to seize the day; you have to recall all the rotten, dirty things you endured to earn this peace. You have to remember to enjoy each minute, each hour, because although you may feel like it's going to last forever, the world plans otherwise. You want to be grateful for every precious second, but you simply can't do it. It's not in human nature to live life to the fullest. Haven't your ever noticed that equal amounts of pain and joy are not, in fact, equal in duration? Pain drags on until you wonder if life will ever be bearable again; pleasure, though, once it's reached its peak, fades faster than a trodden gardenia, and your memory searches in vain for the sweet scent. — George Alec Effinger

All the rarest hues of human life take radiance and are rainbowed out in tears. — Gerald Massey

The deeds of love are less questionable than any action of an individual can be, for, it being founded on the rarest mutual respect, the parties incessantly stimulate each other to a loftier and purer life, and the act in which they are associated must be pure and noble indeed, for innocence and purity can have no equal. In this relation we deal with one whom we respect more religiously even than we respect our better selves, and we shall necessarily conduct as in the presence of God. What presence can be more awful to the lover than the presence of his beloved? — Henry David Thoreau

A mutually fulfilled sexual union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide. But it is not quite real. It stops when the telephone rings. Such a passion can be kept at its early strength only by adding to it either more and more unhappiness (jealousy, separation, doubt, renunciation), or more and more artificiality (drink, technique, stage-illusions). Whoever has missed this has never lived, who lives for it alone is but partly alive. — Cyril Connolly

With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols of things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. — Oscar Wilde

The heart is like an instrument whose strings Steal nobler music from Life's many frets: The golden threads are spun thro' Suffering's fire, Wherewith the marriage-robes for heaven are woven: And all the rarest hues of human life Take radiance, and are rainbow'd out in tears. — Gerald Massey

How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do. — Arthur Schopenhauer

He accepted the deformity which had made life so hard for him; he knew that it had warped his character, but no he saw also that by reason of it he had acquired that power of introspection which had given him so much delight. Without it he would never have had his keen appreciation of beauty, his passion for art and literature, and his interest in the varied spectacle of life. [ ... ] Then he saw that normal was the rarest thing in the world. Everyone had some defect of body or of mind [ ... ] The only reasonable thing was to accept the good of men and be patient with their faults. — W. Somerset Maugham

Chastity ... has, even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest. — Virginia Woolf