Quotes & Sayings About Sense Of Life

The great ones do not set up offices, charge fees, give lectures, or write books. Wisdom is silent, and the most effective propaganda for truth is the force of personal example. The great ones attract disciples, lesser figures whose mission is to preach and to teach. These are gospelers who, unequal to the highest task, spend their lives in converting others. The great ones are indifferent, in the profoundest sense. They don't ask you to believe: they electrify you by their behavior. They are the awakeners. What you do with your petty life is of no concern to them. What you do with your life is only of concern to you, they seem to say. In short, their only purpose here on earth is to inspire. And what more can one ask of a human being than that? — Henry Miller

By accepting and learning to embrace the inevitable sorrows of life, we realize that we can experience a more enduring sense of happiness. — Sharon Salzberg

The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life, which, though startling to the apprehension, is, in fact, that which the habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguished in us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this scene of things. I confess that I am one of those who are unable to refuse my assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Whelks are strange and comforting.
They have no notion of community life and they breed very quietly.
But they have a strong sense of personal dignity.
Even lying face down in a tray of vinegar there is something noble about a whelk.
Which cannot be said for everybody. — Jeanette Winterson

Technology, while providing us many advantages, encourages us to race through our days so that we no longer know what we'd do if we were to slow down. Labor-saving devices seem not only to have failed to enhance the quality of our lives and free up more time, but get between us and the immediate, sensory pleasures of life and increase the pressures on us to do more. Many of us feel cut off from life's blessings, from our neighbors, from the wonders of nature, and from our sense of our own significance in the scheme of things. Modern life leaves us spiritually starved — Kathleen A. Kendall-Tackett

As children become increasingly less connected to adults, they rely more and more on each other; the whole natural order of things change. In the natural order of all mammalian cultures, animals or humans, the young stay under the wings of adults until they themselves reach adulthood. Immature creatures were never meant to bring one another to maturity. They were never meant to look to one another for primary nurturing, modelling, cue giving or mentoring. They are not equipped to give one another a sense of direction or values. As a result of today's shift to this peer orientation, we are seeing the increasing immaturity, alienation, violence and precocious sexualization of North American Youth. The disruption of family life, rapid economic and social changes to human culture and relationships, and the erosion of stable communities are at the core of this shift. — Gabor Mate

The ship is always off course. Anybody who sails knows that. Sailing is being off course and correcting. That gives a sense of what life is about. — Michael Meade

Death gives a reason to our lives. More important then that, death creates a special value for time. If our time on earth was undetermined, life on its own wouldn't make any sense and probably we would still be living without clothes and with a spear on hand. Death is the most powerful agent in nature, it comes to take away the old and make space for the new. Our effort to avoid it and make our short stay here something slightly memorable is what motivates us. Life only exists because of death. — Marilena Chaui

GNP is therefore in a certain sense a value-neutral quantity: a measure of activity, not of activity of any kind of value. A first argument against continued growth is just this. The GNP does not give any guarantee of meaningfulness of that which is created. Growth in GNP does not imply any growth in access to intrinsic values and progress along the course of self-realization. Obviously any kind of economic growth which is not related to intrinsic values is neutral or detrimental. The measure of GNP is somehow related to the fierceness of activity in the society but this fierceness may very well have more to do with a lack of ability of the members of the society to engage in meaningful activity than a measure of something humanity should look upon with joy. There is no clear relation to life quality. — Arne Naess

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife. — Audre Lorde

Resurrection. In the crude form in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me. I have always understood Christ's words about the living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all these hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn't big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out. They'd be crushed by these throngs greedy merely for the animal life.
But all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn't notice it. — Boris Pasternak

Life is a huge farce, and the advantage of possessing a sense of humour is that it enables one to defy fate with mocking laughter. — George Gissing

Art does imitate life, it has to come from somewhere. To put boundaries and limitations on it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. — Christian Slater

We have noted thatthe two creation stories contained no pointers toward male "headship" in the sense that men or husbands are supposed to exercise authority or leadership over women or wives. But the audience of Genesis knew that patriarchy was a reality of life. Genesis here tells them how this came to be. Male authority or domination was not God's design but a consequence of a breakdown in relationship between humanity and God, between humanity and the animal world, and between human beings and one another. From now on, the Bible will assume the reality of patriarchy and of male headship, but it begins by noting that this came about only as a result of those various breakdowns of relationship. — John E. Goldingay

Rebecca and Robert enjoy the fact that they're so similar. They have very little sense that it limits them, narrows their perspective on life, or blinds them to a wide array of opinions, experiences, and different ways of thinking and being. But the fundamental human preference that they exemplify - for the familiar over the alien, the known over the unknown, and the comfortable over the dissonant - has insidious but important consequences. — Anonymous

How great musicians demonstrate a mutual respect and trust on the bandstand can alter your outlook on the world and enrich every aspect of your life, understanding what it means to be a global citizen in the most modern sense. — Wynton Marsalis

Solitude is one thing and being alone is another. Solitude can be isolation, an escape, an unwanted thing; but to be alone without the burden of life, with that utter freedom in which time/thought has never been, is to be with the universe. In solitude there is despairing loneliness, a sense of being abandoned, lost, craving for some kind of relationship, like a ship lost at sea. All our daily activity leads to this isolation, with its endless conflicts and miseries, and rare joys thrown in. This isolation is corruption, manifested in politics, in business and of course in organized religions. Corruption exists in the very high places and on the very doorstep. To be tied is corruption; any form of attachment leads to it, whether it be to a belief, faith, ideal, experience, or any conclusion. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Silence isn't golden and it surely doesn't mean consent, so start practicing the art of communication. — T.D. Jakes

Gogol remembers having to do the same thing when he was younger, when his grandparents died ... He remembers, back then, being bored by it, annoyed at having to observe a ritual no one else he knew followed, in honor of people he had seen only a few times in his life ... Now, sitting together at the kitchen table at six-thirty every evening, his father's chair empty, this meatless meal is the only thing that seems to make sense. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Normally, to decide whether we are alive we do not look outside of ourselves to find out if we are nourishing and generating life. We look into ourselves to find out how strong and healthy and vital we are. But the notion of the seed that dies demands an extraordinary redirection of the sense of life. Now to know if anyone is alive, we do not look at them; look beyond them to the mode of their expenditures and the life that they nourish and preserve beyond themselves. — Arthur C. McGill

Person's life goes like a dream. In order to understand its sense we must wake up. External changes are useful when they go out From the inner world of a person. Everything that is or isn't in this world, it is here, it is in the soul of each person. — Anastasia Novyh

'Cinderella' touches on loss, and there was definitely a strong sense of grief in my life. — Lily James

Nothing uniquely bad has happened to me in my personal life, but all the regular little bad things have accumulated to make me a neurotic person. And these adventures are my way of trying to make sense of that. — Jon Ronson

His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The myth of the dead Indian goes back to the Protestant settlement of the U.S. The Pilgrims wanted to start a new life in America. They wanted to believe that in some sense they had come to a new Eden and that they could leave history behind in Europe. So they convinced themselves that this land had no history, that this was "virgin" land. This made the Indians' presence inconvenient. — Richard Rodriguez

The power of an idea is never to be underestimated. Many a thought has survived long after its host has ceased to be. It is the power of an idea that no shield can defend against, nor sword divide, nor poison infect. As such, we must aspire to create ideas, rather than preserve life. In a sense, this is how we achieve true immortality and live on past our time. — A.J. Darkholme

Bodily delight is a sense experience, just like pure seeing or the pure feeling with which a lovely fruit fills the tongue; it is a great boundless experience which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the splendour of all knowing. Our acceptance of it is not bad; what is bad is that almost all men misuse and squander this experience, and apply it as a stimulus to the weary places of their life, a dissipation instead of a rallying for the heights. Mankind have turned eating, too, into something else: want on the one hand, and superfluity on the other, have dulled the clarity of this need, and all those deep, simple necessities by which life renews itself have become similarly dull. — Rainer Maria Rilke

There is a sense of exhilaration that comes from facing head-on the hard truths and saying, "We will never give up. We will never capitulate. It might take a long time, but we will find a way to prevail." — James C. Collins

In any relationship we feel an unconscious need to create, as it were, a new picture, a new edition of ourselves to present to the fresh person who claims our interests; for them, we in a strange sense wish to, and do, start life anew. — Ann Bridge

Thus, on the one hand, Spenser's thought is steeped in sensuous detail, so that for him there is no really abstract thinking; men, he thinks, 'should be satisfied with the use of these days, seeing all things accounted by their showes, and nothing esteemed of, that is not delightfull and pleasing to commune sense' ( Prefatory Letter). But on the other hand the details of the physical universe become translucent from the pulsing light of varied human experience which is seen behind it. His 'haunt and the main region of (his) song' is the inner life of man and it is described in the symbolism of human figures clothed in raiment iridescent with innumerable associations. His art is a development of the mediaeval. — Janet Spens

Making a big fat deal out of anything is absurd. It makes much more sense to go after life with a sense of, "Why not?" instead of a furrowed brow. One of the best things I ever did was make my motto "I just wanna see what I can get away with." It takes all the pressure off, puts the punk rock attitude in, and reminds me that life is but a game. — Jen Sincero

If experience is the best teacher, there's nothing that comes close to the experience of life. — Michael A. Singer

Throughout all of the changes that have happened in my life, one of the priorities I've had is to never change the way I write songs and the reasons I write songs. I write songs to help me understand life a little more. I write songs to get past things that cause me pain. And I write songs because sometimes life makes more sense to me when it's being sung in a chorus, and when I can write it in a verse. — Taylor Swift

Some of you may feel that if you don't do something soon to change your life, you will be left by the roadside, alone, homeless and in despair. But is the despair not there as you reach and grapple to create or manifest your desires through your own effort and will? What happens if or when those things appear in your life? Joy? Peace? Or a temporary sense of relief?

What if it is relief from the wanting you have been craving for so long, not the outcome, but the relief from the constant wanting. — Kelly Martin

I don't think I shall ever find peace till I make up my mind about things,' he said gravely. He hesitated. 'It's very difficult to put into words. The moment you try you feel embarrassed. You say to yourself: "Who am I that I should bother myself about this, that, and the other? Perhaps it's only because I'm a conceited prig. Wouldn't it be better to follow the beaten track and let what's coming to you come?" And then you think of a fellow who an hour before was full of life and fun,and he's lying dead; it's all so cruel and meaningless. It's hard not to ask yourself what life is all about and whether there's any sense to it or whether it's all a tragic blunder of blind fate. — W. Somerset Maugham

I like to maintain a certain sense of fantasy in my life. I am kind of like that at home. Do I have the full hair and makeup? No. But I might have the nice dress on. — Jennifer Lopez

There was something wrong with her. She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I am a very honest person, and I can only say there are moments in my life where I really did think I was being me in the sense of my morals and beliefs and the way I acted. But when I look back at certain things that I wore and my hair and make-up, I was like, 'Whoa! That wasn't me!' But I didn't know it back then. — Jessie J.

Why do people fall in love if it means there is a chance of feeling this way? What the fuck is wrong with humans?! HUMANS ARE FUCKING SICK AND TWISTED! I mean, I get it - it feels good, you know? Being in love, being happy." Her body trembled as the tears fell faster than she could take breaths. "But when that magical rug is ripped out from under you, it takes all the happy and good feelings with it. And your heart? It just breaks. It breaks and it's unapologetic. It shatters into a million pieces, leaving you numb, blankly staring at the pieces because all your free will, all the common sense you once had in your life is gone. You gave up everything for this bullshit thing called love, and now you're just destroyed." I — Brittainy C. Cherry

Circles of hell. He hated to admit it, but Eugene had been right in his choice of Inferno, except their interpretations differed. Where Eugene saw only the internal battle of the privileged soul, Sunil saw the entire architecture and structures of racism and apartheid: three concentric circles of life and economics. Color-coded circles for easy understanding, whites at the heart, coloreds at the next remove, and finally, the blacks at the outermost circle; the closest to hell - the strange inverse sense of apartheid. — Chris Abani

The thing I understood least of all was that knowledge led to despair and damnation. Our spiritual mentor had not said that those bad books had given a false picture of life: if that had been the case, he could easily have exposed their falsehood; the tragedy of the little girl whom he had failed to bring to salvation was that she had made a premature discovery of the true nature of reality. Well, anyhow, I thought, I shall discover it myself one day, and it isn't going to kill me: the idea that there was a certain age when knowledge of the truth could prove fatal I found offensive to common sense. — Simone De Beauvoir

TCK builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture are assimilated into the TCK's life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background. — David C. Pollock

Each story, good and bad, short or long
from that trip to the mall when you saw Santa, to a long, bad illness
they are all a line or a paragraph in our own life manuscript. Two thirds of the way through, even, and it all won't necessarily make sense, but at the end there'll be a beautiful whole, where every sentence of every chapter fits. — Deb Caletti

Nothing makes sense, not that much of the world ever did."
Quote from the book: "UnHoly Pursuit: The Devil on My Trail. — A. White

She's wearing the dreamy expression peculiar to the very old and the very young, where they seem fascinated by something everyone else takes for granted. People find the phenomenon adorable in babies. It means they're inquisitive and intrigued by objects in their new world. In old people they usually chalk it up to senility, but I don't think that's the case. For both, it's the ability to see things in their purest sense. All the knowledge that comes from experience doesn't exist for a child and doesn't matter anymore to an old lady. With a life completely in front of you or a life completely behind you, the world looks basically the same. She — Tawni O'Dell

To save one life, Mr Tagomi had to take two. The logical, balanced mind cannot make sense of that — Philip K. Dick

Twice in my life I have spent two weary and scientifically profitless years seeking evidence to corroborate dearly loved hypotheses that later proved to be groundless; times such as these are hard for scientists-days of leaden gray skies bringing with them a miserable sense of oppression and inadequacy. — Peter Medawar

Addiction" might be the best word to explain the lostness that so deeply permeates society. Our addiction make us cling to what the world proclaims as the keys to self-fulfillment: accumulation of wealth and power; attainment of status and admiration; lavish consumption of food and drink, and sexual gratification without distinguishing between lust and love. These addictions create expectations that cannot but fail to satisfy our deepest needs. As long as we live within the world's delusions, our addictions condemn us to futile quests in "the distant country," leaving us to face an endless series of disillusionments while our sense of self remains unfulfilled. In these days of increasing addictions, we have wandered far away from our Father's home. The addicted life can aptly be designated a life lived in "a distant country." It is from there that our cry for deliverance rises up. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

It's entirely possible to get to know someone without actually seeing them in person. In fact, it's better like that because none of the superficial stuff gets in the way. You really get to know a person. And it's easier to express yourself when you're writing things down. At least it is for me. I like to order my thoughts, and delete them if they don't make any sense. You can't do that in real life. — Cat Clarke

A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure
as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been. Dim presences gathered at the edge of his consciousness; he could not see them, but he knew that they were there, gathering their forces toward a kind of palpability he could not see or hear. He was approaching them, he knew; but there was no need to hurry. He could ignore them if he wished; he had all the time there was.
There was a softness around him, and a languor crept upon his limbs. A sense of his own identity came upon him with a sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been. — John Edward Williams

In the absence of a widely practiced and capable attention to our use of the land, to the land-use economies, and to the natural sources of our life, we have a national, or global, economy consisting entirely of capital (rated at monetary value), minimal labor ("jobs," merely numbered, and the numbers always liable to reduction by technology), information (infinite perhaps, but never sufficient), marketing (seduction of the gullible), and consumption (conversion of goods into waste or poison). And so we have lost patriotism in the old sense of love for one's country, and have replaced it with an ignorant, hard-hearted military-industrial nationalism that devours the country. Under — Wendell Berry

Interestingly, the word 'person' did not originally refer to the individual in the way we tend to use it today. Instead, 'person' came, via french, from the Latin word 'persona', which referred to the mask worn by tan actor to protray a particular character. In this theatrical sense, personality has to do with the role or character that the person plays in life's drama. The person's individuality, in this sense, is a matter of the roles or characters that he or she assumes. — Nick Haslam

Spiritual growth increases our sense of what's possible. And as we sense new possibility, we can step into that possibility. With every word, every thought, every action, we choose what we wish to call forth in life. — Marianne Williamson

Yet never once in his life had he experienced the unshakable certainty that he and he alone had arrived at a decision. He always had the sense that fate had forced him to decide things to suit its own convenience. On occasion, after the momentary satisfaction of having decided something of his own free will, he would see that things had been decided beforehand by an external power cleverly camouflaged as free will, mere bait thrown in his path to lure him into behaving as he was mean to. The only things that he had decided for himself with complete independence were the kind of trivial matters which, on closer inspection, revealed themselves to require no decision making at all. — Haruki Murakami

Exercising will builds esteem from within through action on one's own behalf; it disproves the premise that only another person can provide it. The result, long in coming and always worth the effort, is the experience of authentic agency in your own life, a sense of self that cannot be destroyed because it is not dependent on anyone else. — Jeanne Safer

The men were less interesting to look at, but nearly all had that air about them that I could sometimes detect in Will
of wealth and entitlement, a sense that life would settle itself agreeably around them. — Jojo Moyes

Perhaps the only reason they survived, Stencil reasoned, was that they were not alone. God knew how many more there were with a hothouse sense of time, no knowledge of life, and at the mercy of Fortune. — Thomas Pynchon

The world's a puzzle; no need to make sense out of it. - Socrates — Dan Millman

Common sense is, of all kinds, the most uncommon. It implies good judgment, sound discretion, and true and practical wisdom applied to common life. — Tryon Edwards

The inner life is bruised by a running against the laws of the Kingdom. The bruises are guilt complexes, a sense of inferiority, of missing the mark, of being out of harmony with God and with oneself, a sense of wrongness. Divine forgiveness wipes out all that sense of inner hurt and condemnation. Brings a sense of at-homeness- at home with God and oneself and with life. The universe opens its arms and takes one in. You are accepted- by God, by yourself, and by life. All self-loathing, self-rejection, all inferiorities drop away. You are a child of God; born from above, you walk the earth, a conqueror, afraid of nothing. Healed at the heart, you can say to life: Come on, I'm ready for anything. — E. Stanley Jones

In previous ages the word 'art' was used to cover all forms of human skill. The Greeks believed that these skills were given by the gods to man for the purpose of improving the condition of life. In a real sense, photography has fulfilled the Greek ideal of art; it should not only improve the photographer, but also improve the world. — David Hurn

In one important sense, Marxism is a religion. To the believer it presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions; and, secondly, a guide to those ends which implies a plan of salvation and the indication of the evil from which mankind, or a chosen section of mankind, is to be saved. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

Every time I go to Europe, I remember that James Dean never saw Europe, but yet I see his face everywhere. There's James Dean, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe - windows of the Champs Elysees, discos in the south of Spain, restaurants in Sweden, t-shirts in Moscow. My life was confused and disoriented for years by his passing. My sense of destiny destroyed - the great films he would have directed, the great performances he would have given, the great humanitarian he would have become, and yet, he's the greatest actor and star I have ever known. — Dennis Hopper

Flying alone! Nothing gives such a sense of mastery over time over mechanism, mastery indeed over space, time, and life itself, as this. — Cecil Day-Lewis

Her father, indulgent in his concern, had opened his library to her, and at last she could read to her heart's content. In all, these past few weeks had been some of the most peaceable of her life. She had the sense of existing inside a fragile pause, a moment of grace. — Helene Wecker

Hence, when his name was casually mentioned by neighboring yeomen, the listener said, Ah, Clym Yeobright: what is he doing now?' When the instinctive question about a person is, What is he doing? it is felt that he will not be found to be, like most of us, doing nothing in particular. There is an indefinite sense that he must be invading some region of singularity , good or bad. The devout home is that he is doing well. The secret faith is that he is making a mess of it ... So the subject recurred: if he were making a fortune and a name, so much the better for him, if he were making a tragical figure in the world, so much the better for a narrative — Thomas Hardy

The greatest cost of the specialization of technological life - and out of which all other damages are birthed - is arguably our separation from the practical and enriching sense of ourselves as embodied beings. When we are alienated from the wisdom of the body, our lives become theoretical and abstract, and we are distanced from the direct, felt sense of living. — Richard Strozzi-Heckler

The question from agnosticism is, 'who turned on the lights?' The question from faith is 'whatever for?' Thoreau climbed Mount Katahdin and gives vent to an almost outraged sense of the reality of the things of this world: "I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries- think of our life in nature-daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,- rocks, trees, wind! — Annie Dillard

When we play, we sense no limitations. In fact, when we are playing, we are usually unaware of ourselves. Self-observation goes out the window. We forget all those past lessons of life, forget our potential foolishness, forget ourselves. We immerse ourselves in the act of play. And we become free. — Lenore Terr

When the desire to get rid of the sensory symptoms of sin so that one can live a life of peace and safety is the only goal, and that goal is achieved by a work other than the work of Christ, the end may be peace in this life but God's certain wrath in the world to come. Mr. Worldly-Wiseman is a friend to sinners who want to lose their sense of sin, but the sworn enemy to all who desire lasting peace and eternal life.
7. — John Bunyan

There is one thing I can say for certain: the older a person gets, the lonelier he becomes. It's true for everyone. But maybe that isn't wrong. What I mean is, in a sense our lives are nothing more than a series of stages to help us get used to loneliness. That being the case, there's no reason to complain. And besides who would be complaint to anyway? (A Walk To Kobe, Granta 124: Travel) — Haruki Murakami

We therapists often make inaccurate assumptions about people living with DID and DDNOS. They often appear to be "just like us," so we often assume their experience of life reflects our own. But this is profoundly untrue. It results in a communication gap, and, as a consequence, treatment errors. Because the dominant culture is one of persons with a single sense of self, most with multiple "selves" have learned to hide their multiplicity and imitate those who are singletons (that is, have a single, non-fragmented personality). Therapists who do not understand this sometimes describe their clients' alters without acknowledging their dissociation, saying only that they have different "moods." In overlooking dissociation, this description fails to recognize the essential truth of such disorders, and of the alters. It was difficult for me to comprehend what life was like for my first few dissociative clients. — Alison Miller

I am conscious of a soul-sense that lifts me above the narrow, cramping circumstances of my life. My physical limitations are forgotten- my world lies upward, the length and the breadth and the sweep of the heavens are mine! — Helen Keller

I was blessed in the sense that I got handed so much early on in life. I got a lot of the things people go through their 20s and 30s craving. — Sheena Easton

... I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn't seem to suffice, not really - rather's it that I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting's will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into it's brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world. — Mark Doty

If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to expand one's self, to forget the rut, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life. — Charles Horton Cooley

So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary - how am I to resolve them? — Richard Flanagan

Life was full of adventure: I learnt the smell of danger - I've got a sixth sense for it now. We're homesick for it, some of us; it's called the 'Afghan syndrome'. — Svetlana Alexievich

Death does determine life. Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. However, to be sincere I must add that for me death is important only if it is not justified and rationalized by reason. For me death is the maximum of epicness and death. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

To get all there is out of living, we must employ our time wisely, never being in too much of a hurry to stop and sip life, but never losing our sense of the enormous value of a minute. — Robert Updegraff

The tragic sense of life is ironically not tragic at all, at least in the Big Picture. Living in such deep time, connected to past and future, prepares us for necessary suffering, keeps us from despair about our own failure and loss, and ironically offers us a way through it all. We are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us. The tragic sense of life is not unbelief, pessimism, fatalism, or cynicism. — Richard Rohr

For me, embalming was a form of meditation; it brought a sense of peace that I had never found in any other aspect of my life. I loved the stillness of it, the quietness. The bodies never moved or yelled; they never fought or left. The dead simply lay there, at peace with the world, and let me do whatever I needed to do. I was in control of myself. — Dan Wells

It made economic sense, if you looked at it from the right angle; it was not in the Clan's interest for the price of the commodity they shifted to drop - and drop it surely would, if it was legalized or if the pressure to keep up the war on drugs ever slackened. But for Mike Fleming, who'd willingly given the best years of his life to the DEA, it was a deeply unsettling idea; nauseating, even. Bought and sold: We're doing the dealers' work for them, keeping prices high. — Charles Stross

For the rest of the afternoon, Rebecca wandered around the house tidying up halfheartedly, feeling bereft and disoriented, trying to balance impassive mass of all the ordinary things of her life with her sense that everything had changed. Inevitably, the weightless moments with Mike began to seem unreal. All her furniture said that love was a bubble and a fluke. — Tim Farrington

For many of us, water simply flows from a faucet, and we think little about it beyond this point of contact. We have lost a sense of respect for the wild river, for the complex workings of a wetland, for the intricate web of life that water supports. — Sandra Postel

It feels good to know you contributed positively to another's life, to their happiness, to their survival. It gives us a sense of purpose. — Joy Bryant

The one big surprise is that as it turns out, God is the sun. It makes sense, if you think about it. Why we didn't see it sooner I cannot say. Every day the sun was right there burning, our and other planets hovering around it, always apologizing and we didn't think it was God. Why would there be a God and also a sun? Of course God is the sun.
Everyone in the life before was cranky, I think, because they just wanted to know. — Dave Eggers

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too. — Alain De Botton

The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity. — Archibald MacLeish

You have to have the service mentality in the sense that you subjugate your own ego, and you subjugate a large part of your own life to really helping other people, being successful on their behalf. — Herb Kelleher

To call ourselves a Microcosme, or little world, I thought it onely a pleasant trope of Rhetorick, till my neare judgement and second thoughts told me there was a reall truth therein: for first wee are a rude masse, and in the ranke of creatures, which only are, and have a dull kinde of being not yet priviledged with life, or preferred to sense or reason; next we live the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of men, and at last the life of spirits, running on in one mysterious nature those five kinds of existence, which comprehend the creatures not onely of world, but of the Universe. — Thomas Browne

This is an important lesson to remember when you're having a bad day, a bad month, or a shitty year. Things will change: you won't feel this way forever. And anyway, sometimes the hardest lessons to learn are the ones your soul needs most. I believe you can't feel real joy unless you've felt heartache. You can't have a sense of victory unless you know what it means to fail. You can't know what it's like to feel holy until you know what it's like to feel really fucking evil. And you can't be birthed again until you've died. — Kelly Cutrone

Sense of humor is important in life, not just in clothing. How boring to live a life in beige. — Jean Pigozzi

Who do you want them to think you are? How do you think people see you? Or don't you let them near enough to see. You make up their minds for them. Do you think you succeed in convincing people that you are what you seem to be? You make people meet you on your own territory. You don't help them. You let them verbally hang themselves and then feel better about yourself, your power, your own sense of worth. You have the power to alienate them and if they allow it, you might even manage to make them feel awkward and foolish--foolish for letting you affect them at all. Do you want them to like you? Or are you one of those people who "don't care what people think." You're not living your life for them, so why should you give a fuck what people think? You make people come to you and, when they eventually do, you punish them with your smugness. Nothing ever out of character. — Carrie Fisher

I knew what the sanctified life was not. Not a life filled with more rituals, more scrupulously observed. Not more praying. Not becoming a better person, being more charitable, more concerned with everyone else's pains. Sanctifying had something to do with a sense of constant wonder - feeling gratitude and finding significance everywhere, in every action, relationship and object. — Vanessa L Ochs

Nothing makes sense anymore, because all the meaning and purpose that life had for them was associated with accumulating, succeeding, building, protecting, and sense gratification. It was associated with the outward movement and identification with form, that is to say, ego. Most people cannot conceive of any meaning when their life, their world, is being demolished. And yet, potentially, there is even deeper meaning here than in the outward movement. — Eckhart Tolle

Once you hold the hand of Death, the only thing in life that can scare you is a sense of humor. — Lionel Suggs

As he took possession of it, he was overcome by a sense of something like sacred awe. He carefully spread his horse blanket on the ground as if dressing an altar and lay down on it. He felt blessedly wonderful. He was lying a hundred and fifty feet below the earth, inside the loneliest mountain in France - as if in his own grave. Never in his life had he felt so secure, certainly not in his mother's belly. The world could go up on flames out there, but he would not even notice it here. He even began to cry softly. He did not know who to thank for such good fortune. — Patrick Suskind

For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute — Atul Gawande

I've been a foodie most of my life. I started when I lived for a year in Germany in my early 20s, and here was this new food environment, and I decided I needed to make sense of it. And I found it was the rules of economics that do the best job. Food is a capitalist product of supply and demand. — Tyler Cowen