That's The Way Life Goes Quotes & Sayings

I believe that whenever someone you love dies, a part of you goes with them. I also think that every time someone new is brought into your life, a part of you is reborn. The circle of life and death is a balancing act, God's way of making things even. — Dani Amore

And under all this vast illusion of the cosmopolitan planet, with its empires and its Reuter's agency, the real life of man goes on concerned with this tree or that temple, with this harvest or that drinking-song, totally uncomprehended, totally untouched. And it watches from its splendid parochialism, possibly with a smile of amusement, motor-car civilization going its triumphant way, outstripping time, consuming space, seeing all and seeing nothing, roaring on at last to the capture of the solar system, only to find the sun cockney and the stars suburban. — G.K. Chesterton

Vain are the beliefs and teachings that make man miserable, and false is the goodness that leads him into sorrow and despair, for it is man's purpose to be happy on this earth and lead the way to felicity and preach its gospel wherever he goes. He who does not see the kingdom of heaven in this life will never see it in the coming life. We came not into this life by exile, but we came as innocent creatures of God, to learn how to worship the holy and eternal spirit and seek the hidden secrets within ourselves from the beauty of life. — Kahlil Gibran

You play all your life and train all your life and then you are not playing. It's not easy to deal with. But you can't roll up in a ball and hope it goes away. You have to take it on the chin and train hard and be prepared to play. We all know the game changes in an instant and anything can happen so you have to keep the hope that comes your way. — Shay Given

By respect for life we become religious in a way that is elementary, profound and alive.
Impart as much as you can of your spiritual being to those who are on the road with you, and accept as something precious what comes back to you from them.
In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.
- Albert Schweitzer — Albert Schweitzer

A young man's ambition is to get along in the world and make a place for himself-half your life goes that way, till you're 45 or 50. Then, if you're lucky, you make terms with life, you get released. — Robert Penn Warren

She opens her eyes, says: Stop lying. She says she hopes she'll never know anything, anything in the world, the way you do. She says: I don't want to know anything the way you do, with that death-derived certainty, that hopeless monotony, the same every day of your life, every night, and that deadly routine of lovelessness.
She says: It's day, everything is about to begin, except you, you never begin.
She goes back to sleep. You ask her why she sleeps, what weariness she has to rest from, what monumental weariness. — Marguerite Duras

One of the oldest aches in the bones of humanity is loneliness. I mean it's one of the things that goes way back; loneliness is not good for the world. And so, whoever you are, gay or straight, it is totally normal, natural, and healthy to want somebody to go through life with. It's central to our humanity. — Rob Bell

Right. And soon sentient beings will stop destroying one
another and themselves. Not. We're all going to die. Alone
and miserably. With lots of pain. That's the way life goes.
People make promises and don't keep them. They say they
care about you and forget you."
"I didn't forget you. I never forget you — Karen Marie Moning

A belief system usually evolves over time. It's something that we grow into, as our needs and goals develop and change. Even when we find a system of beliefs that works for us, we hone and fine-tune it, working our way deeper and deeper into its essential truth. Everything we experience, every thought we have, every desire, need, action, and reaction - everything we perceive with our senses goes into our personal databank and helps to create the belief systems that we hold now. Nothing is lost or forgotten in our lives.
You don't have to remain a victim of your conditioning, however. You can choose for yourself what you believe or don't believe, what you desire and don't desire. You can define your own parameters. Once you do that, you can start consciously creating your destiny according to your own vision. — Skye Alexander

You could say that life just happens and it's the way it goes, you either accept it or you fight it ...
Or
You can be one of the few that rises above this perception and fights in all their glory to create the life they want, regardless of the struggle.
Who do you want to be? Someone to remember or someone easy to forget ... — Nikki Rowe

Watch this, Larry. The seeds I saved from last year bring forth plants this year. It's a death, burial, and resurrection. It's this way with the sun also. It comes up in the morning and brings us light all the day long. But in the evening it goes down. Is that the end of the sun? No... It comes up the very next day. Death, burial, and resurrection."
"I never saw it like that, Charlie. Tell me more."
"See Larry, let's go deeper with that. Just for instance, something must die for something to live. You and I eat live substance--whether it is corn or beans, it's a life. That life dies to give us life. Now watch this, Larry. If that works with the physical; then it also works in the spiritual. Jesus Christ had to die to give us life... — Jerrel C. Thomas

So it goes."
Unlike many of these quotes, the repeated refrain from Vonnegut's classic Slaughterhouse-Five isn't notable for its unique wording so much as for how much emotion - and dismissal of emotion - it packs into three simple, world-weary words that simultaneously accept and dismiss everything. There's a reason this quote graced practically every elegy written for Vonnegut over the past two weeks (yes, including ours): It neatly encompasses a whole way of life. More crudely put: "Shit happens, and it's awful, but it's also okay. We deal with it because we have to. — Kurt Vonnegut

I had the chance to make every possible mistake and figure out a way to recover from it. Once you realize there is life after mistakes, you gain a self-confidence that never goes away. — Bob Schieffer

I used to wish I had an easier life," he mused. "Some families sail through years with nothing touching them. They have no tragedies. They go on about how lucky they are. Yet sometimes it seems to me they're half alive. When something goes wrong for them, and it does for everyone sooner or later, their trauma is much worse. They've had nothing bad happen to them before. In the meantime, they think little problems, like losing a wallet, are big deals. They think it's ruined their day. They have no idea what a hard day's like. It's going to be incredibly tough for them when they find out."
He'd also developed his own version of making the most of every minute. "Through Sam I found out how quickly things can change. Because of him I've learned to appreciate each moment and try not to hold on to things. Life's more exciting and intense that way. It's like the yogurt that goes off after three days. It tastes so much better than the stuff that lasts three weeks. — Helen Brown

In order to understand people, we have to understand their way of life and approach. If we wish to convince them, we have to use their language in the narrow sense of the mind. Something that goes even much further than that is not the appeal to logic and reason, but some kind of emotional awareness of the other people. — Jawaharlal Nehru

That's the way life goes sometimes. — Frank Black

I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry. — Ben Okri

The dream that I've been having, about my high-school sweetheart, is not really about my high-school sweetheart, when you get right down to it. It's not a dream about Alison Koechner and our lost love and the precious little three-bedroom house in Maine we might have built together, had things gone a different way. I am not dreaming of white picket fences and Sunday crosswords and warm tea.
There's no asteroid in the dream. In the dream, life continues. Simple life, happy and white-picket lined or otherwise. Mere life. Goes on.
When I'm dreaming of Alison Koechner, what I'm dreaming of is not dying. — Ben H. Winters

We're all going to die. Alone and miserably. With lots of pain. That's the way life goes. People make promises and don't keep them. They say they care about you and forget you. — Karen Marie Moning

At any period of an actor's life, it's fairly likely that they'll be cast in ways that are reminiscent. That's the way it goes. — Ben Mendelsohn

I think you're asking too much. You know what I have? Toward this Pris android?"
"Empathy," he said.
"Something like that. Identification; there goes I. My god; maybe that's what'll happen. In the confusion you'll retire me, not her. And she can go back to Seattle and live my life. I never felt this way before. We are machines, stamped out like bottle caps. It's an illusion that I - I personally - really exist; I'm just representative of a type."
He could not help being amused; Rachael had become so mawkishly morose. "Ants don't feel like that," he said, "and they're physically identical."
"Ants. They don't feel period."
"Identical human twins. They don't - "
"But they identify with each other; I understand they have an empathic, special bond. — Philip K. Dick

It is unrealistic, I think - and by "unrealistic" I mean it is a demand that cannot be met - to assume that if all goes well in a child's life, he or she will be happy. Not because life is the kind of thing that doesn't make you happy; but because happiness is not something one can ask of a child. Children, I think, suffer - in a way that adults don't always realize - under the pressure their parents put on them to be happy, which is the pressure not to make their parents unhappy, or more unhappy than they already are. — Jennifer Senior

He understands that he sees things differently from the way everyone else does, but he can't put his finger on why. He's not like other people. No one understands him. So he goes through his whole life with this, uh ... " he paused, "confusion." Michael looked off into the distance, now seeming lost in his thought process. "Everybody thinks he's very special, but, really, he's very sad. He's so, so sad. — J. Randy Taraborrelli

Losing someone is the worst feeling. Loss carves out a deep, hollow pocket. There's no magical way to fill it, no medicine or Band-Aid or surgery to cure it. I suppose that over time you get used to it, but the feeling never totally goes away. And the more time you spend on earth, the more pockets you'll collect. But it's part of living. It's life. - Katrina Svensen — Suzanne Selfors

When someone you love dies, people ask you how you're doing, but they don't really want to know. They seek affirmation that you're okay, that you appreciate their concern, that life goes on and so can they. Secretly they wonder when the statute of limitations on asking expires (its three months, by the way. Written or unwritten, that's about all the time it takes for people to forget the one thing that you never will). — Sarah Ockler

There are still more days to travel in this life. And he knows that the man who makes the journey has been shaped by every day and every person along the way. Scars are just another kind of memory. Isabel is part of him, wherever she is, just like the war and the light and the ocean. Soon enough the days will close over their lives, the grass will grow over their graves, until their story is just an unvisited headstone. He watches the ocean surrender to the night, knowing that the light will reappear. — M. L. Stedman - The Light Between Oceans

The truth is that Fate does not go out of its way to be dramatic. If you or I had the power of life and death in our hands, we should no doubt arrange some remarkably bright and telling effects. A man who spilt the salt callously would be drowned next week in the Dead Sea, and a couple who married in May would expire simultaneously in the May following. But Fate cannot worry to think out all the clever things that we should think out. It goes about its business solidly and unromantically, and by the ordinary laws of chance it achieves every now and then something startling and romantic. Superstition thrives on the fact that only the accidental dramas are reported. — A.A. Milne

If I look at the performance of another friend Sting, whenever I hear him take over a stage and share his art with millions, it's very inspiring to me. So I have a lot in my life, a lot of friends who inspire me and I'm sure it goes the other way around, or so that I inspire them. — Philippe Petit

The way I've always governed my life as far as fiscal policy goes is I'm smart enough to know that I'm dumb about it, so I surround myself with smart people in much the same way a hole surrounds itself with a doughnut. I just pay things off. That's all I do. — Dennis Miller

This isn't a courtroom, pal," I said to Nelson, "this is the gutter. No fancy robes, no platitudes engraved in marble, no brass railing dividing the sides. This is the streets and the alleys. this is the Chicago we really live in. Here justice isn't dispensed with a wooden gavel, it's taken with your bare hands. It may be Tubby's world, a part of it, but it's also August Jansen's world, and my world, and yours. Darrow's a great man but this work comes after the fact, after the real battles of life are fought. Lawyers and judges pick up the pieces after the dust settles. Their job is to make sense of what's happened, not make it happen. That occurs in the gutter where blood and bone and horse manure and coal dust and sweat and fear blend and roil. In the end you either have hope or sewage. It can go either way, but it goes on. — James Conroy

I'm into clothes, but in a way that's related to wanting to walk into a film noir movie. You know, I love to go to vintage stores, but mostly it's stuff that I don't have anywhere to wear ... I don't have the life that goes with the clothes. — Maureen Dowd

Friends are like the stars that glow in the sky ... you don't always see them, but you know they're always there overhead, and even when it's cloudy, snowy or stormy, even when the power goes out and you're trapped in darkness, they'll always find a way to shine through to you. — Rebecca McNutt

That's the great thing about being in a band: it's a gang for people who are too wimpy to fight. You can create a gang and have an identity and fight for something and stand up for something just by making pop songs. They're my gang members and gang members are for life, and if you try and leave, we execute you. That's the way it goes. A simple bang, back of the head, into the river, and we keep moving on. — Torquil Campbell

First, he says, you have to go out into the world. This is not a simple matter of going outside one's door. No, that is simply going out. That's what one does when one is on the way to the store to buy a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine. When one goes out into the world, one is shedding preconceptions of past paths and ideas of past paths, and trying to move freely through an unsubstantiated and new geography. — Jesse Ball

Do you think love just goes away? Pops out of existence when it becomes too painful or inconvenient, as if you never felt it?"
I looked at him. What did Jericho Barrons know of love?
"If only it did. If only it could be turned off. It's not a faucet. Love's a bloody river with level-five rapids. Only a catastrophic act of nature or a dam has any chance of stopping it - and then usually only succeeds in diverting it. Both measures are extreme and change the terrain so much you end up wondering why you bothered. No landmarks to gauge your position when it's done. Only way to survive is to devise new ways to map out life. You loved her yesterday, you love her today. And she did something that devastates you. You'll love her tomorrow. — Karen Marie Moning

So what can I do now?" she spoke up a minute later.
"Nothing," I said. "Just think about what comes before words. You owe that to the dead. As time goes on, you'll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn't, doesn't. Time solves most things. And what time can't solve, you have to solve yourself. Is that too much to ask?"
"A little," she said, trying to smile.
"Well, of course it is," I said, trying to smile too.
"I doubt that this makes sense to most people. But I think I'm right. People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if posible, sincerely. It's too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies. Personally, I don't buy it."
Yuki leaned against the car door. "But that's real hard, isn't it?" she said.
"Real hard," I said. "But it's worth trying for. — Haruki Murakami

I didn't like the way he looked at you." "How did he look at me?" Allie asks warily. "Like you were his entire world." She frowns. "And that's a bad thing?" "Damn right it is. Nobody should ever be someone else's entire world. That's not healthy, AJ. If your whole life is centered on one thing - one person - whatcha going to be left with if that person goes away? Absolutely nothing." He gruffly reiterates, "Not healthy. — Elle Kennedy

We're running out of time, he said.
As if time were the kind of thing you could run out of, as if it were measured into bowls that were handed to us at birth and if we ate too much or too fast or right before jumping into the water then our time would be lost, wasted, already spent.
But time is beyond our finite comprehension. It's endless, it exists outside of us; we cannot run out of it or lose track of it or find a way to hold on to it. Time goes on even when we do not. — Tahereh Mafi

And then he says, "The writer must be true to truth." And that's a killer, because the only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections. The perfect human being is uninteresting - the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable. And when the writer sends a dart of the true word, it hurts. But it goes with love. This is what Mann called "erotic irony," the love for that which you are killing with your cruel, analytical word. — Joseph Campbell

It is not lies or a lack of loyalty that ends a relationship. It is the agonizing truth that one person feels in their heart on a daily basis. It is realizing that you are coping and not living. It is the false belief that there is a verse, quote, phrase or talk that will magically make you feel content, complete or not care. However, it doesn't last longer than a few days, before your mind and heart goes back to what it wants. It is the moment you realize that you left without ever leaving. It is the moment you realize that fear, shame or guilt is the only thing standing in the way of the life God meant for you to live. — Shannon L. Alder

Bad things will happen and good things too. Your life will be full of surprises. Miracles happen only where there has been suffering. So taste your grief to the fullest. Don't try and press it down. Don't hide from it. Don't escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That's the way life goes. — Ben Okri

Most of them ... most of us never figure it out. Bad dream, they think, or good one. Funny rash, never really goes away, but Doc says it's fine, nothing to worry about. Why dwell on it? But some people, they just can't let it go ... Some people drink themselves out of school trying to find it again, trolling through bars where the shadows are so greasy they leave trails on the walls, just to find a way in, a way through. Some people forget too that you're supposed to stop sleeping, you're supposed to have a life in the sun. — Catherynne M Valente

I think I've lived quite the unorthodox life so far, but you probably feels that way about yourself too. So much goes untold in our lives. — Connor Franta

Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterward. A friend of mine, a soldier, put it this way. In most of our lives, most of the time, you have a sense of what is to come. There is a steady narrative, a feeling of "lights, camera, action" when big events are imminent. But trauma isn't like that. It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it. — Jessica Stern

I still go to bed sad, and wake up sad, and it still hurts like hell, but there are moments during the day when it hurts less. Sometimes I can think of June and not want to burst into tears or put my fist through a wall. Sometimes I'm close to happy and it doesn't even hurt. Much. I'll never be the way I was before, but maybe that's okay. Life goes on, I'm going on, even without her. Not every day hurts. Not every breath hurts.
Maybe that's all we can really ask for. — Hannah Harrington

With us, there were always too many false starts. I believe that what's meant to be usually has a way of working out... and with us, it never did. Call it timing, call it fate, call it what you want. It is what it is. Sometimes in the end, the girl doesn't always get the boy--and that's ok. Life goes on. You know better than anyone that some love stories never get their happy ending... but it doesn't make them any less of a love story though, does it? It doesn't make the love the two shared any less relevant. — Britney King

There is a certain terror that goes along with saying "My life is up to me." It is scary to realize there's no magic, you can't just wait around, no one can really rescue you, and you have to do something. Not knowing what you want to do with your life - or not at least having some ideas about what to do next - is a defense against that terror. It is a resistance to admitting that the possibilities are not endless. It is a way of pretending that now doesn't matter. Being confused about choices is nothing more than hoping that maybe there is a way to get through life without taking charge. Rather than take charge, — Meg Jay

The many mysteries boil down to three. There is the kind that can be solved: who planted the bomb? Will the travellers reach their destination? What is Mother's childhood secret? There is the supernatural: dark metaphysical forces, never to be fully exposed, yet hinting of themselves in a way that suggests the author could reveal more if he chose, and might do, in his next book. And there are the insoluble mysteries: what lies beyond life, what beauty is for, why the innocent suffer and the guilty prosper, what goes on in the heads of other people, why life keeps fucking us over just when we're doing all right
these are the mysteries the books dealing with them can't solve, and it is for this reason that the best of these books are the ones we keep rereading. — James Meek

The opacity of the mind, its inability to project itself into the realm of another's personality, goes a long way to explain the friction of life. If we would set down other people's errors to this rather than to malice prepense we should not only get more good out of life and feel more kindly toward our fellows, but doubtless the rectitude of our intellects would increase, and the justice of our judgments ... we are so shut away from one another that none tells those about him what he considers ideal treatment on their part toward him ... nothing will probe to the core of this greatest disadvantage under which we labor
that is, mutual noncomprehension
except a basis of society and government which would make it easy for each to put himself in another's place because his place is so much like another's ... we [would] need less imagination in order to do that which is just and kind to every one about us. — Frances E. Willard

I don't think I'd be exaggerating to say that the essence of who I am today is a result of the weight training. It's made me and given me the life that I have. And it goes way back to the eighth grade getting cut, your friends telling you that you can't do it, and you telling yourself that you can. — Jake Steinfeld

I have lived large parts of my life in wonderful circumstances that I utterly failed to appreciate. Reasons to be happy were everywhere, but somehow I didn't connect with them. It was as though I was eating but couldn't taste the food. Finally, I've learned to celebrate the good while it's happening. I feel gratitude and praise today for what are sometimes such simple pleasures. I have learned that happiness is not determined by circumstances. Happiness is not what happens when everything goes the way you think it should go; happiness is what happens when you decide to be happy. — Marianne Williamson

It's like I get into a roller coaster, and sit there while it goes up and down and upside down and sometimes I get thrown out and I hit my head, but I crawl back in again and the moment I'm back in, it just keeps on going and going again ... all of this, so I can find things out and then I write about the things I find out so you can find them out from me. All the bruises, all the wounds, all the bumps on the head, all the scars, just so I can take that and I can write all these things, and sometimes I say "God, I don't want to be in this roller coaster anymore." But when I think about it, if I'm not right here, then where the hell would I be? On the sidewalk? I wasn't born to stand on the sidewalk, I was born to fly around crazy in the sky! — C. JoyBell C.

Often my life seems like that car ride. I'm cruising along happily until something goes up in smoke. And while I'd prefer to skip the drama, it doesn't always happen that way. This story provides an example of how God doesn't promise to spare us life's trials. He does, however, promise to care for us in the midst of them. — Lori Hatcher

Many times in life, God waits while a situation goes from bad to worse. He appears to let it slip over the edge, so that you and I say, "There's no way now for this ever to work out." But that is the point when the omnipotent God intervenes in our hopelessness and says, "Oh, really? Watch this ... ! — Jim Cymbala

One thing I love about life and God: the creator of life.
Within a blink of an eye; things can change either good or bad. It depends on how you want it.
Good in the sense that luck will come to you; if you wish, want, need or even require the good changes.
But, bad same as good changes; but, if you are evil. The evil you did will bite you in the ass. Remember these quotes:
- You sow what you reap
- Karma is a bitch (if you are evil) or Karma is a blessing (if you are good)
- What goes around will eventually come around
- What goes up will come down
So be careful what you do to others.
That's why I am always cautious on the way I treat people. Yes; I am not perfect. But, I always try to be the best I can as a good and loving person despite my roots that is horrifying. — Temitope Owosela

I don't have any regrets," a famous movie actor said in an interview I recently witnessed. "I'd live everything over exactly the same way."
"That's really pathetic," the talk show host said. "Are you seeking help?"
"Yeah. My shrink says we're making progress. Before, I wouldn't even admit that I would live it all over," the actor said, starting to choke up. "I thought one life was satisfying enough."
"My God," the host said, cupping his hand to his mouth.
"The first breakthrough was when I said I would live it over, but only in my dreams. Nocturnal recurrence."
"You're like the character in that one movie of yours. What's it called? You know, the one where you eat yourself."
"The Silence of Sam."
"That's it. Can you do the scene?"
The actor lifts up his foot to stick it in his mouth. I reach over from my seat and help him to fit it into his bulging cheeks. The audience goes wild. — Benson Bruno

Shepherd Book: What are we up to, sweetheart?
River: Fixing your Bible.
Book: I, um ... What?
River: Bible's broken. Contradictions, false logistics - doesn't make sense.
Shepherd Book: No, no. You-you-you can't ...
River: So we'll integrate non-progressional evolution theory with God's creation of Eden. Eleven inherent metaphoric parallels already there. Eleven. Important number. Prime number. One goes into the house of eleven eleven times, but always comes out one. Noah's ark is a problem.
Shepherd Book: Really?
River: We'll have to call it early quantum state phenomenon. Only way to fit 5000 species of mammal on the same boat.
Shepherd Book: River, you don't fix the Bible.
River: It's broken. It doesn't make sense.
Book: It's not about making sense. It's about believing in something, and letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It's about faith. You don't fix faith, River. It fixes you. — Ben Edlund

I handed them a script and they turned it down. It was too controversial. It talked about concepts like, 'Who is God?' The Enterprise meets God in space; God is a life form, and I wanted to suggest that there may have been, at one time in the human beginning, an alien entity that early man believed was God, and kept those legends. But I also wanted to suggest that it might have been as much the Devil as it was God. After all, what kind of god would throw humans out of Paradise for eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. One of the Vulcans on board, in a very logical way, says, 'If this is your God, he's not very impressive. He's got so many psychological problems; he's so insecure. He demands worship every seven days. He goes out and creates faulty humans and then blames them for his own mistakes. He's a pretty poor excuse for a supreme being. — Gene Roddenberry

In education, we need to begin paying attention to matters routinely ignored. We spend long hours trying to teach a variety of courses on, say, the structure of government or the structure of the amoeba. But how much effort goes into studying the structure of everyday life - the way time is allocated, the personal uses of money, the places to go for help in a society exploding with complexity? We take for granted that young people already know their way around our social structure. In fact, most have only the dimmest image of the way the world of work or business is organized. Most students have no conception of the architecture of their own city's economy, or the way the local bureaucracy operates, or the place to go to lodge a complaint against a merchant. Most do not even understand how their own schools - even universities - are structured, let alone how much structures are changing under the impact of the Third Wave. — Alvin Toffler

Voice isn't fixed or unmalleable, it adapts to the characters you are creating and the story being told. I suppose in some way that's true in life - a little flexibility goes a long way. — Ayana Mathis

As the year goes on, certain deputies - and others, high in public life - will appear unshaven, without coat or cravat; or they will jettison these marks of the polite man, when the temperature rises. They affect the style of men who begin their mornings with a splash under a backyard pump, and who stop off at their street-corner bar for a nip of spirits on their way to ten hours' manual labor. Citizen Robespierre, however, is a breathing rebuke
to these men; he retains his buckled shoes, his striped coat of olive green. Can it be the same coat that he wore in the first year of the Revolution? He is not profligate with coats.
While Citizen Danton tears off the starched linen that fretted his thick neck, Citizen Saint-Just's cravat grows ever higher, stiffer, more wonderful to behold. He affects a single earring, but he resembles less a corsair than a slightly deranged merchant banker. — Hilary Mantel

We can put it this way: the man who has faith is the man who is no longer looking at himself and no longer looking to himself. He no longer looks at anything he once was. He does not look at what he is now. He does not even look at what he hopes to be as the result of his own efforts. He looks entirely to the Lord Jesus Christ and His finished work, and rests on that alone. He has ceased to say, "Ah yes, I used to commit terrible sins but I have done this and that." He stops saying that. If he goes on saying that, he has not got faith. Faith speaks in an entirely different manner and makes a man say, "Yes I have sinned grievously, I have lived a life of sin, yet I know that I am a child of God because I am not resting on any righteousness of my own; my righteousness is in Jesus Christ and God has put that to my account. — D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

I get so much from having the opportunity to interface with the younger people and to bring information to them and to represent our culture and our way of life. The feeling and the warmth and the love, it's unbelievable. The type of exchange that goes on between students and teachers or visiting people who are doing master classes, and not just when they're musicians. Even general classes, when the students are not necessarily musicians. — Wynton Marsalis

I mean, mentally you brace yourself for the ending of a novel. As you're reading, you're aware of the fact that there's only a page or two left in the book, and you get ready to close it. but with a film there's no way of telling, especially nowadays, when films are much more loosely structured, much more ambivalent, than they used to be. There's no way of telling which frame is going to be the last. The film is going along, just as life goes along, people are behaving, doing things, drinking, talking, and we're watching them, and at any point the director chooses, without warning, without anything being resolved, or explained, or wound up, it can just...end. — David Lodge

It is unrealistic to assume that if all goes well in a child's life, he or she will be happy. Happiness is not something one can ask of a child. Children suffer in a way that adults don't always realize under the pressure their parents put on them to be happy. — Adam Phillips

It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety. — Neil Gaiman

Philosophy goes into the problem deeply, without changing being at all. Religion tells me that I have been created; that I am continuously receiving myself from divine hands, that I am free yet living from God's strength. Try to feel your way into this truth, and your whole attitude towards life will change. You will see yourself in an entirely new perspective. What once seemed self-understood becomes questionable. Where once you were indifferent, you become reverent; where self-confident, you learn to know "fear and trembling." But where formerly you felt abandoned, you will now feel secure, living as a child of the Creator-Father, and the knowledge that this is precisely what you are will alter the very tap-root of your being — Romano Guardini

She was deemed an unfit mother, in spite of the fact that she goes to the gym every day,' Hal once told me.
... Beautiful people are often forgiven for many things
and maybe she's gotten through life that way, but I don't forgive her for anything
and I don't even know what awful things she's done other than showing a lack of parental fitness. — Neal Shusterman

My record as a pro-life governor is not in dispute. I am completely pro-life, and I believe that we should have a culture of life. It's informed by my faith from beginning to end. And this not just as it related to unborn babies - I did it at the end of life issues as well. This is something that goes way beyond politics. — Jeb Bush

I believe being a 'gentleman' goes well beyond holding the door for a girl and letting her go before you. It's about being vulnerable for her. I think that when it comes to the way we treat women, it's a good idea to look to the way Jesus treated women.

He laid His life down for His bride,

He sacrificed for her,

He lowered Himself for her,

He was vulnerable for her.

We must love women vulnerably in the same way that Jesus loved His bride vulnerably. Being a gentleman is far more than being caring and thoughtful, it's about possessing sacrificial and vulnerable Christ-like characteristics. I don't know if it's possible to be a gentleman without knowing and representing the character of Jesus. — Cole Ryan

Musicians do not have to be believed in. We do not have to be trusted. Our Music speaks for itself without the listener having to know anything about us. Music touches people's emotions in a way that nothing else can. When people find a musician they like, they are usually fans for Life. If they like the musician and his Music, they will open up their hearts to whatever that musician has to say. It matters not what country the musician or the fan comes from. Music is a language that all understand. It goes beyond and breaks down barriers. This makes the musician very powerful, and with power comes responsibility. — Victor L. Wooten

I want to see everything now. And while none of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'll be me. Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me, out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it's finally me, where it's in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times ten thousand a day. I'll get hold of it so it'll never run off. I'll hold onto the world so tight some day. I've got a finger on it now; that's a beginning. — Ray Bradbury

But this book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It's about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It's about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it. The problems that I saw at the tile warehouse run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy. too many young men immune to hard work. Good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time. And a young man [one of Vance's co-workers] with every reason to work - a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way - carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him. There is a lack of agency here - a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America. — J.D. Vance

When I got back into show business in 1961, I felt - for obvious reasons - that nothing in my life went right, and I realized that millions of people felt the same way. So when I first came
back my catch phrase was "nothing goes right." Early on, that was my setup for a lot of jokes. — Rodney Dangerfield

There is no fairy godmother, Cinderella. Life doesn't work that way. If you're patient and go through the steps, you will be able to change. But there's a lot of energy that goes into a transformation. — Sara Farizan

Sure, occasionally a certain sappy song or romantic movie would come on, and you'd wonder what he or she was up to, but there was no way to know. Of course, you could always pick up the phone (and more recently, text or e-mail), but that would require that person's knowing you were thinking of him or her. Where's the fun in that? You never want them to know you're thinking of them, so you refrain. Before long the memories start to fade. One day, you realize you can't quite remember how she smelled or the exact color of his eyes. Eventually, without ever knowing it, you just forget that person altogether. You replace old memories with new ones, and life goes on. It was the clean break you needed to move forward. — Brandi Glanville

Despair is not for the living
but for those unable to rise and continue;
they are the only souls with a right to it.
It is an end where breath and strength and will
have vanished, leaving no way to persevere.
To sink into the abyss that is despair
is to suffer an existence far worse than death;
therefore, cling to its enemy, our ally - hope.
For life goes on,
and we must not live in despair.
We must not. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Life isn't easy. Would that every story ended happily, every crisis be averted, everything get a pretty shiny bow, but that's not the world we live in. Life is harsh. Things go wrong, People get hurt, and some even die. That's just the way it goes. — Daniel Younger

You don't have to be young. You don't have to be thin. You don't have to be "hot" in a way that some dumbfuckedly narrow mindset has construed that word. You don't have to have taut flesh or a tight ass or an eternally upright set of tits. You have to find a way to inhabit your body while enacting your deepest desires. You have to be brave enough to build the intimacy you deserve. You have to take off all of your clothes and say, "I'm right here." There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay. And perhaps the body is our final frontier. It's the one place we can't leave. We're there till it goes. Most women and some men spend their lives trying to alter it, hide it, prettify it, make it what it isn't, or conceal it for what it is. But what if we didn't do that? That's the question you need to answer, — Cheryl Strayed

And when attacked by a Capitol-aligned soldier in District 2, she tells him that fighting in the Capitol's wars makes them all slaves: "It just goes around and around and who wins? Not us. Not the districts. Always the Capitol. But I'm tired of being a piece in their Games." Game theory is not about games. It's about politics and psychology, war and strategy. For Katniss Everdeen, it is life and death, and in the end, everyone in Panem comes to learn that the only way to truly win the game is not to play at all. — Leah Wilson

So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?' Mr. Okamoto: 'That's an interesting question?' Mr. Chiba: 'The story with animals.' Mr. Okamoto: 'Yes. The story with animals is the better story.' Pi Patel: 'Thank you. And so it goes with God. — Yann Martel

Whether it's your personal life or career, people feel they have carte blanche to everything that goes on in your life. I don't agree with that, but I do feel I have to share my thoughts on those things with people instead of totally avoiding it. I want to put it out there the way I want to put it out there. — Faith Evans

Here's a news flash: No soldier gives his life. That's not the way it works. Most soldiers who make a conscious decision to place themselves in harm's way do it to protect their buddies. They do it because of the bonds of friendship - and it goes so much deeper than friendship. — Eric Massa

Tyranny in democratic republics does not proceed in the same way, however. It ignores the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says: You will think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do. You may keep your life, your property, and everything else. But from this day forth you shall be as a stranger among us. You will retain your civic privileges, but they will be of no use to you. For if you seek the votes of your fellow citizens, they will withhold them, and if you seek only their esteem, they will feign to refuse even that. You will remain among men, but you will forfeit your rights to humanity. When you approach your fellow creatures, they will shun you as one who is impure. And even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they, too, be shunned in turn. Go in peace, I will not take your life, but the life I leave you with is worse than death. — Alexis De Tocqueville

What I mean is that those thoughts, they're human. And just because you turn out differently than everyone's imagined you would doesn't mean that you've failed in some way. A kid who gets teased in one school might move to a different one, and be the most popular girl there, just because no one has any other expectations of her. Or a person who goes to med school because his entire family is full of doctors might find out that what he really wants to be is an artist instead. — Jodi Picoult

There are life events that can destroy the personality, which is a lot more fragile than most people imagine, constructed as it is from bits provided by others in the most haphazard way. People can be torn down to the core, "shattered," as the expression goes, and then they seek sleep. And dreams, which provide the ground for the construction of a new and more integrated self. Providing there's a core, and providing they're willing to do the work. — Michael Gruber

In this life you have to be your own hero.
By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way.
Like it or not, you are alone in a forest, just like all those fairy tales that begin with a hero who's usually stupid but somehow brave, or who might be clever, but weak as a straw, and away he goes (don't worry about the gender), cheered on by nobody, via the castles and the bears, and the old witch and the enchanted stream, and by and by (we hope) he'll find the treasure. — Jeanette Winterson

We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand outside things and run them that way. It just doesn't work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be. — Ursula K. Le Guin

What we're doing in writing is not all that different from what we've been doing all our lives, i.e., using our personalities as a way of coping with life. Writing is about charm, about finding and accessing and honing ones' particular charms. To say that "a light goes on" is not quite right - it's more like: a fixture gets installed. Only many years later ... will the light go on. — George Saunders

I don't like MTV, and I don't like the culture that goes with it. It's OK in very small doses, maybe. Nevertheless, it's a social reality and has influenced how kids perceive things around them, the pace of life and the way people do things. — Seymour Papert

I find that life just gets in the way and it gets so busy and there's so much chaos and stress that can come along with raising two teenage girls in Los Angeles and being married and working and, you know, everything that goes along with it. It's how do you find those calm moments, because everybody has this in their life. — Lisa Rinna

It's total bullshit. I hate it when people make sadness all deep and beautiful and, like- profound. That's the word it's not profound. It's not beautiful. It sucks. It sucks balls. I think it makes non-sad people feel better. Like, they think if must be a good thing to be sad, because you're getting all this insight into real life and pain or whatever. Like how people say tears are like rain. Fuck off. Tears are just tears and they make your eyes hurt and they won stop when you want them to and ugh you get all those arty photos of girls crying - it's always girls, have you noticed?- and it's so beautiful and tasteful and moving. When the reality is your face goes all blotchy and your nose runs and you can taste it every time you breathe'
'Taste what?'
'It. Pain. Sadness. I'm just saying that sadness isn't beautiful and if it looks that way, it's a lie. — Sara Barnard

This is the way life goes in Big Sur. Waiting for the mail, watching the sea-lions in the surf or the freighters on the horizon, sitting in the tubs at Hot Springs, once in a while a bit of drink - and, most of the time, working at what ever it is that you came here to work on, whether it be painting, writing, gardening or the simple art of living your own life. — Hunter S. Thompson

Always when I play back my father's voice," Maria says, "it is with a professional rasp, it goes as it lays, don't do it the hard way. My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake. As lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply. — Joan Didion

That's you, drops of water and you're on top of the mountain of success. But one day you start sliding down the mountain and you think wait a minute; I'm a mountain top water drop. I don't belong in this valley, this river, this low dark ocean with all these drops of water. Then one day it gets hot and you slowly evaporate into air, way up, higher than any mountain top, all the way to the heavens. Then you understand that it was at your lowest that you were closest to God. Life's a journey that goes round and round and the end is closest to the beginning. So if it's change you need, relish the journey. — Casey Affleck

People who achieve great things are people who make choices. Far too many people today let life dictate their future instead of the other way around. Choices are hard - that's why so few actually make them. But as the saying goes - not to make a choice is to make a choice. When it comes to choices, The question is - what choices will you make today? The world doesn't care about your problems, or what's holding you back. They don't care about your past failures, or any other obstacles you face. Stop making excuses and start making choices. — Phil Cooke

I'm just really a free spirit. You gotta be like that. 'Cause life ain't that complicated. It's only that complicated when you make it that way. I just wanna wake up and move with the way it goes. If it's meant to happen, it will happen. — Nayvadius Cash

But it had always been my mom's philosophy that the way we treat animals goes hand in hand with the way we treat people, and so she would dedicate her life to stopping men like this one, bushmeat traders hoping for sale — Eliot Schrefer

Ordinarily, I am the person who falls in love quickly and somewhat inappropriately and then goes on to destroy what is a good thing. That's always been my style. So, you know: I get it. And I feel right now the way I imagine all those guys felt with me. And I have to say, for the first time in my life, I feel something approaching compassion for them. — Sarah Dunn