The Life You Were Born To Live Quotes & Sayings

If he were alive he would be sitting on a park bench with a mug of hot coffee reading his favorite book for the fifth or tenth time, glancing up now and then to watch the people stroll by, and the city would smmile and lean in and whisper: That bench was shaped for your body. That book was written for your mind. This city was built for your life, and all these people were born to share it with you. You are part of this, living man. Go live. — Isaac Marion

Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else
an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood
or it may be easier to blame the map you were given
folded too many times, out-of-date, tiny print
but mostly, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself.
One day I'll tell my daughter a story about a dark time, the dark days before she was born, and how her coming was a ray of light. We got lost for a while, the story will begin, but then we found our way. — Nick Flynn

What we share with animals is a desire for choice. It's a desire to have control over our life and a desire to live and use choice as a way in which we can facilitate our ability to live and that is something we really were born with. — Sheena Iyengar

For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the large forest planet Oglaroon, the entire "intelligent" population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree they are born, live, fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance of birth control, fight a few extremely minor wars and eventually die strapped to the underside of some of the less accessible outer branches. In — Douglas Adams

The great name of the Dollys was Milton, and ... if you named a son Milton it was a decision that attempted to chart the life he'd live before he even stepped into it, for among Dollys the name carried expectations and history ... Jessops, Arthurs, Haslams and Miltons were born to walk only the beaten Dolly path to the shadowed place, live and die in keeping with those blood-line customs fiercest held.
Ree and Mom both had shouted and shouted and shouted against Harold becomeing a Milton, since Sonny was already a Jessop ... Ree'd a thousand times wished she'd fought longer for sonny, Shouted him into an Adam or Leotis or Eugene, shouted until he was named to expect choices. — Daniel Woodrell

The purpose of this glorious life is not simply to endure it, but to soar, stumble, and flourish as you learn to fall in love with existence. We were born to live, my dear, not to merely exist. — Becca Lee

When a man lives with the wilderness he comes to an acceptance of death as a part of living, he sees the leaves fall and rot away to build the soil for other trees and plants to be born. The leaves gather strength from sun and rain, gathering the capital on which they live to return it to the soil when they die. Only for a time have they borrowed their life from the sum of things, using their small portion of sun, earth, and rain, some of the chemicals that go into their being - all to be paid back when death comes. All to be used again and again. — Louis L'Amour

Do you think the people who were trying to reach to the Everest were not full of doubts? For a hundred years, how many people tried and how many people lost their lives? Do you know how many people never came back? But, still, people come from all over the world, risking, knowing they may never return. For them it is worth it - because in the very risk something is born inside of them: the center. It is born only in the risk. That's the beauty of risk, the gift of risk. — Rajneesh

Life is full of change, honey. That's how we learn and grow. When we're born, the Good Lord gives each of us a Life book. Chapter by chapter, we live and learn. — Beth Hoffman

Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body. It is from there that both babies and cancers are born. — Yann Martel

My fantasy life was very full. Certainly when I was a kid, I probably wanted to be an actor because I wanted to be a princess, or something magical, and get to dress up magically, and have the kind of life that I hadn't been born into, with magic powers or whatever, and live this wonderful idealised life. — Raquel Cassidy

Weirdly enough, I live in London - was born there and have lived there all my life - but I hadn't made a film in London for a long time. I hadn't found the right subject. I liked going away, to some far flung place. — Asif Kapadia

Yes, we had made and excursion into another world and we had come back, but we had brought the joy of life and of humanity back with us. In the rush and whirl of everyday things, we so often live alongside one another without making any mutual contact. We had learned on the North Fae of the Eiger that men are good, and the earth on which we were born is good."(p.126) — Heinrich Harrer

The only realities in life are that you are born, and that you die. We always think we are going to live forever. The dying aspect we will never accept. The one thing about having this kind of warning is how you appreciate every single day of life. — Oscar De La Renta

I has always thought the world was good, that everyone could find the beauty in themselves. Everyone could honor, and forgive, and live a full and gorgeous life, even when the hands they'd been dealt weren't easy.
But what Davenport had been born into had taken so much from her, leaving her with just the wickedest and the worst. Her father had given her life, and then taken every scrap of joy or freedom, and even now that he was dead, all he had left her with was a deep, abiding hatred for what she was.
Her power was tremendous, working through her, but it had gone to rot, and without someone to help her and to love her, she did not know how to take it back. — Brenna Yovanoff

Everybody is born so that they can learn to live a good life-like loving everybody and being nice, right? Well animals already know how to do that, so they don't have to live so long — Robin Downing

She isn't a storm or a leader or a king or a war or anyone whose life and death makes noise. The problem is words. There is skin, yes. And then, inside that, there is your language, the casual, inherited magic spells taht make your skin real. It's too late now
even if we could say "Shut up" or "Where's my dinner?" in the first language, the real language, the words weren't born in us. And unless your skin and your language touch each other without interruption, there is no word strong enough to make you understand that it matters that you live. The things that really "stay" are an Orisha, a kind night, a pretended boy, a garden song that made no sense. Those come closer to being enough. — Helen Oyeyemi

In my opinion, the best time to be alive is always right now. People are aways whining about how they were born in the wrong century, but they really haven't thought things through. They picture the old castle they wish they could live in, but they don't think about the drafts in the winter or the pitch darkness at night, or all the spiders and the lice. They can't imagine the everyday pain of a life without movies or recorded music or... or... Interet videos about cats. And don't even get me started on women who idealize the past. Do you have any idea what it was like to be a woman even a hundred years ago? Horrible! And a hundred years before that, the situation practically defies description. We might as well have been slaves. Trussed up in hoop skirts and corsets, married off like racehorses. Good riddance to history, I say! — Tommy Wallach

We did not decide to be born hence; we cannot live on our own — Sunday Adelaja

Time says hush: by the gong of time you live. Listen and you hear time saying you were silent long before you came to life and you will again be silent long after you leave it, why not be a little silent now? Hush yourself, noisy little man. Time hushes all: the gong of time rang for you to come out of the hush and you were born. The gong of time will ring for you to go back to the same hush you came from. Winners and losers, the weak and the strong, those who say little and try to say it well, and those who babble and prattle their lives away, time hushes all. — Carl Sandburg

I was born and I live in a small village, where the centre of life is the square, and the small bar/cafe. — Diego Della Valle

Think of it, I literally had to touch death and be born again to live a glimpse of the life that I never had. — Sapan Saxena

It is not fair that people who are born in the UK to parents who are domiciled here, can later in life claim to be non-doms and live here, it is not fair that non-doms with residential property here in the UK can put it in an offshore company and avoid inheritance tax. — George Osborne

I thought if I was going to live a life in this land I was accidentally born on, I must people it; I must have a history ... I'm looking for these people inside me, wherever they may be; that is my form of research. — Sebastian Barry

Some behaviour is more heritable than others; you may start off with some genes loaded for depression but they don't just switch on without some environmental input. No one knows if you become 'you' because of nature or nurture: it's a combination of what you're born with and how you live your life. In — Ruby Wax

It is not understood that before life an individual decides to
live. A self is not simply the accidental personification of the
body's biological mechanism. Each person born desires to be born.
He dies when that desire no longer operates. No epidemic or illness
or natural disaster - or stray bullet from a murderer's gun - will
kill a person who does not want to die. — Seth

You were not born to make only a living but to live life. — Lailah Gifty Akita

And my own affairs were as bad, as dismal, as the day I had been born. The only difference was that now I could drink now and then, though never often enough. Drink was the only thing that kept a man from feeling forever stunned and useless. Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I've got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought. God, they all had assholes and sexual organs and their mouths and their armpits. They shit and they chattered and they were dull as horse dung. The girls looked good from a distance, the sun shining through their dresses, their hair. But get up close and listen to their minds running out of their mouths, you felt like digging in under a hill and hiding out with a tommy-gun. I would certainly never be able to be happy, to get married, I could never have children. Hell, I couldn't even get a job as a dishwasher. — Charles Bukowski

No one knows what it means to be born and to live on the brink, between two worlds....to love and hate both, to hesitate and waver all one's life. To have two homelands and yet have none. To be everywhere at home and to remain forever a stranger. In short, to be torn on a rack, but as both victim and torturer at once. — Ivo Andric

Ignite the fire within you and it will allow you to live your special dreams in life. You were born for it and your destiny. Now ... live it! — Timothy Pina

To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to live the life of a child forever. For what is a man's life, unless woven into the life of our ancestors by the memory of past deeds? — Marcus Tullius Cicero

You meant it, didn't you?'

He was silent for a moment, no doubt reading my thoughts. 'Yes, I meant it. You are life to me, May.'

'But you told me you were born in the seventeen hundreds. How could you live for three hundred years without me?'

He examined my face for a moment before leaning forward, his kiss so sweet it made me want to melt. 'Before you, I merely existed. Now I will truly begin to live — Katie MacAlister

People born in Queens, raised to say that each morning they get on the subway and "go to the city," have a resentment of Manhattan, of the swiftness of its life and success of the people who live there. — Jimmy Breslin

I know change is possible, I know there is an alternative, because I live a completely different life to the one I was born with. I also know that the solution is not fame or money or any transient adornment of the individual. The only Revolution that can really change the world is the one in your own consciousness, and mine has already begun. — Russell Brand

I had a lot of things I wanted to do ... I want to be a teacher ... I also want to be an astronaut ... and also make my own cake shop ... I want to go to the sweets bakery and say "I want one of everything", ohhhh I wish I could live life five times over ... Then I'd be born in five different places, and I'd stuff myself with different food from around the world ... I'd live five different lives with five different occupations ... and then, for those five times ... I'd fall in love with the same person ... — Tite Kubo

You were not born to be ordinary and struggle through life. You were born to excel and win. Your destiny is to live great and above all things ... shine! — Timothy Pina

We human beings are born in ego, live in ego, are brought up in ego and will die in ego. We need a certain degree 0f vision when we live in this world for achieving and attaining our goals in life. — Mata Amritanandamayi

You weren't born just to live a life and to die; you were born to accomplish something specifically. Matter of fact, success is making it to the end of your purpose; that is success ... Success is not just existing. Success is making it to the end of why you were born. — Myles Munroe

What can you do when you don't fit in? What can you do when life seems to be passing you by?"
"Follow me. I want to show you something. See the horizon over there? See how big this world is? See how much room there is for everybody? Have you ever seen any other worlds?"
"No."
"As far as you know, this is the only world there is, right?"
"Right."
"There are no other worlds for you to live in, right?"
"Right."
"You were born to live in this world, right?"
"Right."
"WELL LIVE IN IT THEN! Five cents please. — Charles M. Schulz

Do not regret having lived, but while yet living live in a way that allows you to think that you were not born in vain.
And do not regret that you must die: it is what all who are wise must Wish, to have life end at its proper time.
For nature puts a limit to living as to everything else,
And we are the sons and daughters of nature, and for us therefore the sleep of nature is nature's final kindness — A.C. Grayling

Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can't live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you're a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you're not free. And you can't hold this up as your own tragedy, for your birth is a tragedy of Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life itself so oppresses you that you're forced to become a slave. Hapless you are if, having been born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others. — Fernando Pessoa

Would you be willing to give your life to save the world if no one ever knew your name? If anonymity was the price you would have to pay for significance, would it be too great a price? To live a life of courage is not a guarantee of prestige or adulation. It only matters if you live and die fulfilling the mission you were born for. — Erwin Raphael McManus

I think that once you're born, the thing you have to do is find out who you are and live that life as well as you can. You can't spend your time wondering how things would have been if you were someone different. — Fuyumi Ono

The meanings of life aren't inherited. What is inherited is the mandate to make meanings of life by how we live. The endings of life give life's meanings a chance to show. The beginning of the end of our order, our way, is now in view. This isn't punishment, any more than dying is a punishment for being born. — Stephen Jenkinson

Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness. — George Eliot

There is a profound difference between fighting to avoid death and fighting in order to live. Men who fight to avoid death preserve their dignity and one and all - men, women and children - defend it jealously, tenaciously, fiercely ... When men fight to avoid death they cling with a tenacity born of desperation to all that constitutes the living and eternal part of human life, the essence, the noblest and purest element of life: dignity, pride, freedom of conscience. They fight to save their souls. But after the liberation men had to fight in order to live ... It is a humiliating, horrible thing, a shameful necessity, a fight for life. Only for life. Only to save one's skin. — Curzio Malaparte

Work for a Better Life as if you live forever,
And work for Better End as if you die tomorrow — Ali Ibn Abi Talib

They say a writer is not a single person, it is a bunch of characters. What I learned from life is that everyone is a bunch of characters, characters who live and die within us. The moment I was raped, many characters in me died. I lost most of my characteristics. Several new characters were born, one was rage, second was a lifelong unhappiness and third was the fear of helplessness. — Himanshu Chhabra

A new humanity will be born, fuller in conception and richer in experience and accomplishments in all fields. Joy of life will belong to every man, love will dominate human society, truth and virtue will reign in the world, peace on earth will be permanent and all will live in fulfillment in fullness of life in God Consciousness. — Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

To be born, to live and to die is merely to change forms ... And what does one form matter any more than another? ... Each form has its own sort of happiness and unhappiness. From the elephant down to the flea ... from the flea down to the sensitive and living molecule which is the origin of all, there is not a speck in the whole of nature that does not feel pain or pleasure. — John Dewey

If life begins at conception, but you can be born again later, only to live on eternally after death, what's the big deal about anything? — Dana Gould

You born with three obligations: to love, to live, and to be happy. — Debasish Mridha

Young people," McDonald said contemptuously. "You always think there's something to find out."
"Yes, sir," Andrews said.
"Well, there's nothing," McDonald said. "You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you're ready to die, it comes to you - that there's nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain't done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you're the only one that knows the secret; only then it's too late. You're too old."
"No," Andrews said. A vague terror crept from the darkness that surrounded them, and tightened his voice. "That's not the way it is."
"You ain't learned, then," McDonald said. "You ain't learned yet ... — John Edward Williams

I was born Ezeogo Igariwey to live my life a legacy for the world,like a wound that healed with a scar that remains."My legacy will leave a mark on the world and I shall never be forgetten for my good,bad,and ugly deeds. — Tupac Shakur

You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you're ready to die, it comes to you - that there's nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain't done it, because the lies told you there was something else. — John Williams

telling him how people had thought the same thing long before he and his brother were born, that it was the hubris of each generation to think this anew, to think that their time was special, that all things would come to an end with them. His father said it was hope that made people feel this, not dread. People talked of the end coming with barely concealed smiles. Their prayer was that when they went, they wouldn't go alone. Their hope was that no one would have the good fortune to come after and live a happy life without them. Thoughts — Hugh Howey

The criers of the Mysteries speak again, bidding all men welcome to the House of Light. The great institution of materiality has failed. The false civilization built by man has turned, and like the monster of Frankenstein, is destroying its creator. Religion wanders aimlessly in the maze of theological speculation. Science batters itself impotently against the barriers of the unknown. Only transcendental philosophy knows the path. Only the illumined reason can carry the understanding part of man upward to the light. Only philosophy can teach man to be born well, to live well, to die well, and in perfect measure be born again. Into this band of the elect
those who have chosen the life of knowledge, of virtue, and of utility
the philosophers of the ages invite YOU. — Manly P. Hall

We can choose the narrative we tell about our lives. We're born into cultures, nations and languages that we didn't choose. We're born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can't control. We're sometimes thrust into social conditions that we detest. But among all the things we don't control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to organize perceptions. — David Brooks

Whatever circumstances you were born into, whatever family life and education you had or didn't have, you came here to make your dreams come true, and no matter where you are now, you are fully equipped with everything you need to do it! — Rhonda Byrne

I can't do anything about my past, but I can do a lot to cooperate with my destiny. I am re-created in Christ Jesus, born anew, that I might do the good works that he laid out for me and live the good life. — Joyce Meyer

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. — Boris Pasternak

These are the days in which a true leader wants to live. These are days when opportunities to change lives and even destinies are nearly endless. You are running the anchor leg of the relay because you were born to lead. You were born for glory. — Sheri L. Dew

No one fights dirtier or more brutally than blood; only family knows it's own weaknesses, the exact placement of the heart. The tragedy is that one can still live with the force of hatred, feel infuriated that once you are born to another, that kinship lasts through life and death, immutable, unchanging, no matter how great the misdeed or betrayal. Blood cannot be denied, and perhaps that's why we fight tooth and claw, because we cannot - being only human - put asunder what God has joined together. — Whitney Otto

Know God's Will? How Should I Live in This World? What Does It Mean to Be Born Again? Can I Be Sure I'm Saved? What Is Faith? What Can I Do with My Guilt? What Is the Trinity? What Is Baptism? Can I Have Joy in My Life? Who — R.C. Sproul

Now that we are born, let us live in a trance. — Arvind Parashar

The half-brained creature to whom books are other than living things may see with the eyes of a bat and draw with the fingers of a mole his dullard's distinction between books and life: those who live the fuller life of a higher animal than he know that books are to poets as much part of that life as pictures are to painters or as music is to musicians, dead matter though they may be to the spiritually still-born children of dirt and dullness who find it possible and natural to live while dead in heart and brain. — Algernon Charles Swinburne

Life Is Fine"

I went down to the river,
I set down on the bank.
I tried to think but couldn't,
So I jumped in and sank.

I came up once and hollered!
I came up twice and cried!
If that water hadn't a-been so cold
I might've sunk and died.

But it was Cold in that water! It was cold!

I took the elevator
Sixteen floors above the ground.
I thought about my baby
And thought I would jump down.

I stood there and I hollered!
I stood there and I cried!
If it hadn't a-been so high
I might've jumped and died.

But it was High up there! It was high!

So since I'm still here livin',
I guess I will live on.
I could've died for love--
But for livin' I was born

Though you may hear me holler,
And you may see me cry--
I'll be dogged, sweet baby,
If you gonna see me die.

Life is fine! Fine as wine! Life is fine! — Langston Hughes

So you were born, and that was a good day. Some day you'll die, and that is a shame. But somewhere in the between, you'll live a life of which we'll all dream, and nothing and no one will ever take that away. — Tomas Kalnoky