To Live Simply Quotes & Sayings

At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living. — Paul Kalanithi

We can live as we were meant to live - simply, joyously, of and on the earth. We can live with all our effort and with pure happiness. — Scott Jurek

There are many reasons to be simple. It's simply to learn effectively, to work positively, to communicate actively and to live successfully. — Dee Dee Artner

Tess is not simply presented as a passive victim, however. Throughout the novel she is shown as experiencing tension between the intractable materiality of the social and economic world in which she has to live, and her extraordinarily vulnerable, sensitive self. Hardy is particularly interested in the nature of her consciousness, and in the intense subjectivity of her experience. — Geoffrey Harvey

All of us are partly living our story line the enemy offers us.
Most of us, perhaps, live in not a terribly evil place in the moralistic sense of the word. We simply live where busyness, or apathy, or struggle with circumstances that won't change occupies most of our energy. And the enemy is perfectly happy to leave us in such a place practicing our religion. — John Eldredge

Some of us are lucky enough to fall in love once or twice but the luckiest of us are those who find that someone they simply can't live without and have the pleasure of falling in love with them day in and day out for the rest of their lives. Relationships aren't about simply falling in love once and being done with it, they're about loving someone until the end of your days and growing that love endlessly. — Chuck Palahniuk

You're not a Black man. You're a human being in God's eyes. So when you sit down to talk to someone and you talk to them in really intelligent terms, you ask difficult questions, there's a militancy that's assigned to you without you asking for it, because you are simply judged by what you look like. If you're a white person asking the same questions, you'd be one of these CNN guys and say how brilliant he is. That doesn't work for you, because this is the world we live in. — James McBride

It is necessary to point out that we live in times in which extremity is simply the last remaining form of sanity in an increasingly mad world. — Chilton Williamson

Part of the scandal of American Christianity is that statistically the U.S. is the most Christian country in the world, and yet as a country we have the greatest income inequality in the world. And as a country we are uncritically committed, not simply to being the most powerful nation in the world militarily, but to being as militarily powerful as the rest of the world combined.
We Christians live in a tradition that is passionate about issues of economic justice and peace and yet at least half of American Christians, probably even more, think it's really important that we be as powerful as the rest of the world put together. — Marcus J. Borg

It's very important not to talk down to kids, and to give them something which they think is quite grown-up and hardcore. Kids themselves are very good at self-censoring. If they don't like something, if they think it's too strong for them, they'll simply stop reading. That's the thing about a book, you can't force someone to read it ... I think there's a lot in my books about friendship, leadership, about society and how it works, how we learn to live with each other and what skills do we need to make a viable society. Kids don't need to know any of that, they just want someone to be eaten again. — Charlie Higson

This self-absorbed perspective treats God as a genie who simply exists to serve you in your selfish pursuit of personal fulfillment. But God is not your servant, and if you fall for the idea that life is supposed to be easy, either you will become severely disillusioned or you will live in denial of reality. Never forget that life is not about you! You exist for God's purposes, not vice versa. Why would God provide heaven on earth when he's planned the real thing for you in eternity? God gives us our time on earth to build and strengthen our character for heaven. — Rick Warren

She was simply a young woman who believed that the man called Jesus Christ is a real person, such as those represent him who profess to have known him; and she therefore believed the man himself - believed that, when he said a thing, he entirely meant it, knowing it to be true; believed, therefore, that she had no choice but do as he told her. That man was the servant of all; therefore, to regard any honest service as degrading would be, she saw, to deny Christ, to call the life of creation's hero a disgrace. Nor was he the first servant; he did not of himself choose his life; the Father gave it him to live--sent him to be a servant, because he, the Father, is the first and greatest servant of all. — George MacDonald

The cult of individuals is always, in my view, unjustified. To be sure, nature distributes her gifts unevenly among her children. But there are plenty of the well-endowed, thank God, and I am firmly convinced that most of them live quiet, unobtrusive lives. It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few of them for boundless admiration, attributing superhuman powers of mind and character to them. This has been my fate, and the contrast between the popular estimate of my powers and achievements and the reality is simply grotesque. — Albert Einstein

A convention is a social pattern we have chosen to prefer over whatever the raw world simply proffers. It is a sign of the operation of the mind, drawing the assent of a sufficient number of other minds so that the agreement will be widely operative. A convention is not a custom; a custom is a habit in which a sufficient number acquiesce. A custom can appear as a convention, but it is really a lesser act, the result of passive acceptance rather than of the imposition of design. It is the difference between learning to live by the annual flooding of the river or by a calendar. — A. Bartlett Giamatti

You live recklessly when you do not take God's law seriously or respond to the gospel properly. Reckless living can look like laziness and apathy. When you simply aren't motivated and tell yourself that God has forgiven you in Jesus, so you're not going to fight temptation and sin - that is reckless living, and it's far more dangerous than you realize. — Joe Thorn

I've never met a soldier who knew he was a hero. It's not false modesty. They simply decide to do something that they know they must do, usually for there comrades, because if they don't, those people will suffer in some way. For them, that compulsion is far stronger than any fear. The fact we find it exceptional is a sad indictment of the human race. I'd like to live in a world of heroes. If we did, there would be no wars. — Karen Traviss

Many Americans believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and we need to celebrate marriage as the best way to provide stability for children. For people who live by the clear teaching of many different faith traditions and people who simply believe in the sanctity of marriage, it is essential that their views are respected. — James Lankford

Felicia nodded. "Sometimes I have that problem. I know nearly everything you can learn in a book and very little that you learn in life. Like my fear of spiders. It's silly, really. I've studied arachnids in an effort to get over my ridiculous overreaction, but still, every time I see one ... " She shuddered. "It's not pretty. I simply can't control myself. A flaw - one of many." "If you're not perfect, then you came to the right place," Charlie told her. "Fool's Gold is a lively town with plenty of characters. You'll get a crash course in how the little people live." "I hope I can fit in." Patience saw the concern in Felicia's eyes and touched her arm. "You're going to do just fine. — Susan Mallery

Live simply, love seriously, care deeply, speak kindly ... leave the rest to God. — Joanne Clancy

If I simply live the principles that appear to be truth for me, I will touch the lives of those I am destined to touch. — Marlo Morgan

If morality is always relative to one's own society, then you, coming from your society, have your moral standards and I, coming from my society, have mine. It follows that when I criticize your moral standards, I am simply expressing the morality of my society, but it also follows that when you condemn me for criticizing the moral standards of your society, you are simply expressing the morality of your society. There is, on this view, no way of moving outside the morality of one's own society and expressing a transcultural or objective moral judgment about anything, including respect for the cultures of different peoples. Hence if we happen to live in a culture that honors those who subdue other societies and suppress their cultures, then that is our morality, and the relativist can offer no cogent reason why we should not simply get on with it. — Peter Singer

The psychedelic experience is simply a compressed instance of what we call understanding, so that living psychedelically is trying to live in an atmosphere of continuous unfolding of understanding, so that every day you know more and see into things with greater depth than you did before. This is a process of education. — Terence McKenna

Simply put, the best revenge is to live an awesome life. — Ramon Bautista

Prose Poems from my book SPAN
OBSERVATION
So, we may not be able to explain the world. Not exactly. But we can accept it, and love it. We can turn our faces to the light and examine the minutest details simply for the sake of it. We can live lives of joy and purpose. We are all part of one whole. Take comfort in this. Almost every one of us is capable of holding a cup to another's lips without our hands shaking. — Jay Woodman

For the perversely minded, simply killing the trinkets of your greatest amusement and nutritional satisfaction produces at best only temporary elation, a dazzling sensation that is over in a flash, but to permit your prey to fear calamity and to live through catastrophes large and small, to hope and to weep and to lament, to feel anguish over things lost, to regret things found, and to suffer with physical discomfort, emotional injuries and psychological lesions is the wellhead of enduring pleasure. — John Zande

The dogged effort to "denaturalize" gender in this text emerges, I think, from a strong desire both to counter the normative violence implied by ideal morphologies of sex and to uproot the pervasive assumptions about natural or presumptive heterosexuality that are informed by ordinary and academic discourses on sexuality. The writing of this denaturalization was not done simply out of a desire to play with language or prescribe theatrical antics in the place of "real" politics, as some critics have conjectured (as if theatre and politics are always distinct). It was done from a desire to live, to make life possible, and to rethink the possible as such. — Judith Butler

Life is simply too short to live it less perfectly than it could be lived. — J.P. Delaney

But a Congolese life is like the useless Congolese bill, which you can pile by the fistful or the bucketful into a merchant's hand, and still not purchase a single banana. It's dawning on me that I live among men and women who've simply always understood their whole existence is worth less than a banana to most white people. I see it in their eyes when they glance up at me. — Barbara Kingsolver

Never leave yourself open to regret Grace. We can only make a decision when we know the choices we are faced with. If we shy away, turn our backs and hide, we will simply never know. And that is when you end up old and wondering and regretting. Live a life of hope. Don't live a life of regret. — Hazel Gaynor

In our personal lives, we can seek to align our behavior with our values. We can live more simply, at once reducing environmental impacts, saving money, and leading by example. In our public lives - in our workplaces and in our democracy - we can advocate for dramatic reforms in the systems that shape our consumption patterns. We can, for example, advocate the elimination of perverse taxpayer subsidies such as those that make aluminum too cheap and undammed rivers too rare. And we can promote an overhaul of the tax system. If governments taxed pollution and resource depletion, rather than paychecks and savings, prices would help unveil the secret lives of everyday things. Environmentally harmful goods would cost more and benign goods would cost less. The power of the marketplace would help propel the unstuffing of North American life. — John C. Ryan

So many things fail to interest us, simply because they don't find in us enough surfaces on which to live, and what we have to do is to increase the number of planes in our mind, so that a much larger number of themes can find a place in it at the same time — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The problem with trying to find your happiness through avoidance is the nature of reality. Reality simply does not allow us to evade unwanted experiences. Sure, we might be able to escape a few {...] but the evasive life often comes at a cost, like having to live your life in terror. Even if we can successfully ward off some terrifying experiences, we can not advert them all. Particularly, the most unpleasant ones: sickness, old age and death. If our strategy has been to flea unpleasant circumstances, when they come to meet us - as they surely will - our suffering will be great indeed. — Mark W. Muesse

The secret to thriving is the knowledge that we are never simply victims of our bodies. It's very reassuring to know that we all have within us the ability to heal from anything and go on to live joy-filled lives. — Christiane Northrup

We have observed, through our own experiences and those of others, that one never gets over the loss of a brother or a child or a spouse, or any dearly loved one; one simply learns to live life differently, with a sort of a hole in the heart. The wound in the heart heals over, but the tender scar remains. — Scott Rosenow

More importantly, modern dogs simply don't behave like modern wolves. Popular dog "experts" like Cesar Millan may tell you that a good dog owner needs to play the role of the alpha wolf, the dominant pack leader. But the fact is that dogs don't live in hierarchically organized packs. Indeed it's doubtful that most wolves live this way. — Raymond Coppinger

To any young kid who wants to be a footballer, I would simply say: Have fun playing football and enjoy the team - spirit. That's the right attitude; that will bring you pleasure and fulfillment in football. A baker cannot live on bread he made yesterday, and a footballer cannot live on his last game. It's about the here and now. — Jurgen Klinsmann

It sounds strange, somewhat on the line between irony and absurdity, to think that people would rather label and judge something as significant as each other but completely bypass a peanut ... World peace is only a dream because people won't allow themselves and others around them to simply be peanuts. We won't allow the color of a man's heart to be the color of his skin, the premise of his beliefs, and his self-worth. We won't allow him to be a peanut, therefore we won't allow ourselves to come to live in harmony. (Diary 18) — Erin Gruwell

Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available. — Jonathan Kozol

All this is simply to say that all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty or thirty years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Why are we here? Why didn't God just make us and place us in Heaven? What is this place called Earth we're sent to reside in until we're called to live in Heaven for eternity? Training Camp Earth...it is the reason we're here. It is simply a training camp of lesson after lesson to build strength and our relationship with God before we go home. What lesson is God working on in your life today? — Kimberly Loving Ross

We all are [normal]. Their idea of normal just happens to be different to some other people's idea of normal. But this is the world we live in. Some people simply cannot accept something that is outside of their experience. — John Boyne

Ah. but that is the best form of meditation: to live simply in the moment and enjoy it. — Kim Fielding

In short, we cannot grow, we cannot achieve authentic discovery, and our eyes cannot be cleansed to the truly beautiful possibilities of life, if we simply live a neutral existence. — Armstrong Williams

People will always notice something about you. It might be the way you walk or the way you talk, or just simply your personality. Live each day in the way you want to be remembered. Live in such a way that people will be inspired by those unique qualities that you have and strive to live better lives for themselves. — Amaka Imani Nkosazana

'Who Is This Man?' is about the impact of Jesus on human history. Most people - including most Christians - simply have no idea of the extent to which we live in a Jesus-impacted world. — John Ortberg

Why am I so interested in politics? But if I were to answer you very simply, I would say this: why shouldn't I be interested? That is to say, what blindness, what deafness, what density of ideology would have to weigh me down to prevent me from being interested in what is probably the most crucial subject to our existence, that is to say the society in which we live, the economic relations within which it functions, and the system of power which defines the regular forms and the regular permissions and prohibitions of our conduct. The essence of our life consists, after all, of the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves.
So I can't answer the question of why I should be interested; I could only answer it by asking why shouldn't I be interested? — Michel Foucault

Put bluntly, the ego is not an obstruction to Spirit, but a radiant manifestation of Spirit. All Forms are not other than Emptiness, including the form of the ego. It is not necessary to get rid of the ego, but simply to live with it a certain exuberance. — Ken Wilber

A wise man will know what game to play to-day, and play it. We must not be governed by rigid rules, as by the almanac, but let the season rule us. The moods and thoughts of man are revolving just as steadily and incessantly as nature's. Nothing must be postponed. Take time by the forelock. Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this. Where the good husbandman is, there is the good soil. Take any other course, and life will be a succession of regrets. Let us see vessels sailing prosperously before the wind, and not simply stranded barks. There is no world for the penitent and regretful. — Henry David Thoreau

A Buddha is a person who has no more business to do and isn't looking for anything. In doing nothing, in simply stopping, we can live freely and be true to ourselves, and our liberation will contribute to the liberation of all beings. — Thich Nhat Hanh

One day I decided that existing simply did not work for me, and that was when I began to live. — Sai Marie Johnson

You do not need to be a millionaire to feel successful or be successful. Financial wealth is only one of many possible indicators of success. However, to achieve your dreams and life goals you're going to need money. And making it requires financial planning and goalsetting. I do not know of any successful person who has been able to simply ignore their finances. — Nigel Cumberland

The reason to be an atheist is not that it makes us feel better or gives us a more rewarding life. The reason to be an atheist is simply that there is no God and we would prefer to live in full recognition of that, accepting the consequences, even if it makes us less happy. — Julian Baggini

Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us - grandparents, parents, teachers, and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. If the goal is having some space in which to live one's own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another. * * * P — Susan Sontag

Were native people conquered members of sovereign nations, simply incorporated into the nation that conquered them, or domestic enemies who had fought against what was effectively their own government? Could they live as separate people, or would they be forced to merge into the whole body of the nation? — Chris Bray

I find it strange that - at least in my take on it - the people who are the most alarmed about the dire times we live in are the ones who seem to be humorless, in their taste for poetry anyway. Humor is just an ingredient. It's always been in poetry. It kind of dropped out of poetry I think during the 19th and up to the mid-twentieth century. But it's found its way back. And it's simply an ingredient. — Billy Collins

Public concern for the environment cannot be addressed by placing the blame on growth without spelling out the causes of growth. Nor can an explanation be exhausted by citing "consumerism" while ignoring the sinister role played by rival producers in shaping public taste and guiding public purchasing power. Aside from the costs involved, most people quite rightly do not want to "live simply." They do not want to diminish their freedom to travel or their access to culture, or to scale down needs that often serve to enrich human personality and sensitivity. — Murray Bookchin

Sometimes, she wondered if what she craved even existed. A man who was strong inside and out. A man who knew the world wasn't fair, and knew he had to take responsibility for his part in it. A man who knew there was more to sex than simply the act and that there was more to a woman than breasts and thighs and what lay beyond. A man who accepted the fact that a woman might need adventure as well. That was what she craved. A man she could trust enough not just to give in to her desires with, but to accept her need to live. A man who, even if he wasn't there forever, was at least there long enough to care about fulfilling not just the physical desires, but the adventurous ones as well. — Lora Leigh

People this stupid shouldn't be allowed to live. — Jason Alexander

I am not a courageous person by nature. I have simply discovered that, at certain key moments in this life, you must find courage in yourself, in order to move forward and live. It is like a muscle and it must be exercised, first a little, and then more and more. All the really exciting things possible during the course of a lifetime require a little more courage than we currently have. A deep breath and a leap. — John Patrick Shanley

He wrote Helen that a young writer needs desperately to live with someone and he had decided that he wanted to live with her; even marry her, he offered, because sex was simply necessary but it took too much of one's time if one had to be constantly planning how one was going to get it. Therefore, Garp reasoned, it is better to live with it!
Helen revised several letters before she finally sent him one that said he could, so to speak, go stick it in his ear. Did he think she was going through college so rigorously so that she could provide him with sex that was not even necessary to plan? — John Irving

If we were to excavate the deepest recesses of our consciousness, we would discover many beliefs about ourselves that are simply not true and that may never have been true. Yet we live from these beliefs as if they were true because we have never identified them clearly enough to question them, to challenge them. — Dennis Merritt Jones

To live a fulfilling life is an endurance event, and the only way to get to the finish line is to focus on the present, checking from moment to moment that I am still heading in the right direction. The Atlantic taught me that no matter how huge and seemingly impossible the task, anybody can achieve extraordinary things, by simply taking it one stroke at a time. — Roz Savage

It's very easy in a way, horrible in some ways, but simply to give up the whole thing, to say, "Well, the hell with it, as far as I'm concerned life is pointless and [so] live the fullest, most successfully self-fulfilling life you can and let the rest go hang" - I've never reached that point in my life. — Frederick Buechner

To support his austerely upholstered nest and its rabble staff he put forth minimum effort for maximum return simply because it was easier to be rich than to be poor - Harshaw merely wished to live exactly as he liked, doing whatever he thought was best for him. — Robert A. Heinlein

He had no longer free energy enough for spontaneous research and speculative thinking, but by the bedside of patients the direct external calls on his judgment and sympathies brought the added impulse needed to draw him out of himself. It was not simply that beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectably and unhappy men to live calmly - it was a perpetual claim on the immediate fresh application of thought, and on the consideration of another's need and trial. Many of us looking back through life would say that the kindest man we have ever known has been a medical man, or perhaps that surgeon whose fine tact, directed by deeply-informed perception, has come to us in our need with a more sublime beneficence than that of miracle-workers. Some of that twice-blessed mercy was always with Lydgate in his work at the Hospital or in private houses, serving better than any opiate to quiet and sustain him under anxieties and his sense of mental degeneracy. — George Eliot

Maybe the key to acclaim is simply to live long enough.
But then, maybe acclaim is the foyer to death. — Richard Powers

We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world may no longer be to write a letter to the editor or publish a book. It may be simply to stand up and say something ... because both the words and the passion with which they are delivered can now spread across the world at warp speed. — Chris Anderson

If anything, global response to the Rising only confirmed something that many Australians had quietly believed for quite some time: If forced to live in Australia for a year, most of the world's population would simply curl up in a fetal ball and die of terror. — Mira Grant

Once you consider the premise that Episodes I through III are not live-action movies with extensive special effects, but rather animated features with a few living actors rotoscoped in, many of the more common critical objections to the movies simply wither away. — David Brin

I have given up the ambition to be a great scholar. I want to be more- simply a human ... We are not true humans, but beings who live by a civilization inherited from the past, that keeps us hostage, that confines us. No freedom of movement. Nothing. Everything in us is killed by our calculations for our future, by our social position and cast. You see, I am not happy-yet I am happy. I suffer, but that is part of life. I live, I don't care about my existence, and that is the beginning of wisdom. — Albert Schweitzer

Did he live in a false world, a world that had grown simply to suit him, and was his present slight irritation - in the face now of Jim's silence in particular - but the alarm of the vain thing menaced by the touch of the real? — Henry James

Animals praise a good day, a good hunt. They praise rain if they're thirsty. That's prayer. They don't live an unconscious life, they simply have no language to talk about these things. But they are grateful for the good things that come along. — Mary Oliver

I'm someone who loves to enjoy life and tries to focus on real things and real friendships. That's why I live very simply. I'm a jeans and T-shirt kind of girl. I don't spend much time fixing myself up or trying to look cool. I live like a normal person and even though I'm in a very high-profile business, I really don't let it affect the way I live. — Cameron Diaz

We base our ideas about the world on our personal experience, and that experience has ingrained the rate of growth of the recent past in our heads as "the way things happen." We're also limited by our imagination, which takes our experience and uses it to conjure future predictions - but often, what we know simply doesn't give us the tools to think accurately about the future. When we hear a prediction about the future that contradicts our experience-based notion of how things work, our instinct is that the prediction must be naive. If I tell you [...] that you may live to be 150, or 250, or not die at all, your instinct will be, "That's stupid - if there's one thing I know from history, it's that everybody dies." And yes, no one in the past has not died. But no one flew airplanes before airplanes were invented either. — Tim Urban

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

But I must never forget how blessed I have been. God has given me gifts and happiness, beyond any of my simple desires. My deepest desire now is to simply live ... So with hope and determination, I'd hold on and go on. — Farrah Fawcett

So we live in two worlds: one characterized by social exchanges and the other characterized by market exchanges. And we apply different norms to these two kinds of relationships. Moreover, introducing market norms into social exchanges, as we have seen, violates the social norms into social exchanges, as we have seen, violates the social norms and hurts the relationships. Once this type of mistake has been committed, recovering a social relationship is difficult. Once you've offered to pay for the delightful Thanksgiving dinner, your mother-in-law will remember the incident for years to come. And if you've ever offered a potential romantic partner the chance to cut to the chase, split the cost of the courting process, and simply go to bed, the odds are that you will have wrecked the romance forever. — Dan Ariely

Jesus was clear that following Him meant - get this - following Him. The church has put so much effort into inventing a new form of "following Christ" that doesn't require imitating Him. We teach that even though Jesus allowed His rights to be trampled, we should fight for ours. We teach that even though Jesus lived simply, we have the right to live luxuriously (some prefer the term "comfortably"). Even as we teach that Jesus was rejected by the world, we pursue popularity. — Francis Chan

The way to happiness: Keep your heart free from hate, your mind from worry. Live simply, expect little, give much. Scatter sunshine, forget self, think of others. Try this for a week and you will be surprised. — Norman Vincent Peale

Most people think that Christianity is spelled DO: they look at the Bible or the life of Christ, and they simply try hard to live like Jesus. Christianity is really spelled DONE: it is what Christ has done that enables us to live a life of obedience.30 — Darrin Patrick

My prayer for the new year is that I may have the courage and the stamina to let Life happen to me, to accept its joys and successes, and to take in stride the learning that stretches us and the growing pains. Perhaps, to put it simply, my wish for the New Year is: may we love more, live more, laugh more. And so may you! — Jean Hersey

Disturbingly, modern technological society has allowed us all to become nature's bubble children who artificially dwell in that vacuum of cerebral abstraction that we know simply as material culture. But of course our existence on the planet is not an abstraction. Human culture is not really the universe we live in. That we can so rigorously sustain the illusion that we are somehow removed from the forces that perpetuate and sustain life on this planet is a strong indictment of modern humanity's separation from nature and hints that simple human reason and common sense might also be largely illusory. — Joe Hutto

I was terrified of my weakness, of my sharp tongue, of
my every flaw. I was terrified that this moment, my chance to
live in happiness for however short a time we may have had,
would be ruined because I was simply not carved out of the
same wood as happiness, and that my grain was too twisted
to ever take its form. — Amy Lane

It oughtn't to need a war to make us talk to each other in buses, and invent our own amusements in the evenings, and live simply, and eat sparingly, and recover the use of our legs, and get up early enough to see the sun rise. — Jan Struther

When the Forbidden Fruit was handed to Adam and Eve, they were allowed the moral choice to accept or decline. I know people who have refused to feast on the money tree. They live simply, within their means, and seem far more content than those who are trying to horde their wealth while clinging to the ladder of 'success,' terrified to let go. That isn't real living. The Puritans rightly saw that as covetousness. — Cal Thomas

Well, well, well. The mighty Uthman-ul-Dosht comes with mercy, and offers peace. These are strange times we live in, eh, Tulkis? Have the Gurkish learned to love their enemies? Or simply fear them?'
'One need not love one's enemy, or even fear him, to desire peace. One need only love oneself.'
'Is that so?'
'It is. I lost two sons in the wars between our peoples. One at Ulrioch in the last war. He was a priest, and burned in the temple there. The other died not long ago, at the siege of Dagoska. He led the charge when the first breach was made.'
Glokta frowned and stretched out his neck. A hail of flatbow bolts. Tiny figures, falling in the rubble. 'That was a brave charge.'
'War is harshest on the brave. — Joe Abercrombie

You should live in a manner that should enable you to devote time to writing and contemplation. As is often said, the writer is at work even when he is simply looking out the window. — F. Sionil Jose

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

I believe it is better to live a dream rather than to simply dream it. The dream is the start of something greater, something that impels us to make daring decisions. And it's true that the person who pursues a dream takes many risks. But the person who does not runs risks that are even greater. — Paulo Coelho

The explanation of this perennial quality of Arabic is to be found simply in the conserving role of nomadism. It is in towns that languages decay, by becoming worn out, the things and institutions they designate. Nomads, who live to some extent outside time, conserve their language better; it is, moreover, the only treasure they can carry around with them in their pastoral existence; the nomad is a jealous guardian of his linguistic heritage, his poetry and his rhetorical art. On the other hand, his inheritance in the way of visual art cannot be rich; architecture presupposes stability, and the same is broadly true of sculpture and painting. — Titus Burckhardt

There was a reason these boys were still alive, though. Something made them stronger than the other kids, the ones who had died in the early days, who had simply lain down and given up, unable to cope with the terrible things that were happening in the world. These boys were survivors. The will to live was stronger than any other feelings. — Charlie Higson

Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back. — Kurt Vonnegut

I have come to know that it [death] is an important thing to keep in mind - not to complain or to make melancholy, but simply because only with the honest knowledge that one day I will die I can ever truly begin to live. — R.A. Salvatore

People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It's simply how we live. — Don DeLillo

One joke has a Franciscan, a Dominican, and a Jesuit celebrating Mass together when the lights suddenly go out in the church. The Franciscan praises the chance to live more simply. The Dominican gives a learned homily on how God brings light to the world. The Jesuit goes to the basement to fix the fuses. — James Martin

Family is the one human institution we have no choice over. We get in simply by being born, and as a result we are involuntarily thrown together with a menagerie of strange and unlike people. Church calls for another step: to voluntarily choose to band together with a strange menagerie because of a common bond in Jesus Christ. I have found that such a community more resembles a family than any other human institution. Henri Nouwen once defined a community as "a place where the person you least want to live with always lives." His definition applies equally to the group that gathers each Thanksgiving and the group that congregates each Sunday morning. (p. 64-65, Church: Why Bother?) — Philip Yancey

Sometimes you simply made the wrong choice and you had to live with it. You could only change the future. — Kristin Hannah

What do I miss, as a human being, if I have never heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The answer is: Nothing. And what do I miss by not knowing Shakespeare? Unless I get my understanding from another source, I simply miss my life. Shall we tell our children that one thing is as good as another-- here a bit of knowledge of physics, and there a bit of knowledge of literature? If we do so, the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, because that normally is the time it takes from the birth of an idea to its full maturity when it fills the minds of a new generation and makes them think by it.

Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live. — Ernst F. Schumacher

It was apparent that all of mankind is actually motivated by inner love, but has simply become unaware; most people live their lives as though they're sleepers unawakened to the perception of who they really are. — David Hawkins

In the narrative of his third voyage Columbus wrote: "For I believe that the earthly Paradise lies here, which no one can enter except by God's leave." As for the people of this land, Peter Martyr would write as early as 1505: "They seem to live in that golden world of which old writers speak so much, wherein men lived simply and innocently without enforcement of laws, without quarreling, judges, or libels, content only to satisfy nature." Or as the ever present Montaigne would write: "In my opinion, what we actually see in these nations not only surpasses all the pictures which the poets have drawn of the Golden Age, and all their inventions representing the then happy state of mankind, but also the conception and desire of philosophy itself. — Paul Auster