Unlived Quotes & Sayings

I had come to believe that the fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully. A good working formula is: the more unlived life, or unrealized potential, the greater one's death anxiety. My — Irvin D. Yalom

It is both revealing and invigorating to occasionally set aside the worries of life, seek the company of a friendly book and mingle with the great of the earth, counsel with the wise of all time, look into the unlived days with prophets ... To become acquainted with real nobility as it walks the pages of history and science and literature is to strengthen character and develop life in its finer meanings. — Gordon B. Hinckley

That is what the taste of blood does. It takes away the gap between thought and action.To think is to do. There is no unlived life inside you as the air speeds past your body, as you look down at the dreary villages and market towns ... — Matt Haig

So much to rue, but to what end? All unlived lives cancel one another out. — Laini Taylor

Come to believe that the fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully. A good working formula is: the more unlived life, or unrealized potential, the greater one's death anxiety. — Irvin D. Yalom

A live unexamined isn't worth living. I will add, A life unlived isn't worth examining. — Oscar Wilde

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again. — Maya Angelou

The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety. The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death. — Irvin D. Yalom

We are born haunted, he said, his voice weak, but still clear. Haunted by our fathers and mothers and daughters, and by people we don't remember. We are haunted by otherness, by the path not taken, by the life unlived. We are haunted by the changing winds and the ebbing tides of history. And even as our own flame burns brightest, we are haunted by the embers of the first dying fire. But mostly, said Lord Jim, we are haunted by ourselves. — Jonathan Evison

The brave don't live forever but the cautious don't live at all. The only thing that's truly terrifying is the unlived life. — Bill See

Like so many women, I was living out the unlived life of my mother - so I wouldn't be her. But the price I paid was that I distanced myself internally. — Gloria Steinem

While most would agree with Socrates that, "the unexamined life is not worth living," a lesser-known quote by Sheldon Kopp might be more important here: "The unlived life is not worth examining. — Meg Jay

Sometimes when we weep in the movies we weep for ourselves or for a life unlived. Or we even go to the movies because we want to resist the emotion that's there in front of us. I think there is always a catharsis that I look for and that makes the movie experience worthwhile. — Edward Zwick

She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice. — Jeanette Winterson

His unlived life worried him, tortured him, turning round and round inside him like an animal in a cage. In Dodo's body, the body of a half-wit, somebody was growing old, although he had not lived; somebody was maturing to a death that had no meaning at all. — Bruno Schulz

Unlived dreams often show up in your body as disease. Go for the Big Wow. Life is short! — Christiane Northrup

Nothing so much torments a geezer as the thought of the unlived life. — Jim Harrison

A life without risk, is a life unlived my friend. — Big Time Rush

The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents. — C. G. Jung

Or are "being" and "having" thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone's body to touch and being that someone we're longing to touch are one and the same, just opposite banks on a river that passes from us to them, back to us and over to them again in this perpetual circuit where the chambers of the heart, like the trapdoors of desire, and the wormholes of time, and the false-bottomed drawer we call identity share a beguiling logic according to which the shortest distance between real life and the life unlived, between who we are and what we want, is a twisted staircase designed with the impish cruelty of M. C. Escher. — Andre Aciman

May all that is unlived in you blossom into a future graced with love. — John O'Donohue

Dont be afraid of death, be afraid of the unlived life. — Natalie Babbitt

The unlived life is not worth examining ... Self-awareness, self-examination, self-consciousness are for the quiet moments. In the arena they are paralyzing. The self must not be held out of the arena until living skills have been learned. — Jo Coudert

How historians explain time is one thing, but how we live time is quite another. — Andre Aciman

The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life. — Erich Fromm

the problem that I've found with
most poets that I have known is that
they've never had an 8 hour job
and there is nothing
that will put a person
more in touch
with the realities
than
an 8 hour job.

they have been protected
against the actualities
from the
beginning
and they
understand nothing
but the ends of their
fingernails
and
their delicate
hairlines
and
their lymph
nodes.
their words are
unlived, unfurnished, un-
true, and worse - so
fashionably
dull.

poet (?): that word
needs re-defining. — Charles Bukowski

But then, life is a constant withering of possibilities. Some are stolen with the lives of people you love. Others are let go, with regret and reluctance and deep, deep sorrow. But there is compensation for lives unlived in the intoxicating joy of knowing that the life you have - right here, right now - if the one you have chosen. There is power in that, and hope. — Emily Maguire

It may be true that the unexamined life is not worth living-but neither is the unlived life worth examining. — Dan Millman

All unlived emotions turn to inanity ... — Anais Nin

The unchosen thing is what causes the trouble. If you don't do something with the unchosen, it will set up a minor infection somewhere in the unconscious and later take its revenge on you. Unlived life does not just "go away"... — Robert A. Johnson

Time unlived grows old
Like unworn robes in a locked chest. — Oktay Rifat

Whether through the patterns left in snow, or geese honking in the dark, or through the brilliant wet leaf that hits your face the moment you are questioning your worth, the quiet teachers are everywhere, pointing us to the unlived portion of our lives. When we think we are in charge, the lessons dissolve as accidents or coincidence. But when we're humble enough to welcome the connections, the glass that breaks across the room is offering us direction, giving us a clue to the story we are in. — Mark Nepo

This is how Resistance disfigures love. The stew it creates is rich, it's colorful; Tennessee Williams could work it up into a trilogy. But is it love? If we're the supporting partner, shouldn't we face our own failure to pursue our unlived life, rather than hitchhike on our spouse's coattails? And if we're the supported partner, shouldn't we step out from the glow of our loved one's adoration and instead encourage him to let his own light shine? — Steven Pressfield

How children dance," Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "to the unlived lives of their parents, — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Actually, years mean nothing. It's what's inside them. — Simon Van Booy

Maybe it's less threatening to believe that our beloved spouse is worthy to live out his or her unlived life, while we are not. — Steven Pressfield

To experience beauty on Earth, you needed to experience pain and to know mortality. That is why so much that is beautiful on this planet has to do with time passing and the Earth turning. Which might also explain why to look at such natural beauty was to also feel sadness and a craving for a life unlived. — Matt Haig

I will not die an unlived life. — Dawna Markova

Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning. — Sue Monk Kidd

Our suffering comes from our unlived life
the unseen, unfelt parts of our psyche. — C. G. Jung

the one
who will jolt awake
all the unwritten
the unsung
and the unlived
in me.

i am waiting
for him. — Sanober Khan

Your unlived tomorrow is more important than your Lived yesterday — Ikechukwu Joseph

The amount of death terror experienced is closely related to the amount of life unlived. — Irvin D. Yalom

I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare form heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them. — Gregory David Roberts

Easter is not limited to the passion and death of Christ; it also includes the dismal tragedy of life unlived by the many, and all the loss of passion and truth that goes with it. — Michael Leunig

The educating of the parents is really the education of the child children tend to live what is unlived in the parents, so it is vital that parents should be aware of their inferior, their dark side, and should press on getting to know themselves. — Laurens Van Der Post

At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived. — Rose Macaulay

Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don't leave any unlived life behind. — Irvin D. Yalom

Nothing affects the life of a child so much as the unlived life of its parent — Carl Jung

An origin, I repeat, is not confined to the past: it is a whirlwind, in Benjamin's very fine image, a chasm in the present. And we are drawn into this abyss. That is why the present is, par excellence, the thing that is left unlived. — Anonymous

Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. This retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came. — Peter Matthiessen

And oh, god, how could so much regret and so much sweetness and so much sadness all be present in that single moment. I was already dead and missing my unlived life. I was already dead and Tobias was mourning.
I tried to smile. For him. — Katherine Applegate

I resolve that I would not die with my dreams unlived. — Leslie Mass

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality. — Alain De Botton

I like having options, alternate lives unlived but always possible. — Abigail Padgett

Don't be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don't have to live forever, you just have to live. — Natalie Babbitt

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance. — Steven Pressfield

If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining? — Paul Kalanithi

though you want to flee from yourself so as not to have to live what remains unlived until now.56 But you cannot flee from yourself. It is with you all the time and demands fulfillment. If you pretend to be blind and dumb to this demand, you feign being blind and deaf to yourself. This way you will never reach the knowledge of the heart. The knowledge of your heart is how your heart is. From a cunning heart you will know cunning. From a good heart you will know goodness. So that your understanding becomes perfect, consider that your heart is both good and evil. You ask, "What? Should I also live evil?" The spirit of the depths demands: "The life that you could still live, you should live. Well-being decides, not your well-being, not the well-being of the others, but only well-being. — C. G. Jung

Love unlived is a sin against life, and mourning is one of the ways we love. I felt it then, and I let it happen, the longing for him to return. The power in his eyes, and the pride when I did something he admired, and the love in his laugh. The longing: the longing for the lost. — Gregory David Roberts

Eternal recurrence means that every time you choose an action you must be willing to choose it for all eternity. And it is the same for every action not made, every stillborn thought, every choice avoided. And all unlived life will remain bulging inside you, unlived through all eternity. And the unheeded voice of your conscience will cry out to you forever. — Irvin D. Yalom

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent. — C. G. Jung

I will not die an unlived life ... I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me ... I choose to risk my significance. — Dawna Markova

Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us. — Ernest Becker

Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn't contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born. — Sue Monk Kidd

Most of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers, because they were not able to become the unique people they were born to be. — Gloria Steinem

( ... )while it's true that the unexamined life is not worth living, it's also true that the unlived life isn't worth examining. — Robert McKee

I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible; to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk my significance, to live so that which came to me as seed goes to the next as blossom, and that which came to me as blossom, goes on as fruit. — Dawna Markova

To commit the act of felo-de-se is a form of delusion. You see, my love, to leave one's life unfinished implies the possibility of success. What is left unlived may contain the potential truth one always seeks. Those who kill themselves do so with the conviction that they would have reached that truth eventually had they lived to the proper end. They die in the illusion of hope which in a way keeps the rest of us alive. Reason, therefore, for not committing suicide. — Raymond Federman

Destructiveness is the outcome of an unlived life. — Erich Fromm