Verbs For Life Quotes & Sayings

Life is a verb, not a noun. — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

We spend most of our lives conjugating three verbs: to want, to have, and to do. — Evelyn Underhill

If you have the feeling of choice, if you feel free, you will be better off. And when I say better off I mean that if people feel they have control over their lives, they call in for fewer sick days from work. They have a lesser probability of having a heart attack or stroke. They live longer. They're happier. — Sheena Iyengar

I am surprising myself [at] each show, and the delivered piano often surprises me. Sometimes the piano is so old that I don't have to prepare it, and sometimes I have a concert grand! — Volker Bertelmann

Even within the dark paint on a canvas, and the shadows in a photograph, there is light. — Melissa Bond

I just love learning. I think learning is how you live. The verb of my life is learning. — Louis C.K.

I hadn't been in Vegas 20 minutes when I got word that the bookmakers were offering three to one that Frank wouldn't show for my wedding. — Sammy Davis Jr.

You're going to have to learn the kind of hope that makes things history. Otherwise there'll be no good hope for your own grand truths and no good truths for your own grandchildren. — Ali Smith

You have a great light to illuminate the world. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Know the adjectives that define you and pay no heed to the verbs that defy you. — Vidya Kumar

I think we live in a unique time - the verbs that make up our online and mobile lives haven't been completely invented or imagined for us. That was kind of a life path I was on. — Mark Pincus

Instead of a book, what if we're actually writing (or not writing) in the margins of our lives? What if our lives are books? What is the sign of our presence? Are we pressing into the margins our interpretations and questions? Are we circling offending verbs and drawing furious arrows to the margin where we scrawl "irony," "frustration," "voiceless," "unfair!" Or do we simply turn the pages, passively receiving what's given, furiously disagreeing but remaining silent about it? — Patti Digh

It is told that Buddha, going out to look on life, was greatly daunted by death. "They all eat one another!" he cried, and called it evil. This process I examined, changed the verb and said, "They all feed one another," and called it good. — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Or, God, maybe this was just life. For everyone on the planet. Maybe the Survivor's Club wasn't something you "earned," but simply what you were born into when you came out of your mother's womb. Your heartbeat put you on the roster and then the rest of it was just a question of vocabulary: the nouns and verbs used to describe the events that rocked your foundation and sent you flailing were not always the same as other people's, but the random cruelties of disease and accident, and the malicious focus of evil men and nasty deeds, and the heartbreak of loss with all its stinging whips and rattling chains ... At the core, it was all the same. — J.R. Ward

I watched the enormity of the clouds for several minutes. What I wanted to experience in the water, I realized, was how life of the reef was layered and intertwined. I now had many individual pieces at hand: named images, nouns. How were they related? What were the verbs? Which syntaxes were indigenous to the place? I asked a dozen knowledgeable people. No one was inclined to elaborate- or they didn't know. "Did you see the octopus?" Someone shouted after the dive. Yes, I thought, but who among us knows what it was doing? What else was THERE, just then? WHY? — Barry Lopez

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

Wait: His boyfriend? He was gay? The focus on the lens sharpened, and I could see it clearly now. Of course he was gay. Everyone could see that, except the chubby little lonely heart sitting at seven o'clock, drawing sparkly rainbows on the page with her glitter crayons. I was still beating myself up when the round robin arrived to me, and I sputtered along trying to assemble some phony epiphany with strong verbs, but tears dripped down my face.
The room fell into silence as people waited for me to explain. But what could I possibly say? That I had just discovered my future husband was gay? That I was going to live the rest of my life surrounded by nothing but empty lasagna pans and an overloved cat destined to die before me?
"I'm sorry," I finally said. "I was just reminded of something very painful." And I guess that wasn't a lie. — Sarah Hepola

The English language has been thrust upon Americans. And it is wrong. As static and immobile as are the English, just so ever-moving are Americans. Here is a huge country. Not a mere island. Naturally people move. And they need a moving language. A language that can interpret American life. Nouns and adjectives won't express American life. They are too weak, too immobile. But verbs, adverbs, prepositions and the like, ah, they are moving, just as Americans. Obviously we cannot suddenly junk the English language and adopt some other tongue. English is too connotative, too close to us. Our problem is to adapt the English language to American needs. To make it move with us Americans. That is the problem
to write things as they are, not as they seem. our aim must be not to explain things, but to write the thing itself, and thereby in itself be self explanatory. — Gertrude Stein

How are you feeling?"
"Like I fell out a burning building onto pavement, you?" I grumbled.
"Like I was pushed out of a burning building by a maniac," she retorted, a small smile playing across her face. — R.R. Virdi

Never before have I been so tempted to chase someone. — M. Leighton

The literary experience extends impression into discourse. It flowers to thought with nouns, verbs, objects. It thinks. Film implodes discourse, it deliterates thought, it shrinks it to the compacted meaning of the preverbal impression or intuition or understanding. You receive what you see, you don't have to think it out ... Fiction goes everywhere, inside, outside, it stops, it goes, its action can be mental. Nor is it time-driven. Film is time-driven, it never ruminates, it shows the outside of life, it shows behavior. It tends to the simplest moral reasoning. Films out of Hollywood are linear. The narrative simplification of complex morally consequential reality is always the drift of a film inspired by a book. Novels can do anything in the dark horrors of consciousness. Films do close-ups, car drive-ups, places, chases and explosions. — E.L. Doctorow

We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun. — Stephen Fry

In life one must decide whether to conjugate the verb to have or the verb to be. — Franz Liszt

So a deeper look at which verbs participate in the locative alternation has forced us to take a deeper look at what compels the mind to construe physical events in certain ways. And at that depth we have discovered a new layer of concepts that the mind uses to organize mundane experience: concepts about substance, space, time, and force. These concepts encourage the mind to unite events that have nothing in common in terms of what they look like, smell like, or feel like, yet they obviously matter to the mind a great deal. They are so pervasive that some philosophers consider them to be the very scaffolding that organizes mental life, and in chapter 4 I will show how they saturate our science, our storytelling, our morals, our law, even our humor. — Steven Pinker

In the Bhagavad-Gita Krishna says: Arjuna you cannot avoid action. Everyone is stuck in the world of action. The world of action is forever. — Frederick Lenz

The deepest depth of vulgarism is that of setting up money as the ark of the covenant. — Thomas Carlyle

Even if you were aware of children and felt compassion, when you have your own, it multiplies. It breaks your heart to know that there are so many children in the world suffering so much. — Penelope Cruz