Why We Are Alive Quotes & Sayings

There is a whole generation of young people just like us wandering around Europe and the rest of the world, trying to find some meaning for why they are alive and what they should choose to do with their time. When Martha leaves and we sit in front of the fire in the living room, I look to Lily until she turns to me and I can see the grief that hides just under the surface of her expression. We are, or at least were, two of those lost souls: wanderers, backpackers, season workers, Wwoofers, Workawayers, travellers: searching the world for something or someplace to hold on to. And we have come home not because we have retired from trying to find answers and are ready to settle into adulthood, but because my death has come upon us fast and unexpected. I am not the first person of this generation of travellers- or any person who lives in this godless, superficial society- to die. But I think that it feels to Lily and to me, my mother too perhaps, that I may very well be. — Annie Fisher

Why do so many of us not give ourselves permission to be alive until we are absolutely assured that we will die? ... If we are not in [this present millisecond of life and conscious experience], we are not alive; we are merely thinking our lives. Yet we have seen so many die, looking back over their shoulders at their lives, shaking their heads and muttering in bewilderment, "What was that all about?" — Stephen Levine

We're keeping them alive," she said. "Sweetheart, the fence, the wall, is inhumane. People are dying."
"That's their choice,"he actually said. "They come here illegally, that's the chance they take."
"When did you get so hard?" she asked, holding his face between her hands. "They're human beings like us, looking for a better life for their families. You understand that, don't you? You did it for us."
"It's a humanitarian crises," she said. "And you're part of the problem. That's why you can't sleep at night. — Luanne Rice

That is why he appears to us who are deeply life-hypnotized, obsessed about being alive in any way, as life-negating. To us, just to be alive seems to be the end. We are so much afraid of death that Buddha appears in love with death, and that looks abnormal. He seems to be suicidal. This is what many have criticized Buddha for. — Rajneesh

What are we?" he asked. "Why, we are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts. Creation turns in its abyss. We have bothered it, dreaming ourselves to shapes. The void is filled with slumbers; ten billion on a billion on a billion bombardments of light and material that know not themselves, that sleep moving and move but finally to make an eye and waken on themselves. Among so much that is flight and ignorance, we are the blind force that gropes like Lazarus from a billion-light-year tomb. We summon ourselves. We say, O Lazarus Life Force, truly come ye forth. So the Universe, a motion of deaths, fumbles to reach across Time to feel its own flesh and know it to be ours. We touch both ways and find each other miraculous because we are One. — Ray Bradbury

You're wrong. You're so completely and fucked-up wrong. I live, Taylor." He pointed to his chest. "I don't turn shit off and hide. I live, and if that means going at the storm, I'll go. I don't hold back. I don't flinch. I never second-guess. I do life. Otherwise, why the hell are we alive? Why are we here if we let our demons win? They don't give a shit. They're off doing their thing. You should, too. You've been through the fire already. Why are you still afraid? There's no way in hell I'm going to let some 'less than' experience I had rule how I live the rest of my life. — Tijan

Abaratians are very much about living in the moment; living life because that's what we've got, we've got today, we've got now, we've got being alive now and we have to be awake and alive in the moment and not asleep in our lives. And they would find the idea of sleeping through your life, of being bored - they would think that was very stupid - why would you be bored when there's so much to do and so much to see and so much to be? — Clive Barker

The imposter syndrome is at the core off every human being's soul. We're born with it. It's why human beings are alive today. It's an innate sense you're born with. It's why our ancestors avoided the saber-toothed tiger, because they doubted themselves. They were scared of certain things. That's why they worked hard to learn how to build fire, and taking it all through the generations, that impostor syndrome is always going to be there. Instead of being afraid and letting it get you down, be that 1% who embraces the impostor syndrome and realizes that it's never going away. Because the impostor syndrome exists, it weeds out the 99% of people who cannot get over it and cannot get over their fear. It puts the people who do, into the top 1%, and anyone can join us here, when you just embrace the impostor syndrome. — Harry Duran

Why is it that we claim to want certainty? Only fools and cowards seek certainty. Certainty is a dead end; it's a rich old widow living out the rest of her days on the Upper East Side with a little dog and big memories. Unless you are a senior citizen, you'll go nuts after a few weeks of knowing what the rest of your life will bring. You'll die of boredom. But uncertainty is what keeps us alive. It is that flip of a coin, that brief moment when it's in the air or spinning on its side, that snaps us out of our daily stasis. Some invisible Odds Gods are giving you a chance to become better, smarter, richer. What fun it is to get paid if you earned it by the skin of your teeth, by the close call. And how dreadful it is to shoot fish in a barrel. Exposure to uncertainty earns you membership in a select tribe: You are a Padawan mastering the Force. Once the trade is on, once the die has been cast, you're in a parallel, auspicious universe. — Katya G. Cohen

Love never lies and it never tries, it's unafraid and heaven made.

Keep the faith, surrender the time, just like a grape we need to ripen on the vine.

Be like a fairy, constantly glow, leave a trail of love wherever you go.

Do not try to make sense of this world. Do try to know yourself and to grow yourself while in it.

The more you are, the more you have.

Rather than make the best of a situation, make the best situation. Create, don't negate.

Keep the dream alive and the heart open.

Be your most glorious self, and even better, be indifferent to what anyone may think of it.

Don't fear the dark, it's helping you find the light. We wouldn't know morning, if we didn't see night.

Never give to say you've given, never shy away from a good cry, never stop a laugh from happening, and always wonder, why?

Don't get mad, get motivated! — Allyson Giles

life is the reason for living and death is the reason for dying if we are to live, why die ? there is a ending for everything and being alive gives us a chance to do something and enjoy it. — Pamela

Serenity, we did not mean to offend you. We thought only to help."

Maia set his cup down too hard, slopping tea into the saucer, his entire body hot with shame. "We apologize," he said. "We spoke ungraciously and out of ill temper which we should not have inflicted on you. We should not have disparaged your service, for which we are so truly grateful. We are sorry."

"Serenity," Csevet said uncomfortably, "you should not speak so to us." "

Why not?"

Csevet opened his mouth and closed it again. Then, deliberately, he set down his cup, stood up, and with infinite grace prostrated himself beside the table. Isheian watched him with alarm. Csevet stood up again, unruffled and perfect, and said, "The Emperor of the Elflands does not apologize to his secretary. And yet, we thank you for doing that which the emperor does not." He smiled, a warm beautiful smile that made his face suddenly, momentarily alive, and sat down again. "Serenity. — Katherine Addison

Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you - it's born with us the day that we are born. — Homer

When you die, the energy that kept you alive filters into the people you loved. Did you know that? It's like a fire you've tended all your life, and the sparks are all scattered into the wind ... That's why we survive as long as we do, because the people who loved us keep us going. — Kevin Brockmeier

Why do I feel so exercised about what we think of the people of the Middle Ages? ... I guess it's because so many of their voices are ringing vibrantly in my ears - Chaucer's, Boccaccio's, Henry Knighton's, Thomas Walsingham's, Froissart's, Jean Creton's ... writers and contemporary historians of the period who seem to me just as individual, just as alive as we are today. We need to get to know these folk better in order to know who we are ourselves. — Terry Jones

Why do we cling to life and why are we afraid of death? You may not have thought about it. The reason why we cling so much to life and why we are afraid of death is just inconceivable. We cling to life so much because we do not know how to live. We cling to life so much because really we are not alive. And time is passing and death is coming nearer and nearer. And we are afraid that death is coming near and we have not lived yet. — Rajneesh

Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map.
Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?
Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means.
To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot. — Vincent Van Gogh

Karma is not something pessimistic. If you think of karma as something wrong, you are seeing karma only according to what happened in the past. You look at the past and karma becomes a monster. So you should also look at karma in the present and future. Then karma becomes something very wide and really alive. Through karma you can understand what your destiny is. Destiny itself has no solid form; it's something you can create. You can create your life. That is why we study karma. — Dainin Katagiri

Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the current obsession with excess and hierarchy imploded. Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it - and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That's why Native people were guarding it. — Gloria Steinem

Jenny and I once talked about how we manage to live despite the knowledge that we are all going to die. What's the point of it all? Why bother getting up in the morning when faced with such futility? Or is it the promise of death that inspires life? That we must grab what we can while there's still time? Is it the not knowing if today is the day that keeps us going? But what if this is the day? What if the hour is here? How do you stand? How do you breathe? How do you go on? — Steven Rowley

Maintain a prayerful frame of heart in the intervals of duty. What reason can be assigned why our hearts are so dull, so careless, so wandering, when we hear or pray, but that there have been long intermissions in our communion with God? If that divine unction, that spiritual fervour, and those holy impressions, which we obtain from God while engaged in the performance of one duty, were preserved to enliven and engage us in the performance of another, they would be of incalculable service to keep our hearts serious and devout. For this purpose, frequent ejaculations between stated and solemn duties are of most excellent use: they not only preserve the mind in a composed and pious frame, but they connect one stated duty, as it were, with another, and keep the attention of the soul alive to all its interests and obligations. — John Flavel

Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why. — Toni Morrison

On the list of qualities necessary to humans trying to make our way through life, truth scores fairly low. Why do people believe and do weird things? Because in the end, feeling alive is more important than telling the truth. We have evolved as living creatures to express ourselves, to be creative, to tell stories. We are instruments for feeling, faith, energy, emotion, significance, belief, but not really truth. — Louis Theroux

Once again, the point of this discussion is not to accuse Christians of endorsing torture and persecution. Of course most devout Christians today are thoroughly tolerant and humane people. Even those who thunder from televised pulpits do not call for burning heretics alive or hoisting Jews on the strappado. The question is why they don't, given that their beliefs imply that it would serve the greater good. The answer is that people in the West today compartmentalize their religious ideology. When they affirm their faith in houses of worship, they profess beliefs that have barely changed in two thousand years. But when it comes to their actions, they respect modern norms of nonviolence and toleration, a benevolent hypocrisy for which we should all be grateful. — Steven Pinker

Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?' he said, looking round the table. 'Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls - which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? — Donna Tartt

What is common to all paths that are spiritual is, of course, the Spirit-breath, life energy, that is why all true paths are essentially one path, because there is only one Spirit, one breath, one life, one energy in the universe. It belongs to none of us and all of us. We all share it. Spiritually does not make up otherworldly; it renders us more fully alive. — Matthew Fox

Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls- which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow old, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think? — Donna Tartt

We are lucky simply to be alive together; why get differentiating and judgemental about who is here among us? Thank God there is anyone at all. — Lorrie Moore

We are here to love each other.
That is why you are alive.
That is what life is for. — Maya Angelou

If you are preaching on the first commandment ("Thou shalt have no other gods before me") or Ephesians 5:5 (which calls greed idolatry) or any of the several hundred other places in the Bible that speak of idols, you could quote David Foster Wallace, the late postmodern novelist. In his Kenyon College commencement speech he argues eloquently and forcefully that "everyone worships. The only choice we get is what to worship."32 He goes on to say everyone has to "tap real meaning in life," and whatever you use to do that, whether it is money, beauty, power, intellect, or something else, it will drive your life because it is essentially a form of worship. He enumerates why each form of worship does not merely make you fragile and exhausted but can "eat you alive." If you lay out his argument in support of fundamental biblical teaching, even the most secular audience will get quiet and keep listening to what you say next. — Timothy J. Keller

Why do you need to go outside? For one thing, to appreciate what it is that keeps you alive. And the more time you spend outside, the more you are able to sense change in that world. If you can smell something, chances are that unless it's flowers or food, it doesn't belong there and is not good for us. But even more profound, we have to get outside and seek nature because we need that connection for our physical and mental health. — David Suzuki

There was something wrong with me. The human body doesn't want to get hurt. We're programmed to feel squeamish at the sight of blood. Pain is a careful orchestration of chemical processes so that we keep our body alive. Studies have shown that people born with congenital analgesia
the inability to feel pain
bite off the tips of their tongues and scratch holes in their eyes and break bones. We are a wonder of checks and balances to keep running. The human body doesn't want to get hurt. There was something wrong with me, because sometimes I didn't care. There was something wrong with me, because sometimes I wanted it. We fear death; we fear the void; we scrabble to keep our pulses. I was the void. What are you afraid of? Nothing ... I wasn't meant to live, probably. This was why I was wired this way. Biology formed me and then took a look and wondered what the hell it was thinking and put in a mental fail-safe. In case of emergency pull cord. — Maggie Stiefvater

Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win. — Thomas S. Power

Going from crying to laughing that fast and hard happens maybe five times in your life and that extreme right turn is the reason why we are alive, and I believe it extends our life by many years. — Amy Poehler

how often do we forget that there is hope as well, and that we seldom think about hope? We are ready to despair too soon, we are ready to say, 'What's the good of doing anything?' Hope is the virtue we should cultivate most in this present day and age. We have made ourselves a Welfare State, which has given us freedom from fear, security, our daily bread and a little more than our daily bread; and yet it seems to me that now, in this Welfare State, every year it becomes more difficult for anybody to look forward to the future. Nothing is worth-while. Why? Is it because we no longer have to fight for existence? Is living not even interesting any more? We cannot appreciate the fact of being alive. Perhaps we need the difficulties of space, of new worlds opening up, of a different kind of hardship and agony, of illness and pain, and a wild yearning for survival? Oh — Agatha Christie

We all want to fall in love. Why? Because that experience makes us feel completely alive. Where every sense is heightened, every emotion is magnified, our everyday reality is shattered and we are flying into the heavens. It may only last a moment, and hour, an afternoon. But that doesn't diminish its value. Because we are left with memories that we treasure for the rest of our lives. — Niall O Donaill

Why are you here, Harley? What is it that you really want from me?" I came away from the wall with my hands balled into fists. He nodded thoughtfully, a slight tilt to his head. "I want to know what Arys has that I don't. I want to know what is so important that he is willing to destroy anything that dares to threaten you. Clearly he loves you, yet he chooses not to bond you." Harley's voice was low, contemplative. "I want to know what joins him to the most powerful werewolf alive." I stared at him fearfully as if he were mad, which I was pretty sure he was. This was all about what Arys had that he did not. Was it just a vampire's need to dominate or was there more to it? "All I can tell you is this, whatever Arys and I have, it's meant to be. It's bigger than we are and try as I might to find my way out, it is here to stay." I saw no harm in divulging that much to Harley. I was hoping he would see it for the truth it was and leave me alone. — Trina M. Lee

Love isn't easy. It isn't perfect like in stories or movies--but it's real. When we feel it, it reminds us we are alive, and when we truly feel it--it hurts like hell--but it reminds us why we live... For the hope of love. — N.A. Koziol

If God were a theory, the study of theology would be the way to understand Him. But God is alive and in need of love and worship. This is why thinking of God is related to our worship. In an analogy of artistic understanding, we sing to Him before we are able to understand Him. We have to love in order to know. Unless we learn how to sing, unless we know how to love, we will never learn to understand Him. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Remember on this one thing, said Badger. The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other's memories. This is how people care for themselves. — Barry Lopez

Pain may well remind us that we are alive, but love reminds us why we are alive. — Trystan Owain Hughes

We need feminism because girls are shot in the head for going to school. We need feminism because women are burned alive for refusing to submit to grotesque male desirs. We need feminism because women are aunder represented in every sphere of life except being wives and mothers. (...) We need feminism because women's bodies remain politicised, scrutinsed, fetishised. There are countless more reasons why we need feminism, infinitely more reasons; and this in itself is another reason that we need feminism. — Victoria Pepe

Because I wasn't anything anymore. Not anythingI love or know or care about. Because thou shalt not kill, Kade. Thou shalt not kill. With all my heart I believed this. And I killed. So what am I now? And why should I live? How am I even alive? Because if this is what our lives are
if doing this to others before they do it to us is all our lives are
we're already dead. Honest to God I feel it, Kade. I'm dead. The hell with me. — David James Duncan

Sometimes we whisper it quietly and other times we shout it out loud in front of a mirror. I hate how I look. I hate how my face looks my body looks I am too fat or too skinny or too tall or too wide or my legs are too stupid and my face is too smiley or my teeth are dumb and my nose is serious and my stomach is being so lame. Then we think, I am so ungrateful. I have arms and legs and I can walk and I have strong nail beds and I am alive and I am so selfish and I have to read Man's Search for Meaning again and call my parents and volunteer more and reduce my carbon footprint and why am I such a self-obsessed ugly asshole no wonder I hate how I look! I hate how I am! — Amy Poehler

Going for the brain.
[He chuckles.] We talk about it today as if it is some feat of magic, like holy water or a silver bullet, but why wouldn't destruction of the brain be the only way to annihilate these creatures? Isn't it the only way to annihilate us as well?
You mean human beings?
[He nods.] Isn't that all we are? Just a brain kept alive by a complex and vulnerable machine we call the body? The brain cannot survive if just one part of the machine is destroyed or even deprived of such necessities as food or oxygen. That is the only measurable difference between us and "The Undead." Their brains do not require a support system to survive, so it is necessary to attack the organ itself. — Max Brooks

We're all alive, but we don't know why or what for; we're all searching for happiness; we're all leading lives which are different and yet the same. — Anne Frank

Well, I'm sure you know that our country is the only so-called advanced nation that still has a death penalty. And torture chambers. I mean, why screw around? But listen: If anyone here should wind up on a gurney in a lethal-injection facility, maybe the one at Terre Haute, here is what your last words should be: "This will certainly teach me a lesson." If Jesus were alive today, we would kill him with lethal injection. I call that progress. We would have to kill him for the same reason he was killed the first time. His ideas are just too liberal. — Kurt Vonnegut

For the first time I understood why people come back from Alaska with fifty pictures of glaciers or return from a honeymoon in Tahiti with fifty pictures of the same sunset. The world is so beautiful in these places, it is impossible to register that there will be more, more, more. Surely this is it. Negotiate with your ailing camera battery. How can it not stay alive for this? How can you believe that twenty minutes from now there will be an even taller forest, an even wider waterfall? We are only as good as our most extreme experiences. — Sloane Crosley

That is why humans resist life. To be alive is the biggest fear humans have. Death is not the biggest
fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive - the risk to be alive and express what we
really are. Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans. We have learned to live our lives trying
to satisfy other people's demands. We have learned to live by other people's points of view because of
the fear of not being accepted and of not being good enough for someone else. — Miguel Ruiz

Plays are literature: the word, the idea. Film is much more like the form in which we dream - in action and images (Television is furniture). I think a great play can only be a play. It fits the stage better than it fits the screen. Some stories insist on being film, can't be contained on stage. In the end, all writing serves to answer the same question: Why are we alive? And the form the question takes - play, film, novel - is dictated, I suppose, by whether its story is driven by character or place. — Israel Horovitz

We are the only alive creatures that are mortals; the animals are immortal, which is why they live stupidly. We are the only creatures that know that we will die, but that is a gift. It's important because we know we have to take advantage and squeeze life and understand why we're here in the first place. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

There's war - there's always been war, as long as most of us have been alive. There have always been people being abused, there's always been horrible things in the world. Why are we outraged? We should just be quiet and figure it out, and work it out together. — Dave Matthews

Who are we in moments of crisis or despair? Do we become deeper, truer selves, or lift up and away from a self, untethered from regular meanings like moths suddenly drawn toward heat or light? Are we better people when someone might be dying, and if so, why? Are we weaker, or stronger? Are we beautiful, or abject? Serious, or cartoon? Do we secretly long for death to remind us we are alive? — Lidia Yuknavitch

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts ... .We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need - not all the time, surely, but from time to time - to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember - the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived. — Frederick Buechner

Research from these new disciplines has revealed that trauma produces actual physiological changes, including a recalibration of the brain's alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity, and alterations in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant. We now know that trauma compromises the brain area that communicates the physical, embodied feeling of being alive. These changes explain why traumatized individuals become hypervigilant to threat at the expense of spontaneously engaging in their day-to-day lives. They also help us understand why traumatized people so often keep repeating the same problems and have such trouble learning from experience. We now know that their behaviors are not the result of moral failings or signs of lack of willpower or bad character - they are caused by actual changes in the brain. This — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

Iannis: [writing to Corelli] Antonio, I do not know if this letter will reach you, or even if you are alive. Perhaps someone else sent your record, and that is why we found no note. I would like to say that Pelagia is happy, but she is full of tears she will not let fall, and of a grief no doctor can mend. She blames herself for the pain we have suffered, and perhaps the same is true for you. You know I am not a religious man, but I believe this: if there is a wound, we must try to heal it. If there is someone whose pain we can cure, we must search till we find them. If the gods have chosen that we should survive, it will be for a reason. — Louis De Bernieres

I remember he asked his father, "Can this be true? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be commited? How could the world remain silent?" And now the boy is turning to me. "Tell me," he asks, "what have you done with my future, what have you done with your life?" And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget we are guilty, we are accomplices. And then I explain to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. — Elie Wiesel

What are we going to do about the injuries to our country still going on right in front of our eyes? It gets me out of bed in the morning. It makes me mad enough to get my blood up and want to get out there with [Mark] Twain and get it said and that is why I still hit the road and go out on the stage and keep working at staying alive. — Hal Holbrook

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. — Joan Didion

Once a man has tasted freedom he will never be content to be a slave. That is why I believe that this frightfulness we see everywhere today is only temporary. Tomorrow will be better for as long as America keeps alive the ideals of freedom and a better life. All men will want to be free and share our way of life. There must be so much that I should have said, but haven't. What I will say now is just what most of us are probably thinking every day. I thank God and America for the right to live and raise my family under the flag of tolerance, democracy and freedom. — Walt Disney Company

We are motivated more by aversion to the unpleasant than by a will toward truth, freedom, or healing. We are constantly attempting to escape our life, to avoid rather than enter our pain we, and we wonder why it is so difficult to be fully alive. (43) — Stephen Levine

Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man's own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this "nausea," as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd. — Albert Camus

So long as breath remains in our lungs, untapped potential lies inside us, waiting to be released. The reason we are still alive is that we are carrying something inside us that this generation needs. That's why we're not yet in heaven. — Wayne Cordeiro

Some may wonder why I chose wildflowers when there are hunger and unemployment and the big bomb in the world. Well, I, for one, think we will survive, and I hope that along the way we can keep alive our experience with the flowering earth. For the bounty of nature is also one of the deep needs of man. — Lady Bird Johnson

Is there a reason why you're standing there, staring out the window and watching the neighbors? Are we preparing to kill them and drag them down to the basement and bury them alive? — R.L. Mathewson

He told me how special you are," he said, flashing Shay an unfriendly smile. "Because of your great-great-times-a-hundred-grandmother Eira who got us into this mess when she became a demon's mistress." "Thanks for reminding me," Shay said. "So now you know why you and Calla were supposed to cut my throat instead of a cake at your wedding. Too bad that didn't happen." Ren Stiffened. "I'm not sorry you made it out of Vail alive. As for the rest of it ... we'll see how that turns out, won't we? — Andrea Cremer

Are you sometimes scared, or happy, just like that, out of the blue, apropos of nothing? You hurry out on some stupid errand, and suddenly you feel a thrill of improbablem intense, boundless joy? Or it happens that everything seems to be in its rightful placem your beloved is sleeping sweetly next to you, you're young and full of as much energy as a puppy - and suddenly you feel you're suspended in emptiness, and a leaden sorrow clamps down on your heart, as though you were dead. Not only that, but as though you had never been alive. And sometimes you look at yourself in the mirror, and you can't remember who that chap is, or why he's there at all. Then your own reflection turns around and walks away, and you watch silently as it retreats. [..] It happens because something ineffable is reaching for us - we never know where and when it will show up and start tugging on our sleave. — Max Frei

I first started asking big questions when I was 12, and by big questions, I mean, 'Why are we here? What is this business? We're alive for a few short decades and then poof, we're out of here.' — Barbara Ehrenreich

I didn't hurt anymore, didn't feel like hiding anymore, wasn't scared anymore. Because I wasn't anything anymore. Not anything I love or know or care about. Because thou shalt not kill, Kade. Thou shalt not kill. With all my heart I believed this. And I killed. So what am I now? And why should I live? How am I even alive? Because if this is what our lives are - if doing this to others before they do it unto us is all our lives are - we're already dead. — David James Duncan

It seems weird to me that here we are, alive, not knowing why we are alive, and just going about our business, sort of ignoring that fact. How are we all not looking at each other all the time just like, Yo, what the fuck? — Melissa Broder

If you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious reading and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. — C.S. Lewis