“Life is long if you know how to use it.”
Seneca, The Daily Stoic (Page 369)
“Until death, it is all life.”
Miguel De Cervantes, via Between Two Kingdoms
“This is the true joy in life, the being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no ‘brief candle’ for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
George Bernard Shaw, via Sunbeams (Page 140)
“The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, because an artful life requires being prepared to meet and withstand sudden and unexpected attacks.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, via The Daily Stoic (Page 282)
“Our bodies tell us the truth of life that our minds can deny: that we are in any moment as much about softness as fortitude. Always in need of care and tenderness. Life is fluid, evanescent, evolving in every cell, in every breath. Never perfect. To be alive is by definition messy, always leaning towards disorder and surprise. How we open or close to the reality that we never arrive at safe enduring stasis is the matter, the raw material, of wisdom.”
Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 67)
“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey
“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”
Crowfoot, via Sunbeams (Page 93)
“We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”
Katherine May, Wintering
“Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turn before we have learned to walk.”
Cyril Connolly, via Sunbeams (Page 83)
“Your life is purchased by where you spend your attention.”
James Clear, Blog
“It’s not the length but the quality of life that matters to me. It has always been important to me to write one sentence at a time, to live every day as if it were my last and judge it in those terms, often badly, not because it lacked grand gesture or grand passion but because it failed in the daily virtues of self-discipline, kindness, and laughter. It is love, very ordinary, human love, and not fear, which is the good teacher and the wisest judge.”
Jane Rule, via Sunbeams (Page 67)
Don’t leave your masterpiece unfinished.
(Read Matt’s Blog on this quote)
