Life Celebration Quotes
Crafted with the reader in mind, this collection is clearly divided by themes:
Agatha Christie
You cannot give to people what they are incapable of receiving.
Alan Watts
When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.
No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that’s going to happen.
Man seems to be unable to live without myth, without the belief that the routine and drudgery, the pain and fear of his life have some meaning and goal in the future.
Albert Camus
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Albert Einstein
Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.
As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.
Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
What is right is not always popular and what is popular is not always right.
Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss.
Aldous Huxley
It is man's intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly than the beasts. Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. No animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as punishment for its transgressions. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough.
The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
Aristotle
Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Mostly it is the loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
Wealth is like sea water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.
On the stage, one man is a prince, another a minister, a third a servant or a soldier or a general, and so on - mere external differences; the inner reality, the kernel of all these appearances is the same - a poor player, with all the anxieties of his lot. In life it is just the same.
Bertrand Russell
Cruel men believe in a cruel God and use their belief to excuse their cruelty.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.
To make children happy is not difficult. It requires only affection, common sense, and good spirits. But I am constantly told by my friends – and not only by the highbrows among them – that those who make children happy unfit them for later life. The highbrow tells me that the world is a horrible place which can only be endured by those who have never experienced happiness and therefore do not miss it.
The ordinary citizen tells me that it was not by means of happiness in his early years that he was made into the man he is. No, sir, it was by stern discipline, by the austere experience of going without, by toil and hardship and severity. The man who says this is speaking the truth; it was no doubt by such methods that he was made into the man he is. Whether this is altogether a recommendation of the methods is, however, perhaps less certain than he thinks.
Carl Jung
Much of the evil in the world is due to the fact that man in general is hopelessly unconscious.
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.
If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely.
The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.
Carl Sagan
In our obscurity - in all this vastness - there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.
You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.
Charles Bukowski
Wherever the crowd goes run in the other direction. They’re always wrong.
I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.
Confucius
All people are the same; only their habits differ.
Dalai Lama
When asked what surprised him most about humanity: "Man! Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”
People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.
Whether you believe in God or not does not matter so much, whether you believe in Buddha or not does not matter so much; as a Buddhist, whether you believe in reincarnation or not does not matter so much.
You must lead a good life. And a good life does not mean just good food, good clothes, good shelter. These are not sufficient. A good motivation is what is needed; compassion, without dogmatism, without complicated philosophy; just understanding that others are human brothers and sisters and respecting their rights and human dignity.
Deepak Chopra
It helps if you remember that everyone is doing their best from their level of consciousness.
Douglas Adams
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
The quality of advice anyone has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.
Erich Fromm
Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.
The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
Franz Kafka
I was ashamed of myself when I realized that life was a costume party; I and I attended with my real face.
I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In individuals insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
Dostoevsky, the only psychologist from whom I've anything to learn.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
I think the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.
When losing his hope and purpose a person slowly becomes a monster.
You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.
George Bernard Shaw
Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.
Georgia O'Keeffe
I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then.
Henry David Thoreau
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
Henry Ford
Progress happens when all the factors for it are ready and then it is inevitable.
Isaac Asimov
Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.
Jack Kerouac
I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world. And of course I was right.
James Baldwin
You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.
Jane Goodall
You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.
What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Society is you. If you change, you change society.
A human being, if he transforms himself, becomes alone, but that aloneness is not isolation - it is a form of supreme intelligence.
You must look most intimately and discover for yourself; then it is your own, not somebody else’s, not something that you have been told, because there is no teacher and no follower.
You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and wrote poems, and suffer, and understand, for that is life.
If you notice, all our lives are a series of escapes - escape from boredom, escape from routine, escape from fear. We have various kinds of escape; whether we are conscious of them or not, there they are as actual as the tree behind you or in front of you.
When we are inwardly poor, we indulge in every form of outward show, in wealth, power and possessions. When our hearts are empty, we collect things.
Joseph Campbell
Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth Century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the world, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, that organ wants that. The brain is one of the organs.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Not all those who wander are lost…
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us”
It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.
Hermann Hesse
Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.
John Cleese
A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people.
John Stuart Mill
No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.
Khalil Gibran
Travel and tell no one, live a true story and tell no one, people ruin beautiful things.
Leo Tolstoy
If you feel pain, you’re alive. If you feel other people’s pain, you’re a human being.
Mahatma Gandhi
You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
Marcus Aurelius
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine.
Margaret Atwood
Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.
…each person has a ‘story’—a personal narrative—which is constantly being replayed, revised, taken apart and put together again. The significant points in this narrative change as a person ages—what may have been tragedy at 20 is seen as comedy or nostalgia at 40.
Mark Twain
Worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe.
If a man doesn’t believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean, it does nowadays, because now we can’t burn him.
The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
Maya Angelou
I’ve learned that making a ‘living’ is not the same thing as ‘making a life’.
We need much less than we think we need.
Nikola Tesla
Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.
Of all the frictional resistances, the one that most retards human movement is ignorance, what Buddha called 'the greatest evil in the world.' The friction which results from ignorance can be reduced only by the spread of knowledge and the unification of the heterogeneous elements of humanity. No effort could be better spent.
Oscar Wilde
Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It’s the world’s original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different.
One can live for years sometimes, without living at all, and then life comes crowding into a single hour.
What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.
Pablo Picasso
The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
Plato
There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.
Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.
Robert Anton Wilson
Only the madman is absolutely sure.
Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and ‘progress,’ everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man’s refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent.
Rumi
There is a voice that doesn’t use words.
Half of life is charming others. The other half is lost going through anxieties caused by others. Leave this play, you have played enough.
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
Salvador Dali
The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.
Simone de Beauvoir
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.
Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.
Sir Isaac Newton
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Very similar to John of Salisbury: “We [the Moderns] are like dwarves perched on the shoulder of giants.”
Socrates
Smart people learn from everything and everyone, average people from their experiences, stupid people already have all the answers.
The unexamined life is not worth living.
(Jeff) “The Dude” Lebowski
Sooner or later you are going to have to face the fact that you’re a god damn moron.
Thich Nhat Hanh
The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.
Walt Disney
There is great comfort and inspiration in the feeling of close human relationships and its bearing on our mutual fortunes – a powerful force, to overcome the “tough breaks” which are certain to come to most of us from time to time.
Why not keep this resource at your fingertips?
Other Voices
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
Abraham Maslow
A village without the elderly is like a well without water.
African proverb
Anything which is troubling you, anything which is irritating you, THAT is your teacher.
Ajahn Chah
When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us.
Alexander Graham Bell
Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude.
Anne Frank
I hope to arrive to my death, late, in love, and a little drunk.
Atticus
We’re all so desperate to be understood, we forget to be understanding.
Beau Taplin
Life is too short to spend worrying about people who opposed you.
Benazir Bhutto
It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a ‘higher standard of living than any have ever known... It is a matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Buckminster Fuller
When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.
C. S. Lewis
Aging is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been.
David Bowie
From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.
Denis Diderot
There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river.
We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.
Desmond Tutu
When I look upon seamen, men of science and philosophers, man is the wisest of all beings; when I look upon priests and prophets nothing is as contemptible as man.
As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task.
Diogenes
When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.
Donald Miller
Now, what you’ve seen here is the evolution of populations, not so much the evolution of individuals. And in addition, if you look at the time scales that are involved here — two billion years for life, six million years for the hominid, 100,000 years for mankind as we know it — you’re beginning to see the telescoping nature of the evolutionary paradigm. And then when you get to agricultural, when you get to scientific revolution and industrial revolution, you’re looking at 10,000 years, 400 years, 150 years. You’re seeing a further telescoping of this evolutionary time.
Eamonn Healy
“Finding yourself" is not really how it works. You aren't a ten-dollar bill in last winter's coat pocket. You are also not lost. Your true self is right there, buried under cultural conditioning, other people's opinions, and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are. "Finding yourself" is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering who you were before the world got its hands on you.
Emily McDowell
We find comfort among those who agree with us - growth among those who don't.
Frank A. Clark
Energy moves in waves. Waves move in patterns.
Patterns move in rhythms. A human being is just that energy, waves, patterns, rhythms. Nothing more. Nothing less. A dance.
Gabrielle Roth
We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
Georg Hegel
Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.
Gregory Boyle
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
George Orwell
I have lived a thousand lives and I have loved a thousand loves. I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.
George R.R. Martin
The mind spends most of the time lost in fantasies and illusions, reliving pleasant or unpleasant experiences and anticipating the future with eagerness or fear. While lost in such cravings or aversions, we are unaware of what is happening now, what we are doing now.
Goenka
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to reinforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on, “I am not too sure.”
H.L. Mencken
Poverty is a very complicated issue, but feeding a child isn't.
Jeff Bridges
Your weirdness will make you stronger.
Your dark side will keep you whole.
Your vulnerability will connect you to the rest of our
suffering world.
Your creativity will set you free.
There’s nothing wrong with you.
Jacob Nordby
blood. To hate a man because he was born in another land, because he speaks a different language, or because he has different views is a great folly. Desist, I implore you, for we are all equally human….Let us have but one end in view – the welfare of humanity.
John Amos Comenius
Trust gets you killed, love gets you hurt and being real gets you hated.
Johnny Cash
I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.
Jorge Luis Borges
Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
Joyce Carol Oates
It doesn't matter what we want, once we get it, then we want something else.
Lord Baelish (Game of Thrones)
When the human race learns to read the language of symbolism, a great veil will fall from the eyes of men.
Symbolism is the language of the Mysteries. By symbols men have ever sought to communicate to each other those thoughts which transcend the limitations of language.
Manly P. Hall
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
I’m re-energized by being around people who mean a lot to me.
Martin Scorsese
There are two things people want more than sex and money…recognition and praise.
Mary Kay Ash
There is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others.
Mary Shelley
A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance with what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment.
Maxwell Maltz
A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.
Men In Black
Is it not strange that we fear most that which never happens? That we destroy our initiative by the fear of defeat, when, in reality defeat is a most useful tonic and should be accepted as such.
Napoleon
It is in your hands to create a better world for all who live in it.
Nelson Mandela
The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.
Norman Vincent Peale
Nobody is superior, nobody is inferior, but nobody is equal either. People are simply unique, incomparable. You are you, I am I.
Osho
Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about un-becoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.
Paul Coelho
There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser so terrible as the conscience that dwells in the heart of every man.
Polybius
We could not take them with us to the other world. We do not want riches. We want peace and love.
Red Cloud
Two things people throughout history have had in common are hatred and humour. I am proud that I have been able to use humour to lessen people’s hatred.
Richard Pryor
It is not our job to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves
Like the trees, and be born again,
Drawing up from the great roots.
Robert Bly
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
Robertson Davies
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
R.D. Laing
I am poor and naked, but I am the chief of the nation. We do not want riches but we do want to train our children right. Riches would do us no good.
There is no one truth, but there are an awful lot of objective facts.
Robert Caro
Beware of overconcern for money, or position, or glory. Someday you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are.
Rudyard Kipling
You who feel no pain at the suffering of others It is not fitting for you to be called human.
Saadi
Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.
Sigmund Freud
The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race….It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded.
Stephen Hawking
He who has no enemies is killed by friends.
Tacitus
Imagine you are walking in the woods and you see a small dog sitting by a tree. As you approach it, it suddenly lunges at you, teeth bared. You are frightened and angry. But then you notice that one of its legs is caught in a trap. Immediately your mood shifts from anger to concern. You see that the dog’s aggression is coming from a place of vulnerability and pain. This applies to all of us. When we behave in hurtful ways, it is because we are caught in some kind of trap. The more we look through the eyes of wisdom at ourselves and one another, the more we cultivate a compassionate heart.
Tara Brach
Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness.
The Architect, The Matrix Reloaded
To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.
Thomas Paine
Half of the harm that is done in the world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm; they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
T.S. Eliot
When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.
There are two races of men in this world, but only these two—the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man.
Viktor Frankl
Honesty is a very expensive gift. Don't expect it from cheap people.
Warren Buffett
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
William James
We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires, but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of the public schools, and the number of people who can [and] do read worthwhile books.
W. E. B. Du Bois
Strength is a facade for the proud, weakness is a mask for the lazy.
William James
We are the same. There is no difference anywhere in the world. People are people. They laugh, cry, feel, and love, and music seems to be the common denomination that brings us all together. Music cuts through all boundaries and goes right to the soul.
Willie Nelson
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
Winston Churchill
Ego is simply an idea of who you are that you carry around with you.
Wayne W. Dyer
Humans certainly have a will – but it isn't free. You cannot decide what desires you have. ... Humans make choices – but they are never independent choices. Every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself.
Yuval Noah Harari
