Life Celebration Quotes
Crafted with the reader in mind, this collection is clearly divided by themes:
Absurdity of Life
Agatha Christie
It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.
Alan Watts
A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts, so he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions.
The biggest ego trip is getting rid of your ego, and of course the joke of it all is that your ego does not exist.
Albert Camus
The misery and greatness of this world; it offers no truths, but only objects of love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.
Life is meaningless, but worth living, provided you recognize it’s meaningless.
The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.
It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.
Albert Einstein
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.
Everything is determined, every beginning and ending, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.
Anaïs Nin
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
Bertrand Russell
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
Arthur Schopnehauer
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.
Buddha
My teaching is like a raft used to cross the river. Only a fool would carry the raft around after he had already reached the other shore of liberation.
Carl Jung
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.
I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions - not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation or something I do not know.
The gods have become our diseases.
Carl Sagan
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.
Charles Bukowski
We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead. Boring damned people. All over the Earth. Propagating more boring damned people… what a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.
When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.
If you let them kill you, they will.
For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas.
There are still things to be handled; there will always be things to be handled. Nobody ever gets caught up and finished on what there is to do. And even if you do, for a moment, feel a central peace, there is always somebody walking behind you with a switchblade.
Often the best parts of life were when you weren't doing anything at all, just mulling it over, chewing on it. I mean, say that you figure out that everything is senseless, then it can't be quite senseless because you are aware that it's senseless and your awareness of senselessness almost gives it sense. You know what I mean? An optimistic pessimism.
Douglas Adams
He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
Reality is frequently inaccurate.
There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
In the beginning the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
Eckhart Tolle
You are the universe expressing itself as a human for a little while.
Epictetus
He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at.
Epicurus
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
An intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.
Frida Kahlo
Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There are no facts, only interpretations
There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.
God is dead... And we have killed him.
Is man merely a mistake of God’s or God merely a mistake of man?
Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.
Morality is just a fiction used by the herd of inferior human beings to hold back the few superior men.
George Bernard Shaw
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
The longer I live, the more convinced am I that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum.
George Carlin
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.
The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.
Some people have no idea what they're doing, and a lot of them are really good at it.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Hunter S. Thompson
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives... and to the 'good life', whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.
Jack Kerouac
You can’t live in this world but there’s nowhere else to go.
I have nothing to offer anybody, except my own confusion.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Thought is so cunning, so clever, that it distorts everything for its own convenience.
You know, we all want to be terribly respectable, do we not? The young as well as the old.
Respectability means recognition by society; and society only recognizes that which is successful, important, the famous, and ignores the rest. So we worship success and respectability. And when you do not care whether society thinks you are respectable or not, when you do not seek success, do not want to become somebody, then there is intensity - which means there is no conflict, no contradiction within; and therefore you have abundant energy to pursue the fact to the very end.
Joseph Campbell
The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.
There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you’re on the wrong wall.
Leo Tolstoy
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
Leonard Cohen
The older I get, the surer I am that I'm not running the show.
Leonardo da Vinci
I awoke, only to find that the rest of the world was still asleep.
Mark Twain
Sometimes I wonder if the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.
Dying man couldn’t make his mind which place to got to - Both have their advantages, heaven for climate, hell for company!
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it.
Margaret Atwood
War is what happens when language fails.
Oscar Wilde
Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first and the lesson afterward.
Whenever life sucks, remember you’re going to die someday.
Pablo Picasso
Everything you can imagine is real.
Paul Gauguin
Civilization is what makes you sick.
René Descartes
I can do nothing else, until I have learned for certain that there is nothing in the world that is certain.
Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true and assured I have gotten either from the senses or through the senses. But from time to time I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.
Robert Anton Wilson
The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you'll see that they're all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it.
Every national border in Europe marks the place where two gangs of bandits got too exhausted to kill each other anymore and signed a treaty.
Salvador Dali
I don't do drugs. I am drugs.
Simone de Beauvoir
If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Soren Kierkegaard
The only intelligent tactical response to life’s horror is to laugh defiantly at it.
When I opened my eyes and saw the real world, I began to laugh and I haven’t stopped since.
A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.
Vincent van Gogh
If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.
Art is to console those who are broken by life.
William Shakespeare
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player. That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Why not keep this resource at your fingertips?
Other Voices
Turn your demons into art, your shadow into a friend, your failures into teachers, your weaknesses into reasons to keep fighting. Don't waste your pain. Recycle your heart.
Andrea Balt
Art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness.
Anni Albers
Life is the farce we are all forced to endure
Arthur Rimbaud
…some 5 billion years from now, after it's burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being -- and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth.
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.
Christopher Hitchens
There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’re dedicated their lives to an illusion.
Daniel Dennett
We have a finite environment—the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.
David Attenborough
We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experienced is a narrowing of the imagination.
David Lynch
Perhaps you’re a slave to your own idea of yourself.
D.H. Lawrence
Accidents happen. That's what everyone says. But in a quantum universe there are no such things as accidents, only possibilities and probabilities folded into existence by perception.
Dr. Manhattan
Men have called me mad; but the question is not settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest of intelligence.
I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
I was never insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.
Edgar Allen Poe
Man’s condition is tragic, for he no longer finds fulfillment in life’s simple values. For animals, life is all there is; for man, life is a question mark, for man has never found, nor will ever find, any answers. Life not only has no meaning; it can never have one.
Emil Cioran
The total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing between all beings.
Erwin Scrödinger
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
Euripides
Try to understand what I am saying; everything is dependent on everything else, everything is connected, nothing is separate. Therefore everything is going in the only way it can go. If people were different everything would be different. They are what they are, so everything is as it is.
G.J. Gurdjieff
I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.
Groucho Marx
In the end it doesn’t matter what you do.
Harrison Birtwistle
The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel.
Horace Walpole
The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem.
Jack Sparrow
You're worried about death? Don't worry - you'll die for sure.
Kodo Sawaki
We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.
Kurt Vonnegut
There’s no such thing as perfection, and even if there were, I think it’d be rather boring.
Lorraine Heath
Man is quite insane. He wouldn’t know how to create a maggot, and he creates gods by the dozen.
Michel de Montaigne
The real risk in this life has always been that of becoming oneself amidst the uncertainties of existence. An Irish poet once said, ‘a false sense of security is the only kind there is.’
The purpose of conflict is to create.
Michael Meade
It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning.
Milan Kundera
Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.
Morticia Addams
Quantum physics tells us that nothing that is observed is unaffected by the observer. That statement, from science, holds an enormous and powerful insight. It means that everyone sees a different truth, because everyone is creating what they see.
Neale Donald Walsch
Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.
Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.
The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement, but the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth.
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.
Niels Bohr
Recognizing the absurdity of life is also a way of surviving.
Noa Ben Artzi-Pelossof
I don’t think existence wants you to be serious. I have not seen a serious tree. I have not seen a serious bird. I have not seen a serious sunrise. I have not seen a serious starry night. It seems they are all laughing in their own ways, dancing in their own ways. We may not understand it, but there is a subtle feeling that the whole existence is a celebration.
Osho
We are on a rock traveling around 1 of 100 billion stars. Our species is 1 of over half a billion that have ever existed. Our chances of being born are about 1 in 400 trillion. You’re not special, but you are lucky. Enjoy your amazing life. You’ll never exist again.
Ricky Gervais
You were born on earth. There is no cure for that.
Samuel Beckett
You exist as an idea in your mind.
Shunryu Suzuki
I despise the kind of book which tells you how to live, how to make yourself happy! Philosophers have no good news for you at this level! I believe the first duty of philosophy is making you understand what deep shit you are in!
Slavoj Žižek
Perfection in life does not exist; and if it did, it would not be lovable but admirable, possibly even a bore. Perfection lacks personality.
Thomas Mann
An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.
Victor Frankl
Not only is the universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
Werner Heisenberg
In zen, we don’t find the answers. We lose the questions.
Zen Proverb
Pocketbook of Quotes: From Socrates to Lebowski is an absolute gem that belongs in everyone’s library. This compact book is a treasure trove of wisdom, inspiration, and wit, offering timeless insights from some of the greatest minds in history. From philosophers like Socrates and Camus to unexpected gems from pop culture, every quote invites you to pause, reflect, and marvel at the depth of human thought.
What I love most about this book is its versatility. You can read it in one sitting and feel enriched, or you can take your time, turning to any random page for a moment of insight whenever you need it. Whether you're looking for motivation, contemplating life’s mysteries, or simply need a laugh, there’s always something in here that hits the right note.
The carefully curated selection, with quotes like Albert Camus’s poetic reflections on love and absurdity or Schopenhauer’s timeless truths, makes this book as profound as it is entertaining. The added touch of humor from quotes like Charles Bukowski’s stark yet thought-provoking outlook on life makes this book even more captivating.
It’s perfect for students, professionals, or anyone on a journey of lifelong learning. If you want to nourish your mind and soul with wisdom that has stood the test of time—and still makes sense in our modern world—this pocketbook is a must-have. Highly recommended!
Perhaps the only way to put creativity into a reference book is putting appeal into its presentation, and that is what this volume of helpful and inspirational quotes has done.
Like many similar books, the quotes are divided by subject, but the cleanliness of the typesetting and clearness of the presentation make this volume more accessible than some of the alternatives. A nice touch is the portraits to accompany the most notable contributors, which not only give a visual cue to the reader but also serve to break up what would otherwise be a giant wall of text.
The presentation was spot on, and this will probably make a better book for your desk or coffee table than a lot of its thicker, clunkier competitors. The Kindle version is also particularly clean in its layout, with scarce typesetting errors.
A solid reference, through and through.
This is an excellent book on quotes on all sorts of topics regarding "Life."
There are almost 400 pages of insightful and witty comments that are broken into twenty-four categories, which are too many to list in its entirety but include such topics as art, courage, education, happiness, inspiration, power, time, wisdom, etc.
The layout of the book is straight forward and sorted first by category and then by the person making the statement. Even the icons of the person making the quote referenced are well done.
There's a tremendous amount of insight and humour in this single book. It is a light read and can be enjoyed over time or all at once.