Life Celebration Quotes
Crafted with the reader in mind, this collection is clearly divided by themes:
Agatha Christie
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
Alan Watts
The more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.
Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent… this frustration of desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.
There is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
Albert Camus
When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.
In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile. In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm. I realized, through it all, that… In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.
Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning, but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.
Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.
Albert Einstein
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible, a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless, pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this… For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition.
Aldous Huxley
But perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Perhaps it’s
unavoidable and necessary. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.
One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
Anaïs Nin
What makes people despair is that they try to find a universal meaning to the whole of life, and then end up by saying it is absurd, illogical, and empty of meaning. There is not one big, cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
Aristotle
The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Mostly it is the loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
Men who aspire to a happy, a brilliant and a long life, instead of a virtuous one, are like foolish actors who want to be always having the great parts - the parts that are marked for splendor and triumph. They fail to see that the important thing is not what or how much but how they act.
There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy... So long as we persist in this inborn error... the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in things great and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence... hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of what is called disappointment.
Bob Marley
The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.
The winds that sometimes take something we love, are the same that bring us something we learn to love.
Carl Jung
Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.
People become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they are seeking.
Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.
Charles Bukowski
We are paper thin. We exist on luck amid the percentages, temporarily. And that’s the best part and the worst part, the temporal factor. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You can sit on top of a mountain and meditate for decades and it’s not going to alter. You can alter yourself into acceptability but maybe that’s wrong too. Maybe we think too much. Feel more, think less.
There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can’t hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.
Dalai Lama
We often add to our pain and suffering by being overly sensitive, over-reacting to minor things, and sometimes taking things too personally.
Ernest Hemingway
You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.
Eckhart Tolle
Where there is anger there is always pain underneath.
Epictetus
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will. Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.
Suffering arises from trying to control what is uncontrollable. Or from neglecting what is within
our power.
Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.
Epicurus
Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.
The things you really need are few and easy to come by; but the things you can imagine you need are infinite, and you will never be satisfied. Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.
Erich Fromm
One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their
happiness where others would find their destruction; in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest; difficult tasks are a privilege to them.
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it – that is what you must do.
Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.
Man only likes to count his troubles, he doesn’t calculate his happiness.
Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large
intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on Earth.
The world says: “You have needs - satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.” This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.
I think man will never renounce real suffering, that is destruction and chaos. Why suffering is the whole origin of consciousness.
If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment ... all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.
Henry David Thoreau
That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The urge for the repetition of an experience, however pleasant, beautiful, fruitful, is the soil in which sorrow grows.
… a mind that is all the time seeking pleasure must inevitably find its shadow in pain. They cannot be separated, although we can run after pleasure and try to avoid pain.
John Stuart Mill
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question.
Kahlil Gibran
Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.
Plato
Death is not the worst thing can happen to men.
Observe the wonders as they occur around you. Don’t claim them. Feel the artistry moving through and be silent. Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.
Rumi
When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.
Salvador Dali
There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.
Seneca
No person has the power to have everything they want, but it is in their power not to want what they don’t have, and to cheerfully put to good use what they do have.
We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.
Socrates
He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.
Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.
Be of good cheer about death, and know this as a truth, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.
If you don’t get what you want, you suffer, if you get what you don’t want, you suffer, even if you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.
Soren Kierkegaard
With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness the more intense the despair.
(Jeff) “The Dude” Lebowski
I can’t be worrying about that sh*t. Life goes on, man.
Oh you know, strikes and gutters, ups and downs.
Thich Nhat Hanh
People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.
The fact is that when you make the other suffer, he will try to find relief by making you suffer more. The result is an escalation of suffering on both sides.
if you are ever filled with anger, you create more suffering for yourself than for the other person… So you try to bring peace into yourself first. When you are calm, when you are lucid, you will see that the other person is a victim of confusion, of hate, of violence transmitted by society, by parents, by friends, by the environment. When you are able to see that, your anger is no longer there.
When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That's the message he is sending.
Vincent van Gogh
I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?
Why not keep this resource at your fingertips?
Other Voices
Wisdom comes alone through suffering.
Aeschylus
Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.
Alexis Carrel
Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hate, and hate leads to violence. This is the equation.
Averroes
To seek is to suffer. To seek nothing is bliss.
Bodhidharma
All is vanity.
Book of Ecclesiastes
Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.
Dr. Suess
The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.
If we keep the inner spirit bottled up too long it can turn against us and make our lives miserable. If we accept it as we find it and learn to work with it, everything changes. Spells are broken, gifts are found, and talents serve their true purpose.
Michael Meade
A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.
Michel de Montaigne
Be patient and tough; one day this pain will be useful to you.
Ovid
You cannot suffer the past or future because they do not exist. What you are suffering is your memory and your imagination.
Sadhguru
You must remember that no one lives a life free from pain and suffering.
Sophocles
Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
Yoda
Morality doesn't mean 'following divine commands'. It means 'reducing suffering'. Hence in order to act morally, you don't need to believe in any myth or story. You just need to develop a deep appreciation of suffering.
Yuval Noah Harari
