Life Celebration Quotes
Crafted with the reader in mind, this collection is clearly divided by themes:
Alan Watts
It just is. And it’s all one thing and one moment. So let go and just be.
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink… Instead you relax and float.
You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it.
Anaïs Nin
From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.
Bertrand Russell
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
Buddha
You are the first victim of your own anger.
Buddha was asked, “What have you gained from meditation?” He replied, “Nothing!” Then he continued, “However, let me tell you what I have lost: anger, anxiety, depression, insecurity, and fear of old age and death.”
We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.
You only lose what you cling to.
Charles Bukowski
They simply never understand, do they, that sometimes solitude is one of the most beautiful things on earth?
Charles Baudelaire
Besides, I’m not in the mood for all this today. I have no desire to demonstrate, surprise, amuse, or persuade. My goal is absolute rest. To know nothing, to teach nothing, to want nothing, to sense nothing, to sleep, and then to sleep more.
Dalai Lama
In the practice of tolerance, one's enemy is the best teacher.
Ernest Hemingway
If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry. Worry never fixes anything.
Epictetus
Any person capable of angering you becomes your master.
Don’t hope that events will turn out the way you want, welcome events in whichever way they happen. This is the path to peace.
If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation. Which is why it is essential that we not respond impulsively to impressions; take a moment before reacting, and you will find it easier to maintain control.
Franz Kafka
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
Friedrich Nietzsche
My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.
Georgia O'Keeffe
The morning is the best time, there are no people around. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
A man who is fully aware is meditating; he does not pray, because he does not want anything.
Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life, perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody. That is the beauty of it. It has no technique and therefore no authority. When you learn about yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy, if you are aware of all that in yourself, without any choice, that is part of meditation. So meditation can take place when you are sitting on a bus or walking in the woods full of light and shadows, or listening to the singing of birds or looking at the face of your wife, husband or child.
All that you have to do is merely to watch. That is the greatest action. That is the only action.
Meditate alone. Get lost. And don’t try to remember where you have been. If you try to remember it, it will be something dead. If you hold on to the memory of it, you will never be alone again. So meditate in that endless solitude, in the beauty of that love, in that innocency, in the new. Then there is imperishable bliss.
The craving for experience is the beginning of illusion.
Meditation cannot be learned from another. You must begin without knowing anything about it, and move from innocence to innocence. The soil in which the meditative mind can begin is the soil of everyday life, the strife, the pain and the fleeting joy. It must begin there and bring order, and from there, move endlessly. But if you are concerned only with making order, then that very order will bring about its own limitation, and the mind will be its prisoner. In all this movement, you must somehow begin from the other end, from the other shore, and not always be concerned with this shore or how to cross the river. You must take a plunge into the water, not knowing how to swim. And the beauty of meditation is that you never know where you are, where you are going, or what the end is.
It’s beautiful to be alone. To be alone does not mean to be lonely. it means the mind is not influenced and contaminated by society.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Over all the mountaintops is peace. You perceive scarcely a breath. The little birds in the forest are silent. Wait then; soon you, too, will have peace.
Kahlil Gibran
Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.
You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.
Leonard Cohen
When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you.
Mahatma Gandhi
I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.
Marcus Aurelius
You shouldn’t give circumstances the power to rouse anger, for they don’t care at all.
You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
Mark Twain
I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.
Never argue with stupid people. They will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.
Oscar Wilde
Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace.
René Descartes
Doubt is the origin of wisdom.
Rumi
If you want the moon, do not hide at night. If you want a rose, do not run from the thorns. If you want love, do not hide from yourself.
The soul has been given its own ears to hear the things the mind does not understand.
Seneca
What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes. Some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.
We shouldn't control anger, but destroy it entirely. For what control is there in a thing that's fundamentally wicked?
Socrates
Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.
(Jeff) “The Dude” Lebowski
The Dude abides.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Meditation is not evasion; it is a serene encounter with reality.
If we are not happy, if we are not peaceful, we cannot share peace and happiness with others, even those we love, those who live under the same roof. If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile and blossom like a flower, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.
Stillness is the foundation of understanding and insight.
Just allow yourself to sit quietly. Don’t do anything. Just allow the sitting and breathing to take place. Don’t strive; relaxation will come. When you are completely relaxed, healing will take place on its own.
When you are able to silence all views and words, reality reveals itself to you and that is Nirvana.
I have arrived. I am home. My destination is in each step.
Why not keep this resource at your fingertips?
Other Voices
For these sections without caricature the quote comes first, the cited person after. In case you are using text-to-speech be aware.
Do not react to anything. Stay calm and your calmness will find a way out.
Adeep
Do everything with a mind that lets go. If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you will know complete peace and freedom. Your struggles with the world will have come to an end.
Ajahn Chahshah
I surround myself with silence. The silence is within me, it permeates my house, reaches beyond the surface of the outer walls and into the bordering woods. It is one silence, continuous from within me outward in all directions… In the silence I listen, I watch, I sense, I attend, I observe. I require this silence. I search it out.
Alice Koller
Meditation is realizing and expanding your inner beauty in every direction.
Amit Ray
Before I attained enlightenment everything was as it was. After I attained enlightenment, everything was as it was.
Anonymous
All our miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.
Blaise Pascal
The soul always knows what to do to heal itself. The challenge is to silence the mind.
Caroline Myss
To a mind that is still the whole universe surrenders.
Chuang Tzu
Let your mind be quiet, realizing the beauty of the world, and the immense, the boundless treasures that it holds in store.
All that you have within you, all that your heart desires, all that your Nature so specially fits you for - that or the counterpart of it waits embedded in the great Whole for you. It will surely come to you. Yet equally surely not one moment before its appointed time will it come.
All your crying and fever and reaching out of hands will make no difference. Therefore, do not begin that game at all.
Do not recklessly spill the waters of your mind
in this direction and in that, lest you become like a spring lost and dissipated in the desert.
Edward Carpenter
Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.
George MacDonald
Who are you in the silence between your thoughts?
Gil Fronsdal
There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.
G.K. Chesterton
There is a silence into which the world cannot intrude. There is an ancient peace you carry in your heart and have not lost.
Helen Schucman
Like water which can clearly mirror the sky and the trees only so long as its surface is undisturbed, the mind can only reflect the true image of the Self when it is tranquil and wholly relaxed.
Indra Devi
The calm man, having learned how to govern himself, knows how to adapt himself to others; and they, in turn, reverence his spiritual strength, and feel that they can learn of him and rely upon him. The more tranquil a man becomes, the greater is his success, his influence, his power for good.
James Allen
All real and wholesome enjoyments possible to people have been just as possible to them since first they were made of the earth as they are now; and they are possible to them chiefly in peace. To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over plowshare or spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope: these are the things that make people happy.
John Ruskin
No matter how many years you sit doing zazen, you will never become anything special.
Kodo Sawaki
I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.
Lord Byron
Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.
Matsuo Bashō
The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.
Paulo Coelho
Meaningful silence is better than meaningless words.
Pythagoras
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live with them.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Although the modes of meditation may appear to be different from one another, in the end all of them become one. There is no need to doubt this. One may adopt that path which suits the maturity of one’s mind.
Ramana Maharshi
We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already totally in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness.
Richard Rohr
When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of stress and anxiety; if I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without pain. From this I understand that what I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me. There is a great secret here for anyone who can grasp it.
Shams-i Tabrizi
The true purpose [of Zen] is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes... Emotionally we have many problems, but these problems are not actual problems; they are something created by our self-centered ideas or views. When we realize the everlasting truth of “everything changes” and find our composure in it, we find ourselves in Nirvana.
Shunryu Suzuki
Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children.
Sitting Bull
Being alone has a power that very few people can handle.
Steven Aitchison
Nothing in the world can bother you as much as your own mind, I tell you. In fact, others seem to be bothering you, but it is not other, it is your own mind.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Meditation is a sort of prayer and prayer is meditation. The highest meditation is to think of nothing. If you can remain one moment without thought, great power will come.
Swami Vivekananda
Remember that poise and power are inseparably associated. The calm and balanced mind is the strong and great mind; the hurried and agitated mind is the weak one.
Wallace D. Wattles
Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than how you think it should be.
Wayne Dyer
‘If it were just a matter of playing football with the firmament, stirring up the ocean, turning back rivers, carrying away mountains, seizing the moon, moving the Pole-star or shifting a planet, I could manage it easily enough. Even if it were a question of my head being cut off or my belly being ripped open and my heart cut out or any kind of transference or transformation, I would take on the job at once’ said Monkey. 'But if it comes to sitting still and meditating, I am bound to come off badly. It's quite against my nature.’
Wu Cheng'en
You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
Yuval Noah Harari
Sometimes, simply by sitting, the soul collects wisdom.
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.