Life Celebration Quotes
Crafted with the reader in mind, this collection is clearly divided by themes:
Abraham Lincoln
If I had eight hours to chop down a tree I’d spend six sharpening my axe.
Agatha Christie
One doesn't recognize the really important moments in one's life until it's too late.
Alan Watts
You can’t live at all unless you can live fully now.
This very moment, this very world, this very body is the point. Now. You see? But, if you’re seeking something beyond all the time, you never get with it. You’re never here.
It is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.
Most people nowadays say they have no time. Of course you don’t. Because you’re not aware of the present.
We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see its like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that... Also watch the flow of music. The melody as it’s expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence... you wait till later to find out what the sentence means...The present is always changing the past.
This is the real secret of life - to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.
There is only this now. It does not come from anywhere; it is not going anywhere. It is not permanent, but it is not impermanent. Though moving, it is always still. When we try to catch it, it seems to run away, and yet it is always here and there is no escape from it. And when we turn around to find the self which knows the moment, we find that it has vanished like the past.
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.
Time does not exist – we invented it. Time is what the clock says. The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Bertrand Russell
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Carl Sagan
One glance at (a book) and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time.
Why not share this as a heartwarming gift?
Charles Bukowski
I have no time for things that have no soul.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?
Georgia O'Keeffe
Nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small it takes time - we haven't time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for a moment.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Time is inattention. When you are completely attentive, there is no time.
Leo Tolstoy
The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
Marcus Aurelius
Remember how long you’ve been putting this off… There is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return.
Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to throw away. Death stands at your elbow. Be good for something while you live and it is in your power.
Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time.
Margaret Atwood
Time is not a thing that passes ... it's a sea on which you float.
Seneca
The only thing that belongs to us is the time.
Sun Tzu
If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.
Thich Nhat Hanh
We are so busy we hardly have time to look at the people we love, even in our own household, and to look at ourselves. Society is organized in a way that even when we have some leisure time, we don’t know how to use it to get back in touch with ourselves. We have millions of ways to lose this precious time we turn on the TV or pick up the telephone, or start the car and go somewhere.
We are not being with ourselves, and we act as if we don’t like ourselves and are trying to escape from ourselves.
We tend to be alive in the future, not now. We say, "Wait until I finish school and get my Ph.D. degree, and then I will be really alive.” When we have it, and it’s not easy to get, we say to ourselves, “I have to wait until I have a job in order to be really alive.” And then after the job, a car. After the car, a house. We are not capable of being alive in the present moment. We tend to postpone being alive to the future, the distant future, we don’t know when. Now is not the moment to be alive. We may never be alive in our entire life.
We have a tendency to think in terms of doing and not in terms of being. We think that when we’re not doing anything, we’re wasting our time. But that’s not true. Our time is first of all for us to be. To be what? To be alive, to be peaceful, to be joyful, to be loving. And this is what the world needs the most. We all need to train ourselves in our way of being, and that is the ground for all action. Our quality of being determines our quality of doing.
William Shakespeare
Go wisely and slowly. Those who rush stumble and fall.
A good leg will fall, a straight back will stoop, a black beard will turn white, a curled pate will grow bald, a fair face will wither, a full eye will wax hollow. But a good heart… is the sun and the moon… for it shines bright and never changes, but keeps it course truly.
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.
Nothing is permanent in this wicked world - not even our troubles.
My only enemy is time.
Charlie Chaplin
Forever is composed of nows
Emily Dickinson
Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you… For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.
Erwin Schrödinger
Modern man is frantically trying to earn enough to buy things he’s too busy to enjoy.
Frank A Clark
Peace is when time doesn’t matter as it passes by.
Maria Schell
A man who views the world the same way at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.
Muhammad Ali
Today is for itself enough.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.
Rabindranath Tagore
Everything happens in its own time. The one who is ready for the Absolute Knowledge will be made somehow to hear of it and follow it up.
Ramana Maharshi
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
Virginia Woolf
