Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
September 11 impressed upon us that life is a precious gift. Every life has a purpose. And I think we all have a duty to devote at least a small portion of our daily lives to ensuring that neither America nor the world ever forgets September 11.
For a true artist, life is a real academy. I am always both a student and a teacher. I have been teaching art to children since the age of eight. Now I am a co-founder of Akiane Arts School at Foreli Academy, where we are now enrolling students.
The last part of life is a spiritual concern. You need to find a context to put your life into, that will allow you to go through it with as much grace and balance as possible, even if there is rebellion and adventure and exploration and resistance.
Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don't let yourself believe it will happen to you.
Should we find a second form of life right here on our doorstep, we could be confident that life is a truly cosmic phenomenon. If so, there may well be sentient beings somewhere in the galaxy wondering, as do we, if they are not alone in the universe.
I go through ups and downs in the psyche all the time, and then once you start moving again, it's amazing how you can always bounce back. You get, like, in a low rut, and you think, 'This is it; my life is a train wreck.' And then you bounce back again.
Well, I believe life is a Zen koan, that is, an unsolvable riddle. But the contemplation of that riddle - even though it cannot be solved - is, in itself, transformative. And if the contemplation is of high enough quality, you can merge with the divine.
Like it or not, life is a series of competitions. You may be competing for a grade, a spot on a team, a job, or the largest account in town. The higher your self-esteem is, the better you get along with yourself, with others, and the more you'll accomplish.
It's very true that you can be both selfless and selfish at the same time. What we tend towards, particularly in filmmaking, is this binary sort of, 'This is a good guy, this is a bad guy.' And I quite like the fact that life is a bit more complex than that.
Part of life and part of the enjoyment of life is a croissant and a chocolate cake and eggs and milkshakes and oatmeal. There's so many things, you have to learn to appreciate it all. When I don't eat as much as I should, I'm not fun to be around; I'm fussy.
Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves which we endure help us in our marching onward.
It's difficult to find a genuine weakness that makes you appear competent. For instance, telling your interviewer that your weakness is working so hard that you have trouble prioritizing your family life is a little too cliche and comes across as disingenuous.
I am a romantic, in a literary way, by which I mean the Romantic poets, who thought just because a sensation is fleeting doesn't mean it isn't valuable. If the only criterion of value is whether something lasts, then the whole of human life is a waste of time.
My African heritage is a part of reggae music roots, and the concept is that the album, 'Revelation Part 1: The Root of Life' is a tribute to roots reggae music. The fruit is what blossoms into different colors and shades, but the root has to stand predominant.
Being deeply contented with God in my everyday life is a focused attitude. It is always available. It means practicing letting go of my obsession with how I'm doing. It means training myself to learn to actually be present with people, and seeking to love them.
It's hard sometimes, especially with a book like 'Scorch Trials,' to truly adapt to the way the book is because so many of the scenes that take place in the book are really graphed and painted for the imagination. Trying to bring that to life is a really big task.
God wants us to know that life is a series of beginnings, not endings. Just as graduations are not terminations, but commencements. Creation is an ongoing process, and when we create a perfect world where love and compassion are shared by all, suffering will cease.
Life is a very orderly thing, but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There's nothing that says I can't write a page of full stops. There is no 'should' involved, although you wouldn't know that from literary reviews and critics.
The ability to take pleasure in one's life is a skill and is a kind of intelligence. So intelligence is a hard thing to evaluate and it manifests itself in so many different ways. I do think the ability to know how to live a life and not be miserable is a sign of that.
In a basic sense, 'A Little Life' is a homage to how my friends and I live our lives. I wanted to push past the definitions of how we typically define friendship. It's a different version of adulthood, but it's no less important and no less legitimate than anyone else's.
Young people can get very discouraged and get hooked on drugs or on alcohol because of problems they perceive as insurmountable. It is important that they realize a mistake need not ruin their future, but they must also know that not everything in life is a bed of roses.
Teenagers all think their life is a movie. If you break up with someone or you have a fight, you walk around with movie scores playing in your head. You sort of see yourself suffering as you're suffering. There's a lot of melodrama attached to the real events of your life.
Life on a factory farm is well-nigh unbearable for the animals or birds, and it is often foul for the women and men who process the meat that results - especially in factories for chicken parts. But do not sentimentalize. Do not imagine barnyard life is a bowl of cherries.
In the military, and in business, the most elite and effective teams I've seen or been part of are filled with individuals who take responsibility for their choices. Life is a series of decisions that you make and actions you take, not a series of things that happen to you.
Whatever I've experienced in my life is a part of my story, and I'm proud of that. But it's someone who wakes up early, works all day, believes in charitable work, business-minded, diligent, accountable, problem-solving... I'm so much about school, consistency and tradition.
Life's too short to dwell on things. When you go through experiences that are bad, it's a good thing. You learn from it - become a stronger person. Life is a roller coaster, and you don't know what's going to be thrown at you next, so all you can do is give it your best shot.
But in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt, and this is where I fault Stephen Ambrose and a lot of these guys who attack me - not all of life is a result of conspiracy by any means! Accident occurs alongside conspiracy.
I ask everyone in Russia to pray for me, beginning with the bishops, whose whole life is a single prayer. I ask prayers also of those who humbly do not believe in the efficacy of their prayers, as well as of those who do not believe in prayer at all and even consider it useless.
Life is a great university for the unfolding of the mind, for developing character. In choosing our life work, when we are free to choose, we should remember this, and choose that which will call the biggest man or woman out of us and not that from which we can coin the most dollars.
My favorite book in life is 'A Wrinkle In Time,' which I read before high school. It was my first introduction into the meeting of science and spirit and the universe and big thoughts and all of those interesting New Age-y concepts. It made everything make sense to me and opened up my mind.
Life is a series of punches. It presents a lot of challenges. It presents a lot of hardship, but the people that are able to take those punches and able to move forward are the ones that really do have a lot of success and have a lot of joy in their life and have a lot of stories to tell, too.
There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man's whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment.
When you're a kid, I think you want to be a film star. And I'm not as enamoured with that any more. The reality of that life is a lot of travel, and a lot of being away, which is impractical because I have four children, so I don't want to be away that much, not the other side of the world away.
Nobody's life is a bed of roses. We all have crosses to bear, and we all just do our best. I would never claim to have the worst situation. There are many widows, and many people dying of AIDS, many people killed in Lebanon, people starving all over the planet. So we have to count our lucky stars.
Maybe it's stress or anger or adrenaline or disillusionment or a bullying nature or simple fear of getting killed themselves, but there is a problem if a cop cannot tell the difference between a menacing gangster and the far more common person they encounter whose life is a little frayed and messy.
I'm an imperfect person. I've let anger, jealousy, all the emotions, get the best of me. If I go into books, word by word, little by little, they help re-center and re-ground me and put me on the right path. Life is a journey. I'm very focused on the things I do and have learned not to be pressured.
I learned at a very early age that life is a battle. My family was poor, my neighborhood was poor. The only way that I could get away from the awfulness of life, at that time, was at the movies. There I decided that my big aim was to make money. And it was there that I became a very determined woman.
It seems hopelessly improbable that any particular rules accidentally led to the miracle of intelligent life. Nevertheless, this is exactly what most physicists have believed: intelligent life is a purely serendipitous consequence of physical principles that have nothing to do with our own existence.
What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.
Life is a lot more interesting if you are interested in the people and the places around you. So, illuminate your little patch of ground, the people that you know, the things that you want to commemorate. Light them up with your art, with your music, with your writing, with whatever it is that you do.
I want to tell the story. Mostly, when you see rock movies, it has to be this over-the-top thing. I want to give people a Bret Michaels movie where they see that my life is a comedy of errors. I also want to show my fans how to get through the kind of troubles that would leave most people flat on the floor.
When we realize that something as primal as the food that we choose to eat each day makes such an important difference in addressing both global warming and personal health, it empowers us and imbues these choices with meaning. If it's meaningful, then it's sustainable - and a meaningful life is a longer life.
When you think about exploring deep space, it's very dangerous for humans. To potentially sacrifice human life is a delicate proposition. On the flip side, if you want to send a robot to another planet for an extended period of time and at some point you know it'll cease to function, it's not considered a tragedy.
I think that idea that sort of our emotional self and our emotional life is a faucet that you turn on and off, and that we are in control of it entirely, that's a really appealing idea for a lot of people. But there are certainly the times where it's appealing to me, but it never quite works the way I hoped it would.
One of the most painful parts of a breakup is having the feeling that your life is a story, and then the other person leaves and takes the story with them. And you're left there without it. You're left in this version of life that's basically a succession of events and interactions that don't seem to be going anywhere.
Of course, the most important factor of all for long life is a good family. When a person goes home with the wife or the kids giving him endless headaches, then it's hard for that person to enjoy a long life. I am very fortunate, because my wife Elizabeth and my obedient children are very good; they have given me happiness.
The book, '12 Rules For Life,' is a very serious book. There's elements of humor in it, but I'm trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it's necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there's hell to pay if you don't do that.
I think when you're in your 20s, going from adolescence to about 24, I think your life is a series of emotional storms that you have to weather. Life is more emotional at that time, and you're less equipped to deal with what life throws at you. I always think that if you can get past 24, than life really starts at that point.
Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story, but music sometimes, just music itself, can turn into more of a maths problem. I guess everything in life is a math problem, but it can be more about an empirical route to getting the symmetry that you want, and this vibe, sonically.
Life is a series of baby steps along the way and if you add up these tiny little steps you take toward your goal, whatever it is, whether it's giving up something, a terrible addiction or trying to work your way through an illness. When you total up those baby steps you'd be amazed over the course of 10 years, the strides you've taken.