Quotes About Life And What It Means

#1. There is nothing like feeling truly "awake" and aware of my life and what it means to me. So I look ahead and think, "There is still so much to be done, and I will continue to make the most of it.

Elizabeth Berrien

#2. Teach him to call it 'real life' and don't let him ask what he means by 'real'.

C.S. Lewis

#3. It is by no means your past that determines or dictates your present or your future; it is what you think and what you say, which then results in what you feel and what you do.

Miya Yamanouchi

#4. My mind mellows now, and I sit back, glad to be done with a busy day. Evening's tranquility presents a chance to settle in with myself and with You. It is the time of day that I most often reflect on who I am and what my life means.

Hope Lyda

#5. Success means different things in different parts of my life, but overall if I have to define ultimately what success means.. the bottom line.. then for me it's if the family is healthy and happy.

Phil McGraw

#6. It's no use crying over spilt milk'
*It means that what has happened is over and can not be changed, so clean up the mess and get on with life*
What's done, is done.

James Howell

#7. No man can possibly know what life means, what the world means, until he has a child and loves it. And then the whole universe changes and nothing will ever again seem exactly as it seemed before.

Lafcadio Hearn

#8. As far as being married and what it means to me ... it's nice knowing that I have a partner in life and that someone's got my back.

Jessica Alba

#9. Worship is a posture of life that takes as its primary purpose the understanding of what it really means to love and revere God.

Ravi Zacharias

#10. Detachment doesn't mean avoiding things and going to Himalayas. It means doing what is necessary without drowning in it.

Sumit Singh

#11. What a tragic realm this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don't know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not understand what it means.

Philip K. Dick

#12. All of life, I wanted to tell him, is in our minds. Where else does it take place, where else do we add up what it means to us and subtract what we have lost? An event is just an event until some person attaches meaning to it.

Robin Hobb

#13. Dreaming means 'rehearsing' what you see, playing it over and over in your mind until it becomes as real to you as your life right now.

Emmitt Smith

#14. This world isn't perfect. That means it isn't perfectly good; but it isn't perfectly bad, either. The ease comes with the hardship. Shift the focus of what you see, and your experience of this life will change.

Yasmin Mogahed

#15. But life isn't something that should be edited. Life shouldn't be cut. The only way you'll ever discover what it truly means to be alive and human is by sharing the full experience of what it means to be human and each blemish and freckle that comes with it.

Iain Thomas

#16. It's about, I did talk about my life in broad strokes and what home meant to me in order to really explore the subject of home and can you go back and what that means for people in that sense of community that we've lost.

Sela Ward

#17. We believe that the first time we're born, as children, it's human life given to us; and when we accept Jesus as our Savior, it's a new life. That's what "born again" means.

Jimmy Carter

#18. When you're starting out, you basically have all these assumptions about what it means to be an artist or how to be a rock star. It took me years, through trial and error, to figure out what does work for me. So much of it is counter to the myth of the rock-star life.

Rivers Cuomo

#19. It must be around forty, when you're "over the hill." I don't even know what that means and why it's a bad thing. When I go hiking and I get over the hill, that means I'm past the hard part and there's a snack in my future. That's a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

Ellen DeGeneres

#20. But I still have him in the form of the finest and highest standard of what it means to be a journalist and critic. All my life, Roger Ebert has always been the bar I've tried to reach. I never will. But his example has made me stronger through failure.

Andy Ihnatko

#21. Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. It means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf.

Robin Sloan

#22. Your parents don't get to tell your story. Your sisters don't. When he's old enough, even Pat doesn't get to tell your story. I'm your husband and I don't even get to tell it. So I don't care how lovesick this director is, he doesn't tell it. ... No one gets to tell you what your life means!" ~Alvis

Jess Walter

#23. The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.

James M. Barrie

#24. What we think affects our life so much that life is for each of us just what we think it is. So the question of what life means has individual answers for each of us.

Jay Woodman

#25. If there's one thing I've learned in life, if there's one rule I live by, it's never to regret what's happened. Understand by all means, but never regret - it's such a devouring pastime and one that leads nowhere.

Alan Goodwin

#26. Do you know what it means to be a survivor? It means that not only do you have to live through things, you have to live with them as well. The second part is much harder and sometimes it takes the rest of your life to learn how to do it. But at least you have the rest of your life ...

Josephine Angelini

#27. I'd rather do something than read about it."
"That's fine, but if you do it, and then can't think what it means, it's never much of a memory. Life has more to so with memories of the past and longings for the future than it ever does with *right now*."
-pg 138-9

Dean Hughes

#28. I haven't tweeted once in my life, but I'm sick of hearing about it already. What once may have been the cool way of letting a hundred people know that you're about to go mow your lawn now has the feel of a used-to-be-fresh means of communicating. So yesterday, like two-way pagers. And AOL.

John Ridley

#29. But no one can predict of a certainty what will happen. And none of it will change how I intend to spend the rest of my life. I will live it on my terms. And you ... you can have all of me or nothing. I won't be an invalid any longer. Not even if it means losing you.

Lisa Kleypas

#30. She considers the past. She measures it and weighs it and holds it in her hand like a plum. The past is everything now, and she understands that this is what it means to be dying: You stop looking forward, instead living for moments that happened years before.

Thomas Christopher Greene

#31. There is no activity that is somehow more Christian than another. God looks at the heart, and that is the good part that Mary knew. he simply asks us to come as we are and to be willing, open to receive whatever he might have for us this day. That is what it means to live a graceful life.

Emily P. Freeman

#32. Surviving isn't just about cutting out your heart and burning every feeling into ash. Sometimes it means taking what ever is thrown at you, beautiful or grotesque, poisonous or blissful, and carving out your life with the pieces you're given.

Roshani Chokshi

#33. It is something only a few know in their lives. It is a vision of something so clear, so true, it can only be a madness. You see what life is worth, and you know what death means.

Raymond E. Feist

#34. When dreams come true in reality they never feel the same as when you imagine them, and you know what that means? It means that no matter how good things are, maybe they'll never be good enough, and there's something seriously wrong with that.

Tiffanie DeBartolo

#35. It really is a very radical call ... to reject materialism as our central value and to think about the sanctity of life and what that really means if we take it seriously.

Naomi Oreskes

#36. Sometimes I think it's easier to think about being happier, for what ever that means to you then worrying about what is happiness and what would life be if I finally achieved this ultimate happiness?

Gretchen Rubin

#37. If your life means nothing to anyone, it does mean a lot to you and that's what is important.

Abdulazeez Henry Musa

#38. What does it mean to be an oncologist? It means that you get to sit in at a moment of another person's life that is so hyper-acute, and not just because they're medically ill. It's also a moment of hope and expectation and concern.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#39. When you wonder about the mystery of yourself, look to Christ, who gives you the meaning of life. When you wonder what it means to be a mature person, look to Christ, who is the fulfillness of humanity. And when you wonder about your role in the future of the world look to Christ.

Pope John Paul II

#40. I learned long ago that loss is not only probable but inevitable. I know what it means to lose everything, to let go of one life and find another. And now I feel, with a strange, deep certainty, that it must be my lot in life to be taught that lesson over and over again.

Christina Baker Kline

#41. I think you need to go through some stuff to really appreciate life and understand what it means to persevere, overcome and have faith. I think those tough times make you a stronger person.

Judith Hill

#42. Living where I live New York I don't think anyone's going to make a fuss. But it is more deeply satisfying because it's of your place and means that you aren't forgotten; someone's noticed what you have been doing with your life.

Peter Carey

#43. What does 'stuck' mean?" "It means I should make some big decision, I should do some enormous thing. And I can't do anything. I can't stand my life, and I can't change it." "Maybe it's not an enormous thing," he says. "Maybe you have to do one small thing and then another small thing.

A.M. Homes

#44. It is not all of life to live, nor yet all of death to die. For life and death are one, and only those who will consider the experience as one may come to understand or comprehend what peace indeed means.

Edgar Cayce

#45. If we could carry an awareness of being with us into each day, allowing it to influence the way we do things, and how we relate to others, we might find ourselves living a very different kind of life; maybe then we would fully embrace the deeper truth of what it means to be a human being.

Stephen Denham

#46. I'm going to continue doing what I want to do. And if it means I want to go and make a big movie, if it has something to say, I will want to make it. I don't want to spend my life wasting my time. If it's a big movie, I want to do it. If it's a small movie, I want to do it.

Jake Gyllenhaal

#47. I love you, and I want you to be happy, I want you to have the life you deserve. And if that means ... if that means I have to stand here and watch you walk away, then I'll do it. I won't be happy about it. It'll break my heart. But ... if that's what you really need, then we're done.

Charles Sheehan-Miles

#48. It's not just that,' she said, trying to explain in a way he would understand. 'My life - any lady's life - is made up of morning calls, and musicales, and balls. I would be thrown out of society. No one would receive me or send invitations. That's what it means to be ruined.

Eloisa James

#49. What is the fire that burns in your heart? If you are lucky enough to discover it, than by all means fan the flames and let the fire be the guiding light for a life worth living.

Mary Lou Retton

#50. Worldly life means [state of continuous] agitation and uneasiness. What makes one like it, it is a wonder in itself!

Dada Bhagwan

#51. I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black; it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.

June Jordan

#52. Broadmindedness, when it means indifference to right and wrong, eventually ends in a hatred of what is right.

Fulton J. Sheen

#53. It is poetic and lyrical; words that spill forth like cool waters into the dusty dry rock bed of the Soul desiring love. It has been said that I've lived in the desert all my life and do not know what it means to be wet.

Sophia Rose

#54. Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.

Adam Gopnik

#55. The events of one's life take place, take place. How often have I used this expression, and how often have I stopped to think about what it means? Events do indeed take place, they have meaning in relation to things around them.

N. Scott Momaday

#56. Yet what each one does is by no means of little moment. The grass has to put forth all its energy to draw sustenance from the uttermost tips of its rootlets simply to grow where it is as grass; it does not vainly strive to become a banyan tree; and so the earth gains a lovely carpet of green.

Rabindranath Tagore

#57. You have come a long way, and you do not know it. You have a long way to do, and you do know what that means.

Idries Shah

#58. The Gospels and the rest of the New Testament reflect the life of Jesus, what it means for us & what it means for the world.

Philip Yancey

#59. I've never written a book with the intention of winning someone back or getting back at someone or anything like that. It's always just been about thinking about life and how relationships fit in to what life means.

Jeffrey Brown

#60. You've certainly mellowed out ... you used to be fun, full of life and emotion. Lust, Greed, Sloth, Gluttony, Envy, Wrath, and Pride. Of course, excessive want will destroy anyone, but those same desires are necessary to understand what it means to be human. Why did you rid yourself of them?

Hiromu Arakawa

#61. Bible study is the most essential ingredient in the believer's spiritual life, because it is only in study of the Bible as that is blessed by the Holy Spirit that Christians hear Christ and discover what it means to follow Him.

James Montgomery Boice

#62. To repent means to realize that the kind of life we are living is wrong and that we must adopt a completely new set of values. To that end, it involves two things. It involves sorrow for what we have been and it involves the resolve that by the grace of God we will be changed.

William Barclay

#63. This is what it means to be human "in the image of God." It means being free to make choices instead of doing whatever our instincts
would tell us to do. It means knowing that some choices are good, and others are bad, and it is our job to know the difference.

Harold S. Kushner

#64. I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.

Dorothy Allison

#65. The average person can look at someone in public life and say they have it all, but they might be struggling. Or you may think another person has more apparent challenges, but she's deeply grateful for her life. I don't think anyone can judge what having it all means for someone else.

Ivanka Trump

#66. There's something tragic in the fate of almost every person
it's just that the tragic is often concealed from a person by the banal surface of life ... A woman will complain of indigestion and not even know that what she means is that her whole life has been shattered.

Ivan Turgenev

#67. Becoming mature means learning to accept what you cannot change, facing unresolved sorrows and learning to love life as it really happens, not as you would have it happen.

Barbara Sher

#68. Thaddeus knew again what it felt like to be living a life that was totally out of control. Which is something a cancer diagnosis can do in an eye blink. You don't know what it means, you're threatened and scared to death, and you lack all the information you'll need to try to pull yourself

John Ellsworth

#69. The common problem, yours and mine, everyone's/Is not to fancy what were fair in life/Provided it could be - but finding first/What may be and how to make it fair up to our means.

Robert A. Caro

#70. You don't know what it means to live the life that you could have lived, if an event over which you have no control, an unforeseeable circumstance, had not distracted and diverted you, and at times crushed you, as has happened to me.

Luigi Pirandello

#71. But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll find out - and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out - what happened.

Ali Smith

#72. The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

Adam Gopnik

#73. You know when ubuntu is there, and it is obvious when it is absent. It has to do with what it means to be truly human, to know that you are bound up with others in the bundle of life.

Desmond Tutu

#74. The trouble with education is that we always read everything when we're too young to know what it means. And the trouble with life is that we're always too busy to re-read it later.

Margaret Ayer Barnes

#75. You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.

Richard Dawkins

#76. Friends disappear
or they are powerless.
This is what misfortune means
an acid test of friendship.
I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

Anne Carson

#77. I'm interested in everything about what it means to be a human being, so every role is an excuse to delve into a different way of life, a different socio-economic background, and a different tragic or comedic circumstance.

Rachelle Lefevre

#78. The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#79. Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognizes liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life.

B.R. Ambedkar

#80. How great musicians demonstrate a mutual respect and trust on the bandstand can alter your outlook on the world and enrich every aspect of your life, understanding what it means to be a global citizen in the most modern sense.

Wynton Marsalis

#81. He stared her right in the eyes. "Never . Nila, loving someone means you're willing to fight and die for them. That you'll be there with them no matter what life throws at you. Bring it on. Together, we'll be strong enough to face any future.

Kat Simons

#82. Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?

Alfred Hitchcock

#83. Get somebody else for Jesus Christ and you will get a new vision of life, a new vision of what it means.

Billy Sunday

#84. Various kinds of self-forgetting, usually accompanied by illusions and myths, make it possible to live without the intransigent facing of death-in the sense of always thinking about it and what it means for life and the things dear in life-which is characteristic of a serious life.

Allan Bloom

#85. Wherever you are, be there. If you can be fully present now, you'll know what it means to live.

Steve Goodier

#86. I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it means that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to.

Maya Angelou

#87. This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.

Barbara Kingsolver

#88. Leveraging your personal strengths means you will also need to become clearer about those strengths. It is easier to build on what you are already good at than start from your weaker areas. Take time to list down your strengths and reflect on them.

Archibald Marwizi

#89. I just have a more holistic sense of what it means to be for life, knowing that life does not just begin at conception and end at birth, and that if I am going to discourage abortion, I had better be ready to adopt some babies and care for some mothers.

Shane Claiborne

#90. Everyone takes a turn, and when it gets to me, I shout out what Jewish people say at times like this: "L'chaim!"

"It means 'to life,'" I explain. And as I say it, I think that maybe this is what I was saying a prayer for back in the cathedral. To life.

Gayle Forman

#91. We're married now. We're married.
You don't know when you're twenty-three.
You don't know what it really means to crawl into someone else's life and stay there. You can't see all the ways you're going to get tangled, how you're going to bond skin to skin.

Rainbow Rowell

#92. So I watch her work and put all her energy, all her force, all herself, all is inside her work. Does she think that this is what life means? She goes to work in the dark and comes home when it's dark. Does she know what the world looks like when the sun is shining?

Jinat Rehana Begum

#93. Ah, that's because you don't know what it's like to have faith. You've no idea how amusing and exciting life becomes when you do believe. All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant. It makes life so jolly, you know.

Aldous Huxley

#94. And I think that the ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn't mean anything. Which means you get to start early the work of figuring out what does mean something
David Foster Wallace

David Lipsky

#95. The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.

William James

#96. That's what it means to die, to not be able to stop looking at whatever's in front of you. Some darn thing placed directly there, with nothing you can do about it ...

Philip K. Dick

#97. I think transwomen, and transpeople in general, show everyone that you can define what it means to be a man or woman on your own terms. A lot of what feminism is about is moving outside of roles and moving outside of expectations of who and what you're supposed to be to live a more authentic life.

Laverne Cox

#98. Excellence means that you're prospering spiritually, mentally, physically and in every area of life. What does it mean to prosper? It means to do well, to have over and above, to walk in a high level with God. It means to be in a high class with God, where you can think like God and live like Him.

Chris Oyakhilome

#99. Each of us is born into this life with a light inside us... What's most important is to never let that light go out, because when you do, it means you've lost yourself to darkness. It means you've lost hope. And hope is what makes this world a beautiful place.

John Searles

#100. People who build their own home tend to be very courageous. These people are curious about life. They're thinking about what it means to live in a house, rather than just buying a commodity and making it work.

Tom Kundig