Quotes About Living Our Own Lives

#1. Good fiction reveals feeling, refines events, locates importance and, though its methods are as mysterious as they are varied, intensifies the experience of living our own lives.

Vincent Canby

#2. Without differentiating from parents or caretakers we may never succeed in living our own lives.

Lisa Firestone

#3. What I discovered all over Ireland is that people living simple lives by the sea or in the remote countryside seem a lot calmer than city folk with their iPads and their Android phones.

James Nesbitt

#4. Living for God's glory is the greatest achievement we can accomplish with our lives.

Rick Warren

#5. Americans are opting out of public venues like the playground and the sidewalk for private venues like the healthclub and the mall. We're living our lives inside one form of corporation or another.

Robert D. Kaplan

#6. One solitary God-centered, God-intoxicated man can do more to keep God's love alive and His presence felt in the world than a thousand half-hearted, talkative busy men living frightened, fragmented lives of quiet desperation.

Robert McNamara

#7. I realized that most people waste their lives earning a living, and I wanted to live. I love painting, so I keep painting. That's how I became an artist.

Pierre Soulages

#8. Life is a great asset we must all endeavor to acquire, keep and daily maintain it well with all due diligence, for without life, all other assets have no real meaning to our lives.

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#9. Then that's what the Northern Lights are. All the lives that we're not living.

Adi Alsaid

#10. Often our students see nothing about religious faith except the lowest common denominator. They see nothing but TV evangelists and fools, and it doesn't occur to them that intelligent people might find this religious business worth living their lives by.

Doris Betts

#11. Hope Lives Here. Even Here.

Cynthia Ruchti

#12. Everyone lives the way she knows best. What I mean by 'their happiness' is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone. That's not a bad thing.

Banana Yoshimoto

#13. We are only living truly human lives just so far as we are labouring to keep God's commandments; no further.

J.I. Packer

#14. Deep down, most humans prefer living out their lives surrounded by comfortable certainties, guided by warm myths and metaphors, knowing that they'll understand their children, and their children will understand them.

David Brin

#15. It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living.

Guy De Maupassant

#16. Seems to me there's not much time to read about other people's lives and live your own while you're at it. If I have to choose, and I reckon I do, I'll choose living my own life over reading summat about someone else's.

Sophie Hannah

#17. The big trunk of the umbrella pine looms outside the window, living its two lives - the upper world of needles and stems, the lower world of roots and soil.

Anthony Doerr

#18. She said that everything that disappeared from our side went over to theirs, where they kept living normal lives, waiting for the things still lingering with us to join them, and make the world whole once more.

Alexandra Kleeman

#19. We are frightfully concerned with our own deaths, sometimes so much so that we forget the real purpose of our lives

Brian L. Weiss

#20. We'd cry great waves of love and rage for this young woman, whose resistance made our own lives look empty as nadless ball sacks and sewed-up dry cunts, a girl-woman whose body was in defiance of over stab at "living" we took and failed on a daily basis.

Lidia Yuknavitch

#21. When we recognise that unity of all living things, then at once arises the question - how can we support this life of ours with least injury to the lives around us; how can we prevent our own life adding to the suffering of the world in which we live?

Annie Besant

#22. There's too much judgment out there. Really what we need to be doing is just all of us finding our own paths towards living the best lives we can live as clearly and boldly in accordance with our own personal values. And that's what I'm trying to do.

Cory Booker

#23. The more we are focused on controlling and changing others, the more unmanageable our life becomes. The more we focus on living our own life, the more we have a life to live, and the more manageable our life will become.

Melody Beattie

#24. I believe that our lives, just like fairy tales - the stories that have been written by us humans, through our own experiences of living - will always have a Hero and a Heroine, a Fairy Godmother and a Wicked Witch.

Lucinda Riley

#25. Authentic Christian living has its own order of priority in our lives: God first, others second, self third.

Billy Graham

#26. Work, it seems, was never meant to be something we do just to make a living. It was meant to be a means of making a difference - in our own lives and in the lives of others.

Jeff Goins

#27. Each one of us matters, has a role to play, and makes a difference. Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other.

Jane Goodall

#28. The greatest thing we can do to be closer to our own lives and to the freshness of living is to open up again.

Mark Nepo

#29. We ordinary people must forge our own beauty. We must set fire to the greyness of our labor with the art of our own lives ... What is the essence of this art of living? Of course, even this art should have beauty as its essence.

Kenji Miyazawa

#30. The thing is, we [celebrities are] all just people living our lives, doing our thing. But, I honestly tend to live in my own little world, and am blissfully unaware of so much.

Chris French

#31. Every individual, like a statue, develops in his life the laws of harmony, integrity, and freedom; or those of deformity, immorality, and bondage. Whether we wish to or not, we are all drawing our own pictures in the lives we are living ...

Harriot Kezia Hunt

#32. It's not fair. It's not our fault. We have no say in our own lives. We're living a fairy tale someone else wrote.

Melissa De La Cruz

#33. It does not matter if we are forgotten; what matters is the effect we have on those around us and those who come after us. What matters is how our own lives affect the larger, perpetual community of the living.

Lynn Schooler

#34. As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine.

Tim Wu

#35. There's a convention that one doesn't speak ill of the dead. That's stupid, I think. The truth's always the truth. On the whole it's better to keep your mouth shut about living people. You might conceivably injure them. The dead are past that. But the harm they've done lives after them sometimes.

Agatha Christie

#36. If it is awakened, it communicates a new life to the intelligence in which it lives, so that it becomes a living awareness of itself: and this awareness is not so much something that we ourselves have, as something that we are. It is a new and indefinable quality of our living being.

Thomas Merton

#37. If you have a problem with people living their lives and being authentically who they are, you really should go and do some soul-searching.

Laverne Cox

#38. What is the biggest thing that stops people from living their lives in the present moment? Fear - and we must learn how to overcome fear.

Brian Weiss

#39. You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be.

Douglas Coupland

#40. Human beings going to their jobs and living their lives are unconscious. They don't know what's going on. They don't know why you are born or why you die.

Frederick Lenz

#41. Be happy that after living so many lives, I finally found something to die for

Stephenie Meyer

#42. Although a man may wear fine clothing, if he lives peacefully; and is good, self-possessed, has faith and is pure; and if he does not hurt any living being, he is a holy man.

Denis Diderot

#43. So many broken children living in grown bodies mimicking adult lives.

Ijeoma Umebinyuo

#44. We are such spendthrifts with our lives, the trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I'm not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.

Paul Newman

#45. The real mystery of marriage is not that husband and wife love each other so much that they can recognize God in each other's lives, but more because God loves them so much that they can discover each other more and more as living reminder's of God's presence.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

#46. People talk about 'lives of significance'-as if there's an alternative. If you're not leading a life of significance, you're not living.

Andrew Williams

#47. The living are always trying to find the shortcuts to happiness in life. But look what happens when someone achieves premature success: they bloom too early and spend the rest of their lives dying....Success without struggle warps a person.

Susan Wells Bennett

#48. That's a really good question - what is it like living with a writer? I guess it depends on the writer. You know what? They live in a fantasy world a lot of the time. My husband lives in a fantasy world.

Rene Russo

#49. Never let them see your fear ... it's rule number one. And it's not that I'm afraid. No, I'm not.
I don't fear death.
I've already died too many times before.
I'm a cat with nine lives and I'm already on number twelve. I'm living on borrowed time. When death wants to take me, it'll take me.

J.M. Darhower

#50. People with disabilities not only need to be given lives, they need to be given lives worth living. (paraphrased, not a direct quote))

Helen Keller

#51. As long as I have work then I'm not going to die, cause work is a living spirit in me - that which wants to connect with other people and pass on something to them which they can use in their own lives and grow from.

Marlon Riggs

#52. We desperately want to believe in something. To simply live out our lives believing in nothing is to live as if this thing we call life is filled with nothing but nothing.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#53. What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent with the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.

Christian Wiman

#54. We survived. You and I. And those who survive have a duty. Our duty is to do our best to keep on living. Even if our lives are not perfect.

Haruki Murakami

#55. One must simply take the days of their lives as they happen. If you spend time worrying over what is to come, which may or may not happen, then you will only be wasting precious days you will wish in the future you could have cherished a bit longer.

R.J. Gonzales

#56. People who spend their lives like to go to parties and cinemas, sit at home and watch movies, TV Series, TV dramas, etc.They think this is life. But it is spending life not living life.

Sunday Adelaja

#57. There are a lot of people who had past lives where they were monks and nuns and all their needs were provided for them. I feel like most people in the new age had this as their most recent lifetime experience, that kind of communal living.

Doreen Virtue

#58. While the Christian message is increasingly becoming less acceptable in fashionable society, we must be always living according to Scripture and prepared to be apologists for Jesus Christ in all aspects of our lives.

Jonathan Falwell

#59. It is a rare American who does not have some story about how music has made our lives richer and more interesting, how it has changed our moods, brought out the best in our character and even sometimes helped us earn a living.

Lamar Alexander

#60. We spend half of our lives preparing to live-instead of just living.

Leah Newman Fredrichs

#61. when the uncertainty is known, certainty is guaranteed. Until we unravel the uncertainties of our lives, we shall always be uncertain with the life we live

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#62. The guard rails on a highway may restrict some folks from driving the way they want, but those rules mostly end up saving the lives of those other drivers who understand that living in a society means behaving in a commonly beneficial way.

Steven Weber

#63. ABYSS
Our country lives
Among the dead
And dies among the living
Sometimes.

Visar Zhiti

#64. It was hard when I knew I was about to be flooded with memories of a life I hadn't lived yet. Really, two lives I hadn't lived yet.

Kasie West

#65. The end comes to all of us ... but the end comes quicker to those who do not live their lives as they choose. If your life is not your own, then in what way is it living?

Christopher John Farley

#66. They are the living dead and we have many of those among us, spending their days whining and complaining and never making any attempt to change their lives for the better.

Og Mandino