Quotes About Sense Of Life

#1. The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.

Nadine Gordimer

#2. Truth, terrible truth! It is like an ancient curse, from which there is no escape. The truth will drive one mad. Yet without it, how can one make sense of life's madness?

Maryrose Wood

#3. I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.

Ayn Rand

#4. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.

Julian Barnes

#5. Science is a matter of adjusting language to explain material reality. Art is a matter of adjusting material reality to create a sense of life.

Walter Darby Bannard

#6. The only way for us to make sense of life today is to appreciate where the future is going. Scripture outlines that future, not with detailed dates, but with a general outline of what is to come. That outline is designed not to have us prepare charts, but to prepare our hearts.

Darrell Bock

#7. I believe it is impossible to make sense of life in this world except through art.

Daniel Pinkwater

#8. Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

Nadine Gordimer

#9. As a general rule, the less one's sense of life fulfillment, the greater one's death anxiety.

Irvin D. Yalom

#10. A critical discourse that had respect for the mystery of art would look to the sense of life which finds expression in paradox, metaphor, tautology, and syntax.

Denis Donoghue

#11. You become so overwhelmed by your life situation that you lose your sense of life, of Being. Or you are carrying in your mind the insane burden of a hundred things that you will or may have to do in the future instead of focusing your attention on the one thing that you can do now.

Eckhart Tolle

#12. Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live.

Leo Tolstoy

#13. The underlying purpose of all art is to create patterns of imagery which somehow convey a sense of life set in a framework of order ... all great art ... harmonises consciousness with the ego-transcending Self.

Christopher Booker

#14. We live in the best of worlds. But still, it's like we've lost something on the way to here: a sense of life. I can't know for sure, I might be the only one who's lost it. Maybe everybody else is living the now, thinking they're having it well. Anyhow, that motivated me to write the books.

Karl Ove Knausgard

#15. Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us.

Walter Pater

#16. Science works as a way to make sense of life and the universe. Hard SF as my preferred fictional genre just feels natural.

Edward M. Lerner

#17. I try to make sense of life. I try to keep myself open to people and to laughter and to love and to have faith.

Thea Bowman

#18. We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being. And everything that has not been born can still be brought to life if we are not satisfied to remain mere recording organisms.

Antonin Artaud

#19. I had learnt to seek intensity rather than happiness, not joys and prosperity but more of life, a concentrated sense of life, a strengthened feeling of existence, fullness and concentration of pulse, energy, growth, flowering, beyond the image of happiness or unhappiness.

Nina Berberova

#20. God is life; and in that life which is God there are no years ... The human sense of life is not your real life.

Joel S. Goldsmith

#21. Having reshaped my words with an intensity of feeling I had not known before, I could not understand why others were not overcome with my sense of life, of sex, and of sadness.

Norman Mailer

#22. I had learnt to seek intensity - more of life, a concentrated sense of life.

Nina Berberova

#23. Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.

James Baldwin

#24. She had a distressing sense of life's rushing by before she had a chance to fully make up her mind in which direction she wanted to go.

Hila Colman

#25. A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves, when we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves

Irvin D. Yalom

#26. Trivial participation ultimately bores you, leaves behind a sense of shallowness, contributes little to your deeper sense of life. Significant participation, on the other hand, engages you, enthralls and satisfies you, it contributes to the meaning of your life

Henryk Skolimowski

#27. I was born fussy, liked cleanness and orderliness about me and had already been thrown too much into the midst of shiftlessness. The socialists and communists I had seen and heard talk nearly all struck me as men who had no sense of life at all.

Sherwood Anderson

#28. In the theater you create a moment, but in that moment, there is a touch, a twinkle of eternity. And not just eternity, but community ... That connection is a sense of life for me.

Edward Teller

#29. My younger sister Debby had died of cancer, which started me writing - the sense of life being short. Cancer focuses your mind.

Meg Rosoff

#30. We should learn and reflect to the best of our capacity, but when we reach a point where we are unable to make
sense of life, we should supplant faith for understanding, and reflect again on what we do know.

Baal Shem Tov

#31. There seemed a deep sense of life and joy about all; and although no airs blew from out the Heavens, yet everything had motion through the gentle sweepings to and fro of innumberable butterflies, that might have been mistaken for tullips with wings.

Edgar Allan Poe

#32. I can see no other reason for the existence of art and poetry and religion except as they tend to restore in us a freshness of vision and more emotional glamour and more vital sense of life.

Lin Yutang

#33. In that weekly ecstatic keeping of faith and bearing of witness, Delia fell in love with singing. Singing was something that might make sense of a person. Singing might make more sense of life than living had to start with.

Richard Powers

#34. The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others.

Edward Abbey

#35. I don't try to make sense of suffering. I try to make sense of life...I try each day to see God's will...I console myself with the old Negro spiritual, 'Sooner will be done the troubles of this world. I'm going home to live with God.

Thea Bowman

#36. The human passions transform man from a mere thing into a hero, into a being that in spite of tremendous handicaps tries to make sense of life.

Erich Fromm

#37. Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#38. One has to be at least as ancient as I am now to see that if you try to make sense of life, if you look for patterns and meaning, not only are you bound to be disappointed, you are likely to waste a good deal of precious time.

Andrew Levkoff

#39. There stirred behind her face a sense of life and purpose and mirth and caring that made her seem to be in motion even as she was still. There was a kind of rhythm to her, even in motionless repose. I said, "Energy contained by grace, maybe.

Robert B. Parker

#40. There are two aspects of man's existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art.

Ayn Rand

#41. Compassion begins with the acknowledgment of the single inescapable truth that is the foundation for the possibility of love between human beings - an awareness of the tragic sense of life.

Sam Keen

#42. Dissecting a book was the same as making sense of life. You have to find a way to interpret life, or you'll go nuts.

Susan Meissner

#43. I liked stories. I liked the way they had the power to make sense of life.

Candi Sary

#44. There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with.

Chuck Palahniuk

#45. Writing is making sense of life.

Nadine Gordimer

#46. Becoming a parent gives you access to a whole world of feeling. It gives you a much stronger sense of life and death: becoming a father made me realise my own mortality.

Laurence Fox

#47. Depression is an illness that robs one of the meaning of life. Heal the illness. As the depression heals, enthusiasm, well-being, and a sense of life's purpose will return.

Peter McWilliams

#48. As the gift of the Creator, natural healing power is ours. That's why no special method is needed for recovering it. There are no perfect methods, no matter how effective or powerful they may be. What is perfect is our sense of life itself.

Ilchi Lee

#49. I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying.

Jasper Johns

#50. A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.

E. M. Forster

#51. In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps,
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures.

Philip Larkin

#52. Love is a response to values. It is with a person's sense of life that one falls in love - with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality.

Ayn Rand

#53. It's as if the universe has a sense of humor, since at a deep level it's impossible not to lead a spiritual life ...
the universe is living through you at this moment. with or without belief in god, the chain of events leading from silent awareness to physical reality remains intact.

Deepak Chopra

#54. As for him "feeling dead", that's probably just a consequence of him being gone from your life for so long. In some sense he no longer feels real to you.

Paula Hawkins

#55. He didn't lead anyone on, or make any promises. Instead he conveyed a sense of calm and equanimity, like a man who had banished from his life all superfluous sentiment, all longings and all patience for the nonessential. He was like Yoda, Buddha and the Gladiator all rolled into one.

Michael Robotham

#56. What I have learned from my own experience is that the most important ingredients in a child's education are curiosity, interest, imagination, and a sense of the adventure of life.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#57. Again and again, I learn how much friendship enriches my life, bringing warmth, assurance, humour, inspiration, a sense of security. It depends on honesty, trust, loyalty. It's about giving. It's for sharing the good times, but also the tough times, hurt, grief, sadness.

Quentin Bryce

#58. I was able to shoot a movie like 'Tree of Life' because I had done 'Y Tu Mama Tambien.' The camera needed to capture that sense of freedom and joy and life you have when you're young.

Emmanuel Lubezki

#59. Not only in running but in much of life is a sense of balance and proportion necessary.

Clarence DeMar

#60. In a sense,' Foucault concluded with a flourish, 'all the rest of my life I've been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys.

James Miller

#61. As the child once fantasized that its wishes governed the world, and the youth fantasized that heroism could manage to do it all, so the person in the second half of life is obliged to come to a more sober wisdom based on a humbled sense of personal limitations and the inscrutability of the world.

James Hollis

#62. I didn't know my Dad - he moved out early. And my mom's politics were kind of hardscrabble. She didn't think about Democrats or Republicans. She thought about who made sense. I've been both in my life.

Dennis Miller

#63. My life isn't theories and formulae. It's part instinct, part common sense. Logic is as good a word as any, and I've absorbed what logic I have from everything and everyone ... from my mother, from training as a ballet dancer, from Vogue magazine, from the laws of life and health and nature.

Audrey Hepburn

#64. Life is full of disparate details arbitrarily joined together by dreams, pain and yearning. I do not long for sense, but I call for emotion and imagination amidst this chaos.

Juhani Peltonen

#65. There is something within our biological structure that screams out and says it is morally wrong for the old to outlive the young. This is one of the times when God doesn't seem to make sense. This is the worst that life gets.

Rick Atkinson

#66. Life was not so horrible if it was meaningless, and he faced it with a strange sense of power. CIX

W. Somerset Maugham

#67. Step forward out of your own lingering residual sense of smallness, take up every inch of life that is your blessed inheritance, and DO YOUR THING.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#68. This doesn't make sense."
"I know," Kylie said. "And that seems to be the theme song of my life right now. Not a damn thing makes sense.

C.C. Hunter

#69. A solicitor had looked up at the sky, swept blue by the wind, and had a sudden sense of religious consolation, a feeling that this life cannot possibly be all, and that it is not possible for consciousness to end with the end of life.

John Lanchester

#70. I'm not a fan of plastic surgery. Oh, and I've never had a wax in my life. Waxing makes no sense to me because you have to grow it out to wax it.

Elizabeth Banks

#71. I've been a foodie most of my life. I started when I lived for a year in Germany in my early 20s, and here was this new food environment, and I decided I needed to make sense of it. And I found it was the rules of economics that do the best job. Food is a capitalist product of supply and demand.

Tyler Cowen

#72. Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy
of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step toward humanity.

Arthur C. Clarke

#73. I do feel like I have always, in my life, been inclined to be on the outside, walk a different path or something. Because of that, and increasingly over the years, my sense of distance from mainstream society or from the way culture works, I have a different kind of perception of it.

Ian MacKaye

#74. The only way to make sense of the world is to accept the fact that it absolutely makes no sense.

Lourd De Veyra

#75. For many of us, water simply flows from a faucet, and we think little about it beyond this point of contact. We have lost a sense of respect for the wild river, for the complex workings of a wetland, for the intricate web of life that water supports.

Sandra Postel

#76. If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.

Terry Eagleton

#77. It was inevitable for people to try to create a sense of normalcy in a place where nothing was normal. It helped one get through the day, to add predictability to a life that was inherently unpredictable.

Nicholas Sparks

#78. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute

Atul Gawande

#79. We the Living is not a novel 'about Soviet Russia.' It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life - using the word 'sanctity' not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of 'supreme value.'

Ayn Rand

#80. Barometer of success in later life is not that they always win, but how they deal with failure. An ability to pick themselves up when they fall, retaining their optimism and sense of self, is a far greater predictor of future success than class position in Year 3.

Helen Fielding

#81. Life is droll. It has no common sense. It is the game of a mountebank.

William John Locke

#82. Mastery of impulse is achieved through taking pauses during life's contrasting situations. Mastery of impulse is about developing strong willpower that can be used to redirect the flow of energy in any situation. Mastery of impulse is about responding to the world with a sense of reason and peace.

Alaric Hutchinson

#83. Our life depends on others so much that at the root of our existence is a fundamental need for love. That is why it is good to cultivate an authentic sense of responsibility and concern for the welfare of others.

Dalai Lama

#84. In its most fundamental sense, execution is a systematic way of exposing reality and acting on it. Most companies don't face reality very well ... Realism is the heart of execution, but many organizations are full of people who are trying to avoid or shade reality. Why? It makes life uncomfortable.

Lawrence Bossidy

#85. Men of sense esteem wealth to be the assimilation of nature to themselves, the converting of the sap and juices of the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their design.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#86. Because that's what you do when something terrible happens. You go over and over every little thing, looking for clues, trying to find a pattern and a way to make sense out of the muddle and hurt.

Julia Green

#87. We are always alone. We are never alone. Even in the center of a crowd of friends , we cannot escape our apartness; even in the locked and darkened room, we cannot cut ourselves off from our sense of the life going on outside.

Lester M. Schulman

#88. You have to have the service mentality in the sense that you subjugate your own ego, and you subjugate a large part of your own life to really helping other people, being successful on their behalf.

Herb Kelleher

#89. We all play God every day. When a woman buys a new pair of expensive shoes, she could have spent that same money feeding someone who was starving. In a sense, those shoes mean more to her than a life. We all kill to make our lives more comfortable. We don't put it in those terms. But we do.

Harlan Coben

#90. No one's life made sense on paper. You cannot condense a person into facts.

Rivera Sun

#91. A look into the Human Mind..of how we perceive..How can we see beauty in and around us..Not the correction of evil or pursuit of the virtuous..BUT..pleasure that resides in the Sense of Self !! A Self living in a state of 'nothingness' and beauty as it lies there..from that place! Simple and Deft

Abha Maryada Banerjee

#92. Our choices in life are made according to our sense of our own worth.

Kaylan Pickford

#93. A sense of humor saves your life, and being able to make friends wherever you go.

Jason O'Mara

#94. I'm a great admirer of Primo Levi's work. It's always mind-boggling, the idea of how much pain people can endure and still come back from the edge with a sense of humor, with this tremendous animal desire we have to get on with life.

Allan Gurganus

#95. The old who refuse to die merely on principle live on forever, to hate life and complain of all the things they could have been spared had they the good sense to die young.

Michelle Franklin

#96. So long as you have courage and a sense of humor, it is never too late to start life afresh.

Freeman Dyson

#97. I have my husband and children near me in Rome, and I feel this is where we are temporarily belonging. But personally, all my life, I have felt the absence of a sense of history.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#98. Without danger I cannot be great. That is how I pay for Abel's blood. Danger and fear follow my steps everywhere. Without them courage would have no sense. And it is courage, courage, courage that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor.

George Bernard Shaw

#99. We are created with life's inherent sense of order and urge to thrive.

Deborah Sandella

#100. The observant Jew has his own sense of values. Torah Judaism is his blueprint for this life, his target for existence.

Meir Kahane