Top 100 Waking Life Quotes
#1. Doing a story about my mundane, waking life, how much I don't like my job, or breaking up with someone, I don't think so. Those stories don't interest me that much as a general thing.
Jim Woodring
#2. Something within me is waking from long sleep, and I want to live and move again. Some zest is returning to me, some immense gratefulness for those who love me, some strong wish to love them also. I am full of thanks for life. I have not told myself to be thankful. I am just so.
Alan Paton
#3. Those who have compared our life to a dream were right ... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep.
Michel De Montaigne
#4. We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.
Annie Dillard
#5. Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.
Meghan O'Rourke
#6. In nature nothing is at standstill, everything pulsates, appears and disappears. Heart, breath, digestion, sleep and waking - birth and death - everything comes and goes in waves. Rhythm, periodicity, harmonious alternation of extremes is the rule. No use rebelling against the very pattern of life.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
#7. How would it feel to live a full life and have no one remember it, to have no one remember the extraordinary things you accomplished, even if it was just waking up every day and finding the courage to get out of bed?
T.J. Klune
#8. Work and love these are the basics; waking life is a dream controlled.
George Santayana
#9. As the Western world has invested every aspect of its waking life with visual order, with procedures and spaces that are uniform, continuous and connected, it has progressively alienated itself from needful involvement in its subconscious life.
Marshall McLuhan
#10. People are waking up in their homes - without conferences. They're waking up because life is waking them up, not because of some conference called "Body and Soul."
Rachel Naomi Remen
#11. Do not fear death, fear sleeping without waking up instead.
ABC
#12. And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.
C.S. Lewis
#13. The waking have one world in common; sleepers have each a private world of his own.
Heraclitus
#14. In a life where waking hours are draped in the costume of horrid nightmare, where reality has suddenly become questionable, it's easy to be scared by dreams.
Scott Sigler
#15. Because if I'm going to spend at least seventy-five percent of my waking hours doing something, I want that something to have meaning. I am tired of wasting my time. I am starting to realize that I want my life to matter in every way that it can.
Julie Buxbaum
#16. The hemulen woke up slowly and recognised himself and wished he had been someone he didn't know.
Tove Jansson
#17. In this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a mother's first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet and growing time, a full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it for the most part spent out in the fresh air.
Charlotte Mason
#18. Life would again have to make superhuman efforts, "as in a battle," to break open for himself a path through the truths created by the sciences which "dream of being but cannot see it in waking reality.
Lev Shestov
#19. There is nothing like waking up at six in the morning and changing a baby's nappy to bring you face to face with life's reality.
Tony Blair
#20. The mystery of life
its inexplicability, beauty, cruelty, tenderness, folly ... has occupied the greater part of my waking thoughts; and in reverence or rage or irony, as the moment or situation might dictate, I have pondered and even demanded of cosmic energy to know Why.
Theodore Dreiser
#21. Imagine waking up and finding your first and last view of the world was a shotgun barrel. That'd be a hell of a life.
John Scalzi
#22. Waking up is not a selfish pursuit of happiness, it is a revolutionary stance, from the inside out, for the benefit of all beings in existence.
Noah Levine
#23. If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.
Ian McEwan
#24. Waking up and having a project to work on is one of life's great pleasures.
Kelly Reichardt
#25. The winners in life think constantly in terms of I can, I will, and I am. Losers, on the other hand, concentrate their waking thoughts on what they should have or would have done, or what they can't do.
Denis Waitley
#26. Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment any choice in life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries ... and never pass a waking hour without a book before me.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#27. I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?
Henry David Thoreau
#28. Her whole life had been a long and easy dream to lull her helplessly into this waking nightmare.
Stephen King
#29. Waking up in India is like waking up to life itself.
Reymond Page
#30. Waking up is not serious. It is a gentle remembering and an honoring of the present moment as the truth of life.
Leonard Jacobson
#31. As we travel again between life and death,
Waking and dream, blinking, while layers within layers,
None better, none worse, unravel and knit up before us ...
Jay Woodman
#32. She looked like she was waking up in a strange place - only she knew she hadn't gone to sleep yet, and that this was actually life.
David Levithan
#33. The alternatives in my life went through my mind. Unemployed, alone, despairing, watching daytime TV. That couldn't end well.
Or helping people, like genuinely making a difference. Imagine waking up and doing that every day?
Ruth Ahmed
#34. If you have a goal in life that takes a lot of energy, that requires a lot of work, that incurs a great deal of interest and that is a challenge to you, you will always look forward to waking up to see what the new day brings.
Susan Polis Schutz
#35. But our waking life, and our growing years, were for the most part spent in the kitchen, and until we married, or ran away, it was the common room we shared.
Laurie Lee
#36. God does not deal directly with man: it is by means of spirits that all the intercourse and communication of gods with men, both in waking life and in sleep, is carried on.
Socrates
#37. A good dream was something you clung to until the last moment before waking.
Veronica Rossi
#38. though I thought of him often, though he appeared in dreams from which I woke more excited than I was by anything in my waking life, I didn't regret what I had done. I had missed him, but more than missing him I had been relieved that he was gone.
Garth Greenwell
#39. We apologise for interrupting your life but we have an important message from our sponsors the Konichiwa collective software, it's a waking sub routine,
Steve Merrick
#40. Bedeviled, / human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words / that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled / among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.
Marie Howe
#41. In every waking moment, it is our next choice that makes us who we are.
Melissa McPhail
#42. There's nothing more uplifting like the joy of waking up every morning knowing your family is safe from the perils of our society".
Abdulazeez Henry Musa
#43. As for me, sleep was a country I no longer visited, despite my incantation. When I did, I wished for my waking life, the hours when I didn't see the nightmare images of all that had happened and all I had become.
Alice Hoffman
#44. I remembered a few things about waking. I remembered the sense of surprise as dream life and waking life swapped primacy, and the way in which the most tangible and deeply involving dreams could bleach entirely away.
Alex Garland
#45. At last awake from life, that insane dream we take for waking now.
Robert Browning
#46. Most people are either sleep walking through their waking life or wake walking through their sleeping life. either way they're not getting much out of it.
Waking Life
#47. I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance - a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it.
Edmund White
#48. When we shoot 'Scrubs' I spend every waking hour of my life in an abandoned and haunted hospital. All I can date there are ghosts and they tend to be horrible snugglers.
Zach Braff
#49. The human soul, provided it is pure and strong enough, can contact the unseen in waking life as well as in dreams: all that is required is withdrawal of the soul from the tumult of sensory life.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
#50. All the means we've been given to stay alert we use to ornament our sleep. If instead of endlessly inventing new ways to make life more comfortable we'd apply our ingenuity to fabricating instruments to jog man out of his torpor!
Rene Daumal
#51. Nothing seemed as scary as waking up at 40 and realizing that I had not lived a very courageous life.
Brit Marling
#52. Even if I spend every waking moment attempting to keep my life in balance, I'm going to fuck up. Having
Tyler Oakley
#53. My dreams are crowded with people, as though to compensate for the solitariness of my waking hours.
Anna Lyndsey
#54. We imagine that waking-life is real and that dream-life is unreal, but there does not seem to be any evidence for this belief.
Wei Wu Wei
#55. If I look at the one thorn that is in my side, of all my life, it is my weight. I fret about it, I'm anxious about it, being an actor on television - it drives me insane. It just seems to be something that plays a central part in waking up in the morning and thinking, 'How am I with myself today?'
Deborah Mailman
#56. I thrive on being on the road, waking up in a different place every day and having my life revolve around music. When you walk out in front of 300,000 people and pull it off, it validates you.
Sheryl Crow
#57. People who pay attention to their lives, watch for clues from their dreams, and then make adjustments in waking life based on the information in dreams, can follow the highest path in the direction that their lives are ultimately meant to go.
Teresa DeCicco
#58. Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#59. As soon as something stops being fun, I think it's time to move on. Life is too short to be unhappy. Waking up stressed and miserable is not a good way to live.
Richard Branson
#60. Life is'nt about getting everything you want the instant you want it.Some thing are worth waiting for.
Mira Lyn Kelly
#61. Nobody knows what either sleep or waking consciousness is, even though these two have long been seen as the two sides of being: part of life's unvarying diurnal rhythm.
Siri Hustvedt
#62. It is obviously possible that what we call waking life may only be an unusual and persistent nightmare.
Bertrand Russell
#63. When we dream, we create. All of life is a dream or a series of waking dreams. We dream our surroundings. We dream our friends, our relations. We dream our bodies. We dream our dreams.
Frederick Lenz
#64. I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing about.
Paul Theroux
#65. Hope to sin only in the service of waking up.
Alice Walker
#66. I love Derrick Brown for the surprise of one word waking up next to another. One moment tender, funny or romantic, the next, visceral, ironic and relevatory-here is the full chaos of life. An amazing talent.
Janet Fitch
#67. When darkness fell, he told me to close my eyes and dream, for in my dreams I would find another world, and in my waking life I would soon enough find such a world as well ...
Alice Hoffman
#68. Experience in itself wasn't enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I'd missed it.
Sarah Manguso
#69. Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life.
Wendell Berry
#70. The half hour between waking and rising has all my life proved propitious to any task which was exercising my invention ... It was always when I first opened my eyes that the desired ideas thronged upon me.
Walter Scott
#71. By exposing the hidden dream-thoughts, we have confirmed in general that the dream does continue the motivation and interests of waking life, for dream-thoughts are engaged only with what seems to be important and of great interest to us.
Sigmund Freud
#72. I just love life. I'm excited about things in life. I think that if you're excited about life, you are excited about waking up and doing things with your life every day.
Salma Hayek
#73. Waking At Night
The blue river is grey at morning
and evening. There is twilight
at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark
wondering if this quiet in me now
is a beginning or an end.
Jack Gilbert
#74. Adversity had not only ruined him, it had frightened him, and he was evidently going through his remnant of life on tiptoe, for fear of waking up the hostile fates.
Henry James
#75. I can very much relate to waking up inside of your life and saying to yourself, "How did I get here?"
Sara Bareilles
#76. There are not enough words in the English language to describe the experience of this. Death is more than life. Humans put their animals "to sleep" when it's really waking them up. Everybody has it all backwards.
Kate McGahan
#77. I had been a writer all of my life, every waking second, and now that part of my life was over. I suppose the truth was that I had never put myself forward as a writer, I didn't like the idea of the 'professional writer'; I just wanted to write. But that was not how the world worked...
Bonnie Greer
#78. It means that every waking breath you take, every step you take, you don't just take to move your own life forward, but ours. You take it knowing I'm right there with you, irrevocably tied to every decision you make.
Meredith Wild
#79. They take little interest in waking life, choosing to lie most of the time in death-like sleep." "Then
Robert E. Howard
#80. Through dreams a door is opened to mythology, since myths are of the nature of dreams, and that, as dreams arise from an inward world unknown to waking consciousness, so do myths: so, indeed, does life.
Joseph Campbell
#81. And also, where an outstretched hand is no longer a gesture but a moment of love, lasting until sleep, until waking, until everyday life.
Kim Thuy
#82. Tell me, what's the most valuable thing anyone can ever have? It's your life, isn't it? But you can hold on to it as tightly as you can for every waking hour, and you'll still have to let it go when the time comes, won't you?
Ge Fei
#83. He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.
William Golding
#84. Dreams on waking were like empty cocoons of moths or the split-open husks of milkweed pods, dead shells where life had briefly swirled in furious but fragile storm-systems.
Stephen King
#86. There was no moment of life, no waking from a darkness to find myself cured in that place. Rather there was slow shuffling towards comprehension, a few hours of recollection follow by a sleep, followed by a waking which stayed awake a little longer.
Claire North
#87. In the same way your life is the continuity of standing up, sitting down, laughing, sleeping, waking up, drinking, eating, and, of course, being born and dying. That is the continuity of the whole universe.
Yamada Koun
#88. There are nights when dreams are so vivid it's impossible to believe that they aren't really a part of your waking life. Your
Leigh Raines
#89. Lucretius and Cicero testify to the view that people dream about the things that concern them in waking life.
Sigmund Freud
#90. Okay. Parachuting on its own? Maybe not so terrifying. Parachuting into a Mexican jungle at night while strapped to an angry Uchben man named Brutus? An unimaginable nightmare that would haunt my every waking moment for the rest of my life.
Mimi Jean Pamfiloff
#91. Caldwell speaks in the dry, inflectionless tone of a lecturer, but her expression hardens as she stares down at the thing that is both her nemesis and the focal point of her waking life. "If
M.R. Carey
#92. Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.
Cormac McCarthy
#93. Making something secret makes it too important, elevates it to the point where it runs your life from the shadows. If you hide what's at your core from other people for too long, sooner or later you end up hiding it from yourself and waking up with no idea of who you are.
Michael Marshall Smith
#94. Consciousness is the chronic pain of life, and all higher organisms suffer it every waking moment.
David Marusek
#95. Our dreams are firsthand creations, rather than residues of waking life. We have the capacity for infinite creativity; at least while dreaming, we partake of the power of the Spirit, the infinite Godhead that creates the cosmos.
Jackie Gleason
#97. I think that dying is the easy part of life; for in waking each day and living in every moment, therein lies the challenge
Jeremy Aldana
#98. And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?
Don DeLillo
#99. Because he's three thousand times the human being you'll ever be,' said Alec. 'Now get out of here before I risk his life by waking him up so he can turn you into a garbage fire. Something that would match your personality.'
'Oh!', said Zara. 'So rude!
Cassandra Clare
#100. Dreams and waking life are both the same kinds of things. The difference is that dreaming is perceiving free of external constraints, whereas perceiving otherwise is dreaming true. Meaning what you dream about actually happens.
Stephen LaBerge
