Top 100 We The Living Quotes
#1. 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
#2. We live in a world that treats the dead better than the living. We, the living are askers of questions and givers of answers, and we have other grave defects unpardonable by a system that believes death, like money, improves people.
Eduardo Galeano
#3. The spirits of the dead are all around us, but it is we, the living, that are the true hungry ghosts.
John Dolan
#4. We, the living, must find what space we can alongside them; the giant dead whom we cannot tie down, though we grasp at their hair, though we rope them while they sleep
Salman Rushdie
#5. We the living, should not think of the dead as lonely because if they could speak to us, they would say: "Do not weep for me, earth was not my true country, I was an alien there: I am at Home where everyone comes."
Helen Keller
#6. I have to acknowledge that the sea is a cup of death, and the land is a stained altar stone. We the living are survivors huddled on flotsam, living on jetsam. We are escapees. We wake in terror, eat in hunger, sleep with a mouth full of blood.
Annie Dillard
#7. We create our own reality. The blessing (or problem) with this is that when one creates one's own reality, one must live it! Are you living a blessing or is it a curse?
Gary R. Ryan
#8. The tragic irony in all of this is that when we focus so strongly on our need to get better, we actually get worse.
Tullian Tchividjian
#9. 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
#10. The vision is not to see things just as we have imagined them to be. The vision is the freedom to live deliberately every day and that is a simply a choice.
Colleen Mariotti
#11. Most people talk; we do things. They plan; we achieve. They hesitate; we move ahead. We are living proof that when human beings have the courage and commitment to transform a dream into reality, there is nothing that can stop them.
Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum
#13. Most of us are busy gambling on the most dangerous risk of all - living our whole life not doing what we want on the bet that we can buy the freedom to do it later.
Jake Ducey
#14. As a people, we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body.
Lewis Thomas
#15. Even if language is a living evolving organism, we don't have to embrace all the changes that occur during our lifetimes. If language is so alive, it can get sick.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
#16. Social power is the power over nature, the living standards achieved by men in mutual exchange. State power, as we have seen, is the coercive and parasitic seizure of this production - a draining of the fruits of society for the benefit of nonproductive (actually antiproductive) rulers.
Murray N. Rothbard
#17. I'm not good at living in the grim places ... when we did Gatsby, I lived in Claridges, that's where I wanted to live. I can't live in grimness and then go play a classy human being.
Bruce Dern
#18. Like Venice, Italy, this is a place of fleeting beauty. The knowledge that we won't be here long gives everyone an intense appetite for living.
Andrei Codrescu
#19. The only living language is the language in which we think and have our being.
Antonio Machado
#20. And with all of the enemy's citizens living at the bottom of huge gravity wells, we don't even have to aim particularly well. Einstein was right. We will be fighting the next war with rocks. But the Belt has rocks that will turn the surface of Mars into a molten sea.
James S.A. Corey
#21. Most of us, as we grow older, become frightened; we are afraid of living, afraid of losing a job, afraid of tradition, afraid of what the neighbours, or what the wife or husband would say, afraid of death. Most of us have fear in one form or another; and where there is fear there is no intelligence.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#22. A lot of youth today have become very narrow and conservative in a way, whereas we in the older generation are kind of living it.
Marc Almond
#23. The reason some people put on a mask is not in their blood but it is in their fear that we judge them too soon.
Ameya Agrawal
#24. 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
#25. There seems to be no mainframe explanation for the PC world in which we're living.
William J. Clinton
#26. The souls of all are from one and the same source but a soul which is unveiled shines out. Love and light come continually from such souls. We need no proof of it for it is living all else is dead in comparison.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#27. But the dream of something unlikely has its own special name. We call it hope.
Jostein Gaarder
#28. Doesn't the expansiveness of this make you think of the good Lord? Except we know the ocean ends while He goes on forever.
Mindy Starns Clark
#29. We are living in a time of uncertainty, anxiety, fear, and despair. It is essential that you become aware of the light, power, and strength within each of you, and that you learn to use those inner resources in service of your own and others' growth.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#30. Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun ... But underneath they feed a hunger for justice ... you offer to divert them, and you show them by stealth the orderly world in which we should all try to be living.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#31. If we are to be aware of life while we are living it, we must have the courage to relinquish our hard-earned control of ourselves.
Madeleine L'Engle
#32. I am a very radical person - as radical now as I was when I was younger. So my books all have in common my search for understanding of the terrible world we are living in and ways to change it.
Henning Mankell
#33. Native Americans are not and must not be props in a sort of theme park of the past, where we go to have a good time and see exotic cultures. "What we have done to the peoples who were living in North America" is, according to anthropologist Sol Tax, "our Original Sin.
James W. Loewen
#34. Carter is doing a high-wire act over a cesspool, preaching all the way. Sinclair Lewis, thou shouldst be living in this hour. We have a Warren Harding impersonating Elmer Gantry.
Jimmy Carter
#35. When we understand the illusory nature of life and the profound power of eternal love, which enables us to create miracles and experience the presence of our deceased loved ones, we find ourselves living with joy, hope and peace.
Susan Barbara Apollon
#36. As we trust the Lord, we start "emptying" ourselves with things that tie us or entangle us in order to be filled by God's grace and the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way.
Yilda B. Rivera
#37. Singers provide all the proof that we have souls.
J.R. Rim
#38. There is only this world and that numbing routines and brief squabbles and financial worries are an essential part of it, that in spite of the aches and boredomes and disappointments, living in this world is the closest we will ever come to seeing paradise.
Paul Auster
#39. 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
#40. The living carry us inside them like pearls. We survive only so long as they remember us.
Kevin Brockmeier
#41. As Edward Glaeser put it, 'Thoreau was wrong. Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.
Matt Ridley
#42. The ultimate experience of being mindful occurs when we forget about everything, even the mindful self and doing. In that mode we are full of energy, utterly self-generated.
Sang H. Kim
#43. We may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. Because
Bill Bryson
#44. The Indians had to be either killed, or herded into reservations, which were essentially concentration camps, and forgotten. Their history had to be absolutely obliterated so that we could believe that we were living on virgin soil.
Richard Rodriguez
#45. We are successful
the moment we start toward
a laudable goal
J. Benson
#46. We have fallen in the dreams the ever-living
Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world,
And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.
W.B.Yeats
#47. 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
#48. I think we are living in pretty scary times and people are looking for inspiration and are also more open to the spiritual possibilities.
Eva Mendes
#49. A utopia cannot, by definition, include boredom, but the 'utopia' we are living in is boring.
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen
#50. We won the lottery in life and life is such a beautiful, precious gift, and we have to savor it, because as far as we know, we are the only living things in the universe, so it is our duty to protect it.
Francesca Martinez
#51. Instead of buying into the global agenda, which is using food as just industrial stuff, we would say we view food as biological, a living thing, that belongs in smaller communities.
Joel Salatin
#52. Living in the midst of abundance we have the greatest difficulty in seeing that the supply of natural wealth is limited and that the constant increase of population is destined to reduce the American standard of living unless we deal more sanely with our resources.
Wallace Carothers
#53. There is the philosophy embedded in the culture we are living. It is quite clear for example that Arabs have a different culture than Malaysians.
Tariq Ramadan
#54. Life is too short to be unhappy in business. If business were not a part of the joy of living, we might almost say that we have no right to live, because it is a pretty poor man who cannot get into the line for which he is fitted.
George L. Brown
#55. If you're going to have any kind of political opposition in the 21st century, then it has to be as fundamentally liquid as the rapidly changing society we're living in.
Alan Moore
#56. The face of the night will be an old wound that reopens each evening, impassive and living. The distant silence will ache like a soul, mute, in the dark. We'll speak to the night as it's whispering softly.
Cesare Pavese
#57. Christian living does not mean to be good but to become good; not to be well, but to get well; not being but becoming; nor rest but training. We are not yet, but we shall be. It has not yet happened, but it is the way. Not everything shines and sparkles as yet, but everything is getting better.
Martin Luther
#58. The world we live in is not purely visual. For me it's totally poly-sensorial so the tactile, sensual aspect of living in the work that I do is brought to the fore.
Ross Lovegrove
#59. Things are pretty good in Canada. We weathered the recession fairly well. And, of course, were up here up living here, we're watching American news and we're constantly saying, wow, it's not as bad as it is in the United States.
Rick Mercer
#60. On the day when we are able to foresee inventions we will be living in a state where everything conceivable has been invented. Our
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#61. We would make mistakes, we would argue, we would make up. We would lose the people we love and find new ones, and hold our memories close. We would fight for each other, again and again. We would keep living. We were in love.
And we were only human, after all.
Jocelyn Davies
#62. As the sociologist Mitchell L. Stevens has put it, "affluent families fashion an entire way of life organized around the production of measurable virtue in children." Measurable, here, means capable of showing up on a college application. We are not teaching to the test; we're living to it.
William Deresiewicz
#63. 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
#64. Mindfulness is continuous undisturbed awareness of the present moment. Fully aware of here, and now, we pay attention to what is happening right in front of us, we set aside our mental and emotional baggage. To be mindful we have to re-train our mind.
Natasa Nuit Pantovic
#65. We do not grow by knowing all of the answers, but rather by living with the questions.
Max De Pree
#66. The meaning of life is pretty clear: Living things strive to pass their genes into the future. The claim that we would not have morals or ethics without religion is extraordinary. Animals in nature seem to behave in moral ways without organized religion.
Bill Nye
#67. The gap is not between knowing it and living it, it's between knowing it and living it consistently. You know, we've all had moments when we got it right. Most of us have moments when we get it right every day. The trouble is getting it right when a curve-ball comes at us.
Marianne Williamson
#68. By increasing productivity and becoming more competitive, we will be able to offer better opportunities and improve the standard of living for all Mexicans.
Enrique Pena Nieto
#70. It is the experience of living that is important, not searching for meaning. We bring meaning by how we love the world.
Bernie Siegel
#71. I truly believe that if we keep telling the Christmas story, singing the Christmas songs, and living the Christmas spirit, we can bring joy and happiness and peace to this world.
Norman Vincent Peale
#72. Just as we cast off worn clothes and wear new ones, when the time arrives, the soul casts off the body and finds a new one to work out its karma. Therefore the wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#73. Whether we speak of the death to self or a sinking down in humility and meekness before God or faith in the Lamb of God, it all means one thing - a deliverance from self to find our liberty and our blessedness in the living sacrifice of ourselves for all around us. THE END
Andrew Murray
#74. In scripture God brings the animals to the human for naming. In that simple act the human is brought to recognize the particular personality and worth of each living creature. Too bad we forget so often.
Joan D. Chittister
#75. Someday, he thought, it'll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald's hamburger as well as buy it; we'll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won't even have to go outside.
Philip K. Dick
#76. I was living on the wrong side of the tracks in Evanston, Illinois, in a home for boys. We had these Jackson 5 records. I really related to their voices - they were about my age, but they were doing it.
Eddie Vedder
#77. Driven living makes us the center of our well-planned schedules. It may stem from a passion to live with eternal purpose, but it signifies that we believe God's work depends on us and neglects to acknowledge that God created us as finite resources dependent upon Him.
Paul Chappell
#78. It's not like we're all animalistic people trying to become more spiritual. We're really living spirit, trying to find out how to live embodied in this nitty gritty world, these corporeal forms, in these fleeting bodies in the material world where everything's changing and we're not in control.
Surya Das
#79. We're living in a time when the world has suddenly discovered India because it's run out of raw material for its imagination. The raw materials for imagination are inexhaustible here.
Deepak Chopra
#80. Commercialism and the mad desire to make money have blotted out everything else, and as a result we are not living, but merely existing.
Joseph Knowles
#81. We spend too much time keeping up with celebrities. They're living their dreams, what about you? Are you where you want to be in life. Get off the couch, turn off the tv and start achieving your goals.
Bianca Frazier
#82. We had common interests in the beauty of the French language. We both had a tremendous love of jazz. We shared dreams of getting married and having a family, living in the country, leading an idyllic life.
David Amram
#83. 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
#84. As if when someone close to us dies, we momentarily trade places with them, in the moment right before. And as we get over it, we're really living their life in reverse, from death to life, from sickness to health.
David Levithan
#85. I think that is a better thing than thanksgiving: thanks-living. How is this to be done? By a general cheerfulness of manner, by an obedience to the command of Him by whose mercy we live, by a perpetual, constant delighting of ourselves in the Lord, and by a submission of our desires to His will.
Charles Spurgeon
#86. Most of our social and educational institutions are designed to weed out or make over people ... until we produce a world where everyone is a smart, quick-witted, aggressive person living on the surface of the mind without ever looking into the depths.
Helen McCloy
#87. How is it we're the lucky ones, living a life that the children-we-were took for dreams?
Richard Bach
#88. Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#89. Like Jesus we belong to the world living not for ourselves but for others. Give yourself fully to God. He will use you to accomplish great things on the condition that you believe much more in His love than in your own weakness.
Mother Teresa
#90. One of the tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon - instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
Dale Carnegie
#91. The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.
William Morris
#92. The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.
Annie Dillard
#93. 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
#95. We're living in a homogenized culture where everything is the same, and books are not a homogenized culture. They are extremely varied, and they're eccentric because they are the product of an individual mind. They are not, in any way, mediated.
Jeanette Winterson
#96. AT THE CENTER of Wilson's work was an attempt to solve a deceptively simple puzzle: what makes life worth living when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves?
Atul Gawande
#97. We humans are here because nothing can be perfect. There always have to be some living things that are unsatisfied, itchy, trying too hard. If it was all just animals and rocks and lettuce, the gods wouldn't feel like they had enough to do.
Miranda July
#98. Why in the world have we never found what we're really looking for? Because what we need is often the very thing we won't accept. And sadly, in turning away the God we need, we need to understand that we have chosen to live without everything we need.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#99. The living environment is the biosphere, the thin layer around the world of living organisms. We're part of that. Our existence is dependent on it in ways that people haven't even begun to appreciate. Our existence depends not just on its existence, but its stability and its richness.
E. O. Wilson
#100. These things frighten people. It's best not to talk about them." "But, Dad, that's like ... like ignoring a fire in the living room because we're all in the kitchen, and, besides, house fires are too scary to talk about.
Octavia E. Butler
