Life
Quotes - Beliefs are choices. First you choose your beliefs. Then your beliefs
affect your choices
“Thermodynamic
miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively
impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a
thing.
And
yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply
those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being
alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your
mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the
thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you,
that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability,
like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The
thermodynamic miracle.
But...if
me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that
about anybody in the world!.
Yes.
Anybody in the world. ..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with
these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze
continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from
the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away.
Come...dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable
beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all
things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes... and let's go
home.”
―
Alan Moore, Watchmen
“This
life is for loving, sharing, learning, smiling, caring, forgiving, laughing,
hugging, helping, dancing, wondering, healing, and even more loving. I choose
to live life this way. I want to live my life in such a way that when I get out
of bed in the morning, the devil says, 'aw shit, he's up!”
―
Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human
Experience
“Gratitude
builds a bridge to abundance.”
―
Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
“Conventionality
is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not
to assail the last.”
―
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
“You
were put on this earth to achieve your greatest self, to live out your purpose,
and to do it courageously.”
―
Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
“You
were born to stand out, stop trying to fit in.”
―
Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
“The
only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists.
Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly
uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most
unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The
worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having
published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He
lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they
dare not realize.”
―
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Beliefs
are choices. First you choose your beliefs. Then your beliefs affect your
choices.”
―
Roy T. Bennett
“About
once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing
need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often,
when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not
one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural
world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract
pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find
meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation
of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?
Depending
on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a
breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with
the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you
from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just
as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the
respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they
have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to
the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of
friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the
chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called
'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and
elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but
it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so.
Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a
human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed
propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.”
―
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir
“Life
is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest
possible route.”
―
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
“Dare
I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are
nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love.
I
still cannot understand how he could abandon me so unceremoniously, without any
sort of goodbye, without looking back even once. That pain is like an axe that
chops at my heart.”
―
Yann Martel, Life of Pi
“We,
unaccustomed to courage
exiles
from delight
live
coiled in shells of loneliness
until
love leaves its high holy temple
and
comes into our sight
to
liberate us into life.
Love
arrives
and
in its train come ecstasies
old
memories of pleasure
ancient
histories of pain.
Yet
if we are bold,
love
strikes away the chains of fear
from
our souls.
We
are weaned from our timidity
In
the flush of love's light
we
dare be brave
And
suddenly we see
that
love costs all we are
and
will ever be.
Yet
it is only love
which
sets us free.”
―
Maya Angelou
“Stop
doing what is easy. Start doing what is right.”
―
Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
