Favorite quotes about life
Here are some of my favorite quotes about life from famous writers, artists, musicians, shamans, psychiatrists, poets, entrepreneurs, and others.
— Henry Moore, quoted in
The Ultimate Seduction,
by Charlotte Chandler
— Pablo Picasso, quoted in The Ultimate Seduction, by Charlotte Chandler
BILL MOYERS: Do you ever have the sense of— being helped by hidden hands?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time — namely, that if you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.
— Joseph Campbell in “Sacrifice and Bliss,”
Part 4 of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers
— Phil Stutz, in “Hollywood Shadows”
by Dana Goodyear, The New Yorker, March 21, 2011
Nice people made the best Nazis.
Or so I have been told. My mother was born in Munich in 1934, and spent her childhood in Nazi Germany surrounded by nice people who refused to make waves. When things got ugly, the people my mother lived alongside chose not to focus on “politics,” instead busying themselves with happier things. They were lovely, kind people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away.
— Naomi Shulman, in a commentary for WBUR, November 17, 2016
As Weeks retold this story, he shook his head in astonishment. “We did it in under six months,” he said. “We produced a glass that had never been made.”
— Steve Jobs coaxing Corning CEO Wendell Weeks to produce Gorilla Glass, as recounted in Chapter 36 of
Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson
— Barry Michels, in The Tools: 5 Tools to Help You Find Courage, Creativity, and Willpower — and Inspire You to Live Life in Forward Motion
— Kevin Smith, in Tough Sh*t: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good
— attributed to chef Bobby Flay
— paraphrasing Rev. John Watson (a.k.a. Ian MacLaren)
— Tom Robbins, in an interview by Tony Vigorito
“Sir?”
“—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
— Atticus Finch, in Chapter 3 of To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
DAVID LETTERMAN: From your perspective now, do you know something about life and death that maybe I don’t know?
WARREN ZEVON: Not unless I know how much— how much you’re supposed to enjoy every sandwich.
— Warren Zevon, discussing his terminal cancer during his last appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman
— Don Juan Matus to Carlos Castaneda in Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan
— Poet Mark Strand in an interview which aired on WBUR’s Here and Now March 13, 2012
— George Harrison in George Harrison: Living in the Material World
All great love stories, all of them must, by definition, end in tragedy.
— Novelist Nicholas Sparks in a Salon interview, October 8, 2024
What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, and every day, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those other things, are his history. His acts and his words are merely the visible, thin crust of his world, with its scattered snow summits and its vacant wastes of water — and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden — it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written. Every day would make a whole book of eighty thousand words — three hundred and sixty-five books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.
— Charles Dickens, Book 1, Chapter 3 of A Tale of Two Cities
— Roger Ebert, in Chapter 55 of Life Itself: A Memoir

EGO Cordless String Trimmer
What is the purpose of life?
Trout plundered his pockets for a pen or pencil. He had an answer to the question. But he had nothing to write with, not even a burnt match. So he left the question unanswered, but here is what he would have written, if he had found anything to write with:
To be
the eyes
and ears
and conscience
of the Creator of the Universe
you fool.
—Elvis Presley, recalling his first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in If I Can Dream: Elvis’ Own Story, by Larry Geller, Joel Spector, and Patricia Romanowski
—Chevy Chase as Ty Webb in Caddyshack
—Bruce Springsteen, in a Rolling Stone interview by Brian Hiatt, October 5, 2016
—Erik Vance, in conversation on On Being with Krista Tippett
— The Gospel of Thomas, saying 70, as quoted by Elaine Pagels in The Gnostic Gospels
Out of that, though, came for me what I always thought was one of our greatest sort of mottoes, which is like — we’re standing around, the four of us, standing around with the van kind of out of commission and our roadie thinking, “Oh my God, how am I gonna get this?” ‘Cause it was a slope that we’d gone down, so you couldn’t just drive the van back up the slope. But we’re sitting around and somebody said, “We’ll what are we gonna do now?”
And then one of us — I can’t remember which — said, ”Something’ll happen.” And it was like, ”Wow — that is the greatest quote ever!”
—Paul McCartney, recalling an early Beatles van crash to Terry Gross on Fresh Air, November 3, 2021

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