Being Alive Quotes

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“We only need to be one person.
We only need to feel one existence.
We don't have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“You aren't alive if you aren't in need.”
― Henry Cloud, Safe People: How to Find Relationships That Are Good for You and Avoid Those That Aren't

“Tobacco’s a killer,” Kafuku said. “Being alive is a killer, if you think about it,” Misaki said.”
― Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women: Stories

“The very fact that you're aware of suffering is enough reason to be overjoyed that you're alive and can experience it.”
― Bob Ross, Happy Little Accidents: The Wit and Wisdom of Bob Ross

“The theater hums with presence as everyone in the audience and cast alike remembers that joy and grief are human birthrights, but mostly, being alive, is everything in between.”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

“You do realize the message of this play, right?" Tyler asked.
"Sure." My arm was still over my eyes. "It's about life on a farm and falling in love and watching the people you love die. So, you know, that's awesome."
He ignored the sarcasm. "It's about being alive. About noticing all the little things, because no one ever knows if it's the last time they'll see them.”
― Tamara Ireland Stone, Little Do We Know

“You killed the princess in the tower."

"In some ways, she was already dead, wasn't she? Are you truly alive if you spend your entire life locked in a tower, hidden away for so long that you wouldn't even know to flee if the door opened for you?"

His words rang deep in my chest, as true and clear as the music of him that had first called to me all those years ago. His irises were gold, hypnotizing me. *Are you alive, Nannerl?* they seemed to say to me. *Don't you want to be?*”
― Marie Lu, The Kingdom of Back

“Failure to shed tears is a failure to live life fully. And the one thing that life requires of us all is to live it. Never be embarrassed by your ability to be alive.”
― Amy Neftzger, The Orphanage of Miracles

“Take every breath as an event.”
― Arzum Uzun

“There’s not much point to being alive if you don’t do what you can to make life better for someone else, is there?”
― Michael Thomas Ford, The Road Home

“Sydney's arms were beginning to ache from lifting the shovel, but for the first time in a year, she wasn't cold. Her cheeks burned, and she was sweating through her coat, and she felt alive.
As far as she was concerned, that was the only good thing about digging up a corpse.”
― Victoria Schwab, Vicious

“Ik leef, fluisterde hij, ik adem. En ik beweeg. Ik adem, ik beweeg, dus ik leef. Wat kan er nog gebeuren? Er kunnen rampen komen, pijnen, verschrikkingen. Maar ik leef. Ik kan opgesloten zijn, of door gruwelijke ziekten worden bezocht. Maar steeds adem ik, en beweeg ik. En ik leef.”
― Gerard Reve, De avonden

“Everyone who breathes has problems; it’s how the world keeps spinning. Life always brings us problems, and if it doesn’t, we create some. Which makes them worse in my conception, since they are personal consequences. And the last time I checked, I was still breathing.”
― Ivy Oakes, What if Stars Don't Die

“I am not a visitor. I am more of a trespasser, interested in secret little deaths of people who think they are alive, people who are inching towards death with each breathing moment, people who don't realize that life is just a temporary phase of a long journey, like I never did when I was alive, people who will soon become trespassers like me. Why do I think that this phase of trespassing is permanent? Maybe I too am just as stupid as these humans to think I am wiser than them!”
― Samir Satam, Litost: Sliced Stories

“By teaching ourselves to stay connected to our sensuality, we start to install new neurological hardware that becomes a blueprint for the body to experience the richness, soulfulness, and beauty of being alive.”
― Lebo Grand

“GARDEN OF WISDOM

A heart that has ached mercilessly
Can spin a lifetime of agony
Into a solacing garden of wisdom,
Offering you comfort
And peace.
It’s the same heart that knows the
Ecstasy of just being alive
And cherishes every moment.”
― Kyrian Lyndon, Awake with the Songbirds

“It was always falling down around you, everything has always been falling down around us. Only we were too alive to notice.”
― George Saunders, Liberation Day

“Are you confused about being human? The reason is because you are much more than what the mind wants you to think or believe, and you know this innately. Being does not mean that we will not become ill. It does not imply that this human form will not encounter difficulty and pain. Being does not suggest that we will receive a paradise that the mind thinks we lost and are so desperate to find. Being is simply that; it is.”
― Steve Leasock, Love Will Show You the Way: Choosing the Path of Least Resistance

“It's strange to think that we're all here because someone wasn't killed at some point.”
― Madeleine Ryan, A Room Called Earth

“Still, I mustn't grumble: I have more friends than enemies and there are moments when I am almost glad to be alive — when I watch the sun set and the moon rise, or see snow on mountain tops.”
― Fred Uhlman, Reunion

“What if, one would fall into an empty abyss? Nothing truly outrageous would happen - or could it finally happen?
Dare to soar
Fly angel fly - free
for here, we are to love and be.”
― Ulonda Faye, Sutras of the Heart: Spiritual Poetry to Nourish the Soul

“Life," they say, "comes down to a few concrete things: A shovel. Payday. A movie. Wine."
What else? Is everything else an aroma diffused on the air? It is, because you can smell it, but how can you grasp it?”
― Ryszard Kapuściński, Busz po polsku

“Being curious is an indication of being alive.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“As long as we're alive, we'll have all different kinds of problems. These troubles are the conditions of being alive.”
― Kosho Uchiyama, The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo

“Just being alive doesn’t mean all that much on its own. How you live is more important.”
― Genki Kawamura, If Cats Disappeared from the World

“I’m not really here. I am physically, but metaphorically I am not. I just exist sometimes. Occasionally I’m present, but majority of times I’m not. I stand. I hold in place. Periodically I sit. Sometimes you see my eyes drifting. I’m not wondering. I’m wandering. I’m seeking. I’m observing. I’m listening to the wind. I’m grasping the moment. I’m grasping time. I’m feeling this. I’m trying to understand what this is. I’m not here nor there, but elsewhere in between the hologram.”
― Dominic Riccitello

“[...] For those who think (create), reality has no mysteries. The underlying notion of reality is a creative process attributable to the Absolute, going to transform the immutability characteristic of identity into a "dynamic" concept". For Bergson, "existence is the victory over nothing", while the non-being, according to logic, is not, by its very definition. Perhaps, the priority of humankind shall be understanding thoroughly the idea of nothing, in order to properly define the borders and limits of being.”
― Vincent Bozzino, Philosophy Trips: A Naive's Guide

“It occurred to her that, in the dead of night, every alive and awake thing could easily become heightened with excitement, craving, and possibility.”
― H.C. Roberts, Harp and the Lyre: Exchange