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Quotes tagged “Life”

“Raise the cry that tells of this struggle–make your beacon burn bright.”
— Euripides, Electra and Other Plays
Tagged: Life
“They say 'Find somewhere inside yourself to get better,' because that's what I'm doing everyday of the week, every minute of the day. They have no tolerance for anything else. None.”
— Rick Fox, Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success
Tagged: Life
“How's the patient?
Dead to the world
But not actually dead?
No 
How nice–to feel nothing and still get credit for being alive. ”
— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel (Modern Library 100 Best Novels)
Tagged: Life
“Eisenhower made it look easy. Like he was always doing less work than he really was.”
— Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower In War And Peace
Tagged: Life
“Because they have nothing in their hearts they must swallow and defend principles they know nothing about...They do not sympathize except hypocritically.”
— John Fante, Mencken: The American Iconoclast
Tagged: Life
“Power doesn't so much corrupt; that's too simple. It fragments, closes options, mesmerizes.”
— Shelby Foote, The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy
Tagged: Life
“As I see it, life furnishes just one panacea, if so much for all the ills and accidents of life: it is work–and more work.”
— Theodore Dreiser, Mencken: The American Iconoclast
Tagged: Life
“Don't trust the report.”
— Samuel Zemurray, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King
Tagged: Life
“Common sense is the guy who tells you you ought to have your breaks relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarter back who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flack on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a gray suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always someone else's money he's adding up.”
— Philip Marlowe, Playback
Tagged: Life
“Steve Jobs was adopted. He asked his parents if that meant they didn't love him: No, you have to understand. We specifically picked you out.”
— Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
Tagged: Life, Children
“Steve Jobs hires Paul Rand to design NEXT's logo and requests options: I will solve your problem and you will pay me. You can use what I produce or not, but I will not do options and either way you will pay me.”
— Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
Tagged: Life
“'Who do you think will win the war?' Asked a woman of him in 1919.

'My dear friend...may I ask you who won the San Francisco earthquake?'”
— Irvin Cobb, A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing
Tagged: Life
“I've never done a single thing I've wanted to in my whole life! I don't know's I've accomplished anything except just get along. I figure out I've made about a quarter of an inch out of a possible hundred rods. Well, maybe you'll carry things on further. I don't know. But I do get a kind of sneaking pleasure of the fact that you knew what you wanted to do and did it. Well, those folks in there will try to bully you, and tame you down. Tell 'em to go to the devil. I'll back you. Take your factory job, if you want to. Don't be scared of the family. No, nor all of Zenith. Nor of yourself, the way I've been. Go ahead, old man! The world if yours!”
— Babbit, Babbitt
Tagged: Life
“The most heartbreaking thing about it is: the better you got, the harder you have to work–because your standards will rise with your ability. I mentioned 'work'–it's the wrong word: because if you're serious, the whole creative process is attended with pleasure in a form which very few people ever know. Putting two words together in a sequence that pleases you, really pleases you, brings a satisfaction which must be kin to what a businessman feels when he manages a sharp transaction...but on a higher plane...those two words which the writer set together have produced an effect will will never die as long as men can read with understanding.”
— Shelby Foote, The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy
Tagged: Life, Writing
“I'm the first to admit it–I've never lived by the rules. The people who make them don't, so why should I?”
— Robert Evans, The Fat Lady Sang
Tagged: Life
“Saddam is a loner by nature, and power increases isolation. A young man without power or money is completely free. He has nothing, but he also has everything. He can travel, he can drift. He can make new acquaintances every day, and try to soak up the infinite variety of life. He can seduce and be seduced, start an enterprise and abandon it, join an army or flee a nation, fight to preserve an existing system or plot a revolution. He can reinvent himself daily, according to the discoveries he makes about the world and himself. But if he prospers through the choices he makes, if he acquires a wife, children, wealth, land, and power, his options gradually and inevitably diminish. Responsibility and commitment limit his moves. One might think that the most powerful man has the most choices, but in reality he has the fewest. Too much depends on his every move. The tyrant's choices are the narrowest of all. His life–the nation!–hangs in the balance. He can no longer drift or explore, join or flee. He cannot reinvent himself, because so many others depend on him–and he, in turn, must depend on so many others. He stops learning, because he is walled in by fortresses and palaces, by generals and ministers who rarely dare to tell him what he doesn't wish to hear. Power gradually shut the tyrant off from the world. Everything comes to him second- or thirdhanded. He is deceived daily. He becomes ignorant of his land, his people, even his own family. He exists, finally, only to preserve his wealth and power, to build his legacy. Survival becomes his one overriding passion. So he regulates his diet, tests his food for poison, exercises behind well-patrolled walls, trusts no one, and tries to control everything.”
— Mark Bowden, Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts
Tagged: Life
“To stay alive, you need to fight. It's as simple as that.”
— Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi
Tagged: Fight, Survival, Life
“The idea that we could control the course of our lives through rational choices was as absurd as a fish trying to control the ocean in which it swam.”
— Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi
Tagged: Control, Life, Destiny, Choices
“Your destiny is the level where you will play your tune. You might not change your instrument but how well you play is entirely in your hands.”
— Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi
Tagged: Destiny, Life, Fate
“Do not go with the flow. Be the flow.”
— Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi
Tagged: Change, Faith, Life

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This page was created by our editorial team. Each page is manually curated, researched, collected, and issued by our staff writers. Quotes contained on this page have been double checked for their citations, their accuracy and the impact it will have on our readers.

Kelly Peacock is an accomplished poet and social media expert based in Brooklyn, New York. Kelly has a Bachelor's degree in creative writing from Farieligh Dickinson University and has contributed to many literary and cultural publications. Kelly assists on a wide variety of quote inputting and social media functions for Quote Catalog. Visit her personal website here.

Kendra Syrdal is a writer, editor, partner, and senior publisher for The Thought & Expression Company. Over the last few years she has been personally responsible for writing, editing, and producing over 30+ million pageviews on Thought Catalog.