Fahrenheit 451

50 Breathtaking Ray Bradbury Quotes That'll Teach You To Cherish Life

Death could come at any moment, so enjoy life while it lasts.
Holly Riordan
July 21, 2016
“Live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451: A Novel
Tagged: enjoy life, live in the moment, Dreams
“I've always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you've died a couple of thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand.”
— Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man
Tagged: Death, Life, Time, Change
“From the outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living.”
— Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man
Tagged: Life, Death, Regrets
“Love will fly if held too lightly, love will die if held too tightly.”
— Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man
Tagged: Love, Dating, Relationships
“To be asleep is to be dead. It is like death. So we dance, we dance so as not to be dead. We do not want that.”
— Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man
Tagged: Death, Life, Sleeping, Dancing
“The quality of death, like that of life, must be of an infinite variety, and if one has already died once, then what was there to look for in dying for good and all, as he was now?”
— Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man
Tagged: Death, Quality, Life
“Memories, as my father once said, are porcupines. To hell with them! Stay away from them! They make you unhappy. They ruin your work. They make you cry.”
— Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man
Tagged: Memories, Sadness, Past
“A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.”
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Tagged: Medicine, cure, Sleeping, eating
“The first thing you learn in life is you're a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you're the same fool.”
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Tagged: Learning, Life, stupidity, Fools
“I’m alive. Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don’t watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you’re doing and it’s the first time, really.”
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Tagged: Life, alive, pay attention, Perspective
“I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn't forget, I'm alive, I know I'm alive, I mustn't forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.”
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Tagged: Life, alive, enjoy life
“Where would you like to go, what would you really like to do with your life?

See Istanbul, Port Said, Nairobi, Budapest. Write a book. Smoke too many cigarettes. Fall off a cliff but get caught in a tree halfway down. Get shot at a few times in a dark alley on a Morrocan midnight. Love a beautiful woman.”
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Tagged: Life, bucket list, Goals
“I’m really alive! I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!”
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Tagged: alive, Life, enjoy life
“No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you're nine, you think you've always been nine years old and will always be. When you're thirty, it seems you've always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.”
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Tagged: Time, Past, present, Future
“You’ll find out it’s little savors and little things that count more than big ones. A walk on a spring morning is better than an eighty-mile ride in a hopped-up car, you know why? Because it’s full of flavors, full of a lot of things growing.”
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Tagged: Nature, enjoy life, the little things
“Sandwich outdoors isn’t a sandwich anymore. Tastes different than indoors, notice? Got more spice. Tastes like mint and pinesap. Does wonders for the appetite.”
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Tagged: eating, food, differences
“Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about.”
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Tagged: ugly, beauty, Children, aduls
“Important thing is not the me that's lying here, but the me that's sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that's downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count. I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family.”
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Tagged: Family, Death, Children
“I like to cry. After I cry hard it’s like it’s morning again and I’m starting the day over.”
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Tagged: Crying, Tears, fresh start
“And some days, he went on, were days of hearing every trump and trill of the universe. Some days were good for tasting and some for touching. And some days were good for all the senses at once.”
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Tagged: senses, Universe, Life
“Pictures? No, they lie. You’re not the picture. My dear, you’re not the dates, or the ink, or the paper. You’re not these trunks of junk and dust. You’re only you, here, now—the present you.”
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Tagged: present, Time, Past, Memories
“And, after all, isn’t that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other people’s heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh, so that’s how you see it!? Well, now, I must remember that.”
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Tagged: Perspective, differences, Life
“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.”
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Tagged: Death, Souls, Creativity
“Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.”
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Tagged: Hero, Books, rescued
“And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Tagged: Death, Crying, Tears
“I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.”
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Tagged: Life, enjoy life
“That's the good part of dying; when you've nothing to lose, you run any risk you want.”
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Tagged: Death, risks, Bravery
“A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know is bad, or amoral, at least. You can’t act if you don’t know.”
— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
Tagged: Hero, actions, Strangers, Friendship
“Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.”
— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
Tagged: Death, Darkness, Loss
“Everything that happens before death is what counts.”
— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
Tagged: Death, Life, Meaning