Just living is not enough," said the butterfly, "one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.
— The Complete Fairy Tales
Quotes About Life
It is necessary to fall in love – the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway.
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.
Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.
Our life is made by the death of others.
Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.
Find someone who has a life that you want and figure out how they got it. Read books, pick your role models wisely. Find out what they did and do it.
Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.
Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
— Les Misérables
A live concert to me is exciting because of all the electricity that is generated in the crowd and on stage. It's my favorite part of the business, live concerts.
I take thee at thy word: Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized; Henceforth I never will be Romeo.
— Romeo and Juliet
He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
— Orlando
She looked back as well as she could; but it was all confusion. She had taken up the idea, she supposed and made everything bend to it.
— Emma
…everyone needs a somewhere, a place he can go. There comes a time, you see, inevitably there comes a time you have to have a somewhere you can go!
— Crime and Punishment
The things she said seemed to have very little relation to the last thing she had said a minute before. She was the sort of person, Tommy thought, who might know a great deal more than she chose to reveal.
— By the Pricking of My Thumbs
His way had therefore come full circle, or rather had taken the form of an ellipse or a spiral, following as ever no straight unbroken line, for the rectilinear belongs only to Geometry and not to Nature and Life.
— The Glass Bead Game
Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.
— The Emperor's Handbook
It is necessary ... to yield to the storm, purchase a peace, and wait patiently for better times.
— Twenty Years After
Love between man and woman cannot be built without sacrifices and self-denial.
— Love and Responsibility
Little by little she had been discovering the uncertainty of her husband's step, his mood changes, the gaps in his memory, his recent habit of sobbing while he slept, but she did not identify these as the unequivocal signs of final decay but rather as a happy return to childhood.
— Love in the Time of Cholera
I used to wonder if it was God's plan that I should be alone for so much of my life. But I found peace. I found happiness within people and the world.
If you live each day as if it were your last, someday you'll be right.
— I, Steve
First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
— Mrs. Dalloway