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I would I could stand on a busy corner,
and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.
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-Bernard Berenson
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All the animals except man know that the
ultimate of life is to enjoy it.
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-Samuel Butler
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Life is the art of drawing sufficient
conclusions from insufficient premisses.
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-Samuel Butler
Notebooks
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I don't believe people are looking for the
meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being
alive.
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-Joseph Campbell
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If there is a sin against life, it consists
perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and
in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
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-Albert Camus
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Enjoy yourself. It's later than you
think.
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-Chinese proverb
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It is necessary to try to surpass oneself
always; this occupation ought to last as long as life.
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-Christina, Queen of Sweden
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You and I want our lives to matter. We want
our lives to make a real difference--to be of genuine consequence in the
world. We know that there is no satisfaction in merely going through the
motions, even if those motions make us successful, or even if we have
arranged to make those motions pleasant. We want to know we have made some
impact on the world. In fact, you and I want to contribute to the quality
of life. We want to make the world work.
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-Werner Erhard
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Who will tell whether one happy moment of
love, or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling
the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life
implies.
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-Erich Fromm
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Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of
the idea that life is serious.
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-Brendan Gill
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Not only is life a bitch, but it is always
having puppies.
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-Adrienne Gusoff
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When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,'
I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?'
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-Sydney J. Harris
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Life is not meaningful to us unless serving
an end beyond itself, unless it is of value to someone else.
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-Abraham J. Herschel
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~It matters not how a man
dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so
short a time.
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-Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell's
Life of Johnson, 1791
October 26, 1769
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~Wisedome without Honesty
is meere craft, and coosinage. And therefore the reputation of Honesty must
first be gotten; which cannot be, but by living well. A good life is a
maine Argument.
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-Ben Jonson
Timber: or, Discoveries, made vpon men and matter: as they have flow'd out of his daily Readings ; or had their refluxe to his peculiar Notion of
the Times, 1640
Discoveries, Topic 17, "Probitas. sapientia." ("Honesty and Wisdom")
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What is most fearsome about death is that
it takes away something that remains to this day wholly undefined.
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-Eli Khamarov
Lives of the Cognoscenti
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The cost of living is high, but it's worth it.
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-Doug Larson
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We can help one another to find out the
meaning of life, no doubt. But in the last analysis the individual person
is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' Others
can give you a name or number, but they can never tell you who you really
are. That is something only you yourself can discover from within.
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-Thomas Merton
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Life is like a game of cards. The hand that
is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will.
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-Jawaharlal Nehru
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The person lives most beautifully who does
not reflect upon existence.
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-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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He who has a why to live can bear almost any
how.
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-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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Is not life a hundred times too short for
us to bore ourselves?
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-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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Life is just one damned thing after another.
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-Frank Ward O'Malley
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Life is about not knowing, having to change,
taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going
to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.
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-Gilda Radner
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*An organism's life is its
standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good,
that which threatens it is the evil.
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-Ayn Rand
The Virtue of Selfishness, 1964
"The Objectivist Ethics", 1963
This essay originally appeared in The Objectivist Newsletter,
February, 1963"
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*By the grace of reality
and the nature of life, man---every man---is an end in himself, he exists
for his own safe, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest
moral purpose.
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-John Galt, the hero in Ayn Rand's
Atlas Shrugged, 1957
Part Three : A is A, Ch. VII, "'This is John Galt Speaking'"
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*No, he thought, I regret
nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because
I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even
the unanswered-and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life. But
I loved it.
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-Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead, 1943
Part Four, "Howard Roark"
Ch. 5
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*[W]e can never lose the
things we live for. We may have to change their form at times, if we've
made an error, but the purpose remains the same and the forms are ours to
make.
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-Francisco D'Anconia, a hero in Ayn Rand's
Atlas Shrugged, 1957
Part Two : Either-Or, Ch. VIII, "By Our Love"
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*We are like butterflies
who flutter for a day and think it is forever.
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-Carl Sagan
Cosmos, 1980
Chapter II, "One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue"
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A single event can awaken within us a
stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.
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-Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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There is no cure for birth or death save to
enjoy the interval.
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-George Santayana
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It's what one does, and nothing else, that
show's the stuff one's made of. . You are- your life, and nothing else.
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-Jean-Paul Sartre
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Our care should not be to have lived long
as to have lived enough.
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-Seneca
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Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself
out of much of life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for
something.
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-Henry David Thoreau
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Life does not consist mainly, or even
largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of
thought that is forever flowing through one's head.
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-Mark Twain
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You cannot control the length of your life
but you can control is breadth, depth and height.
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-Unknown
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The cost of living hasn't affected its
popularity.
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-Unknown
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Life is a zoo in a jungle.
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-Peter De Vries
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There'll be two dates on your tombstone
And all your friends will read 'em
But all that's gonna matter is that little dash between 'em...
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-Kevin Welch
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Two babies were born on the same day at
the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. Their
families came and took them away. Eighty years later, by a bizarre
coincidence, they lay in the same hospital, on their deathbeds, next to
each other. One of them looked at the other and said, 'So. What did
you think?'
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-Steven Wright
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