You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.
—Mae West
We have thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living. The opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences.
—Mary Parker Follett
We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.
—Audre Lorde
I imagine that yes is the only living thing.
—e. e. cummings
The person lives twice who lives the first life well.
—Robert Herrick
It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have, it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.
—D. H. Lawrence
There is so much beauty in just existing. In being alive.
—Hannah Harrington in Saving June
Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.
—Albert Camus
Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.
—Albert Schweitzer
Death is not the greatest fear. Neither is loss. Living is.
—Joel Peckham
There's an African proverb: "When death finds you, may it find you alive." Alive means living your own damn life, not the life that your parents wanted, or the life some cultural group or political party wanted, but the life that your own soul wants to live.
—Michael Meade
The most solid advice… for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
—William Saroyan
I don't envy "busy." Busy means having a schedule, not living life. What I really covet is leisure and peace of mind.
—Donna Lynn Hope
I imagine that yes is the only living thing.
—e. e. cummings
I imagine that yes is the only living thing.
—e. e. cummings