Lifetime Quotes - Page 7

• Samsara-the Wheel of Existence, literally, the "Perpetual Wandering"-is the name by which is designated the sea of life ever restlessly heaving up and down, the symbol of this continuous process of ever again and again being born, growing old, suffering, and dying. (It) is constantly changing from moment to moment, (as lives) follow continuously one upon the other through inconceivable periods of time. Of this Samsara, a single lifetime constitutes only a vanishingly tiny fraction.

  Gautama Buddha

  Sea, Names, Single Life

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• Meditation may require a lifetime to master, but it will have been a lifetime well spent. ... If you want to judge your progress, ask yourself these questions: Am I more loving? Is my judgment sounder? Do I have more energy? Can my mind remain calm under provocation? Am I free from the conditioning of anger, fear, and greed? Spiritual awareness reveals itself as eloquently in character development and selfless action as in mystical states.

  Eknath Easwaran

  Spiritual, Character, Judging

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• Perfect is determined in shortened measures of time, not over long periods of time or lifetimes. It would be unnatural.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Long, Perfect, Would Be

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• We only see in a lifetime a dozen faces marked with the peace of a contented spirit.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Contentment, Dozen, Faces

  Henry Ward Beecher, William Drysdale (1887). “Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit”

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• As for inhibitions, I've spent a lifetime developing them, and I don't intend to lose them.

  Pearl S. Buck

  Inhibitions, Developing, Loses

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• Vulgar souls look hastily and superficially at the sea and accuse it of monotony; other more privileged beings could spend a lifetime admiring it and discovering new and changing phenomena that delight them. So it is with love.

  Honore de Balzac

  Love, Sea, Soul

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• A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Thinking, Terror, Persons

  Barbara Kingsolver (2001). “Homeland and Other Stories”, Wheeler Pub Incorporated

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• The activity of happiness must occupy an entire lifetime; for one swallow does not a summer make.

  Aristotle

  Happiness, Summer, Doe

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• There is no way to live up to your full potential in life without losing lots of things. Yet there are people who believe you can go through a lifetime without losing anything, if you would just be more careful and more thoughtful. They actually believe that a child can get through elementary school without losing a jacket, but that's impossible unless the child is very repressed.

  Jennifer James

  Children, Believe, School

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• If one is the kind of creature I am and wants to do the kind of writing I want to do, an undisturbed bourgeois existence with no distractions seems in order. A single meeting outside the family upsets one's whole inner web, makes one start off on two-days' thinking and weighing, destroys a delicate balance etc. etc. ... I now have enough friends to last me a lifetime and that is enough. I am going to close the doors and hibernate at least for a couple of years. I am frightfully depressed about my work. It seems to me perfectly mediocre.

  May Sarton

  Couple, Writing, Thinking

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• If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced, and almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Ideas, Attention, May

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• Learning when 'enough is enough' is the discipline of a lifetime.

  Gail Godwin

  Art, Discipline, Enough

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• Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.

  Doris Lessing

  Pain, Cat, Knowing

  Doris May Lessing (1991). “Particularly Cats-- and Rufus”, Alfred A. Knopf

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• We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively.

  Harold Bloom

  Past, Journey, Three

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years - responses to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters - stay with you, mark you, become you. The cost of discontinuity (that pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what should take weeks take me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.

  Tillie Olsen

  Writing, Responsibility, Years

  Tillie Olsen (2014). “Silences”, p.48, The Feminist Press at CUNY

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• Sometimes, with luck, we find the kind of true friend, male or female, that appears only two or three times in a lucky lifetime, one that will winter us and summer us, grieve, rejoice, and travel with us.

  Barbara Holland

  Friendship, Summer, True Friend

  Barbara Holland (1996). “One's Company: Reflections on Living Alone”

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• By some fluke, my folks forgot to ask me the question most crucial to ensuring a lifetime of self-doubt: 'What if you fail?

  Lizz Winstead

  Confidence, Self, What If

  Lizz Winstead (2012). “Lizz Free or Die: Essays”, p.46, Penguin

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• It is important that early in life you choose companionable prejudices, for the fact is that they are likely to stay with you for a lifetime.

  Virginia Cary Hudson

  Important, Prejudice, Facts

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• If you feed a man a meal, you only feed him for a day-but if you teach a man to grow food, you feed him for a lifetime.

  Peace Pilgrim

  Helping Others, Men, People

  Peace Pilgrim (1992). “Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words”, p.60, Friends of Peace PIlgrim

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• [On President Clinton's address:] It was the worst inaugural address of our lifetime, and I think the only controversy will be between those who say it was completely and utterly banal and those who say, 'Well, not completely and utterly.

  Peggy Noonan

  Thinking, President, Addresses

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• To be alive is a fine thing. It is the finest thing in the world, though hazardous. It is a unique thing. It happens only once in a lifetime. To be alive, to know consciously that you are alive, and to relish that knowledge -- this is a kind of magic. Or it may be a kind of madness, exhilarating but harmless.

  Edna Ferber

  Unique, Magic, Once In A Lifetime

  Edna Ferber (2014). “A Kind of Magic: An Autobiography”, p.5, Vintage

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• There is a global epidemic where one out of three women will be beaten or sexually assaulted in their lifetimes? How are we going to build a future of love and connection? And why would this not be of utmost concern to men?

  Eve Ensler

  Men, Epidemics, Connections

  Interview with Kevin Powell, bknation.org. May 1, 2014.

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• It took most people a lifetime to join the human race.

  Hortense Calisher

  Race, People, Humans

  Hortense Calisher (2013). “Standard Dreaming: A Novella”, p.47, Open Road Media

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• I'm less confident now than I've ever been. In this peculiar craft, confidence is something you spend a lifetime losing. I used to be frightened only one night a week but now I'm frightened of every performance. I mean really frightened.

  Glenda Jackson

  Mean, Night, Actors

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• For more than eight decades, Washington has been my hometown. ... It is a city that offers me more people -- more different kinds of people -- than I could otherwise possibly have come to know in a lifetime: the native Washingtonian, the local merchant, the foreign diplomat, the ever-present tourist, the public servant, the journalist, the president, the friend.

  Katharine Graham

  Eight, Cities, People

  Katharine Graham (2009). “Katharine Graham's Washington”, p.16, Vintage

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