Actual Life Quotes

• In actual life, every great enterprise begins with and takes its first forward step in faith.

  August Wilhelm von Schlegel

  Faith, Inspiration, Firsts

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• People talk of the courage of convictions, but in actual life a man's duty to his family may make a rigid course seem a selfish indulgence of his own righteousness.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Courage, Selfish, Men

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dover Thrift Editions (2015). “The Early Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald”, p.129, Courier Dover Publications

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• I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Beautiful, Believe, Feelings

  Ernest Hemingway (2014). “The Hemingway Collection”, p.3488, Simon and Schuster

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• All actual life is encounter.

  Martin Buber

  Empathy, Encounters, Life Is

  Martin Buber (2013). “I and Thou”, p.82, eBookIt.com

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• This life is a test-it is only a test. If it had been an actual life, you would have received further instructions on where to go and what to do. Remember, this life is only a test.

  Jack Kornfield

  Tests, Remember, Life Is

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• In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent.

  Aldous Huxley

  Movement, May, Ascent

  Aldous Huxley (1999). “Moksha: Aldous Huxley's Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience”, p.48, Inner Traditions / Bear & Co

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• That youthful fervor, which is sometimes called enthusiasm, but which is a heat of imagination subsequently discovered to be inconsistent with the experience of actual life.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Imagination, Enthusiasm, Heat

  Benjamin Disraeli (19??). “Endymion”

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• My diaries were written primarily, I think, not to preserve the experience but to savor it, to make it even more real, more visible and palpable, than in actual life. For in our family an experience was not finished, not truly experienced, unless written down or shared with another.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Real, Thinking, Diaries

  ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH (1973). “BRING ME A UNICORN”

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• dreams must not take the place of actual life, nor constitute themselves a cowardly escape from it, but become rather a sanctuary in which the overdriven mind and nerves may take refuge, a country on the outer edge of this confusion, bright with the shadow of eternity beyond.

  Maude Meagher

  Country, Dream, Confusion

  Maude Meagher (1931). “Fantastic Traveller”

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• My actual life is a fact, in view of which I have no occasion to congratulate myself; but for my faith and aspiration I have respect. It is from these that I speak.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Faith, Ambition, Views

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.357, Penguin

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• Poems give us permission to be unsure, in ways we must be if we are ever to learn anything not already known. If you look with open eyes at your actual life, it's always going to be the kind of long division problem that doesn't work out perfectly evenly. Poems let you accept the multiplicity and complexity of the actual, they let us navigate the unnavigable, insoluble parts of our individual fates and shared existence.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Eye, Fate, Long

  Source: www.americanmicroreviews.com

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• This life has been a test. If it had been an actual life, you would have received actual instructions on where to go and what to do.

  Winnie Holzman

  Tests, Instruction, This Life

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• Underneath the forms of fiction and poetry, you can bet your ass the ground comes from someone's actual life experience.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Fiction, Life Experience, Ass

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I think it makes people frustrated when they have to live their actual lives commercial free and they can't just magically wind up at the part with the happy ending.

  Larry Gelbart

  Thinking, Wind, People

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• For some reason it gives people pleasure to equate the life of certain movie actors or actresses with their actual lives.

  Woody Allen

  People, Giving, Actors

  Interview with Geoff Andrew, www.theguardian.com. September 27, 2001.

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• Since art is dead in the actual life of civilized nations, it has been relegated to these grotesque morgues, museums.

  Walter Gropius

  Art, Museums, Civilized Nations

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• I don't think paper will go away. I do believe that the value of paper will change, and Xerox is working on changing that value. Consider a color page. Actual life is in color, but you keep reproducing it in black and white. You remove value. It's a bad thing to do.

  Ursula Burns

  Believe, Black And White, Thinking

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• We live today in a world where most of the really important developments in everything from math and physics and astronomy to public policy and psychology and classical music are so extremely abstract and technically complex and context-dependent that it's next to impossible for the ordinary citizen to feel that they (the developments) have much relevance to her actual life.

  David Foster Wallace

  Math, Psychology, Important

  Interview with Dave Eggers, www.believermag.com. November 2003.

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• We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Winning, Men, Effort

  Theodore Roosevelt (1920). “Roosevelt's Writings: Selections from the Writings of Theodore Roosevelt”

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• At a theoretical level, I think a naturalist approach to religion is just asking questions I'm not interested in. They're perfectly legitimate in their own terms, but they don't address the actual experience of how one or other aspect of religion becomes existentially meaningful to us in our actual lives. The fact that we ourselves are the subject of investigation makes all the difference.

  George Pattison

  Meaningful, Thinking, Asking Questions

  "Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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• Muhammad's is one of those rare lives that is more dramatic in reality than in legend. In fact the less one invokes the miraculous, the more extraordinary his life becomes. What emerges is something grander precisely because it is human, to the extent that his actual life reveals itself worthy of the word 'legendary'.

  Lesley Hazleton

  Reality, Legends, Facts

  Lesley Hazleton (2013). “The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad”, p.14, Penguin

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• And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

  Mark Strand

  True Life, Facts, Courses

  "In The Presence Of America: A Conversation With Mark Strand". Interview with Katharine Coles, weberstudies.weber.edu. 1992.

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• Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest discipline to be simple, and the acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life.

  Carl Jung

  Happiness, Acceptance, Simple

  Carl Gustav Jung (2001). “Modern Man in Search of a Soul”, p.240, Psychology Press

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• Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?

  William James

  Truth, Ideas, Differences

  William James (2012). “Pragmatism”, p.77, Courier Corporation

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• Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.

  Oscar Wilde

  Dog, Strong, Feet

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.152, GENERAL PRESS

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