True Life Quotes

• True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Change, Life Changing, Tiny

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• The supreme object of life is to live. Few people live. It is true life only to realize one's own perfection, to make one's every dream a reality.

  Oscar Wilde

  Dream, Reality, People

  Oscar Wilde (1997). “Nothing...Except My Genius”, p.30, Penguin UK

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• True life is elsewhere

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Life Is, Elsewhere

  Arthur Rimbaud (1962). “Rimbaud”

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• What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Life, World, Elsewhere

  Arthur Rimbaud (1962). “Rimbaud”

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• Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me.

  Carol Burnett

  Inspirational, Change, Attitude

  "Aaron Carter Is 'Excited' For the Future After Gaining 40 Pounds at Health and Wellness Facility" by Jennifer Drysdale‍, www.etonline.com. December 1, 2017.

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• The whole of life is but a moment of time. It is our duty, therefore to use it, not to misuse it.

  Plutarch

  Inspirational, Funny, Life

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• I know that when a door closes, it can feel like all doors are closing. A rejection letter can feel like everyone will reject us. But a closed door leads to clarity. It's really an arrow. Because we cannot go through that door, we will go somewhere else. That somewhere else is your true life.

  Tama J. Kieves

  Doors, Somewhere Else, Arrows

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• In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge. The young they keep out of mischief; to the old they are a comfort and aid in their weakness, and those in the prime of life they incite to noble deeds.

  Aristotle

  Life, Friendship, True Friend

  Socrates, Plato, Aristotle (1967). “Wit and Wisdom of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle: Being a Treasury of Thousands of Glorious, Inspiring and Imperishable Thoughts, Views and Observations of the Three Great Greek Philosophers, Classified Under about Four Hundred Subjects for Comparative Study”

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• In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge.

  Aristotle

  True Friend, Comfort, Noble Deeds

  Socrates, Plato, Aristotle (1967). “Wit and Wisdom of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle: Being a Treasury of Thousands of Glorious, Inspiring and Imperishable Thoughts, Views and Observations of the Three Great Greek Philosophers, Classified Under about Four Hundred Subjects for Comparative Study”

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• We are made in the image of God; we carry within us the desire for our true life of intimacy and adventure. To say we want less than that is to lie.

  John Eldredge

  Lying, Adventure, Desire

  John Eldredge (2007). “Desire: The Journey We Must Take to Find the Life God Offers”, p.165, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon.

  Oscar Wilde

  Forgiving, Sin, Loveless

  Oscar Wilde (2004). “The Best of Oscar Wilde: Selected Plays and Writings”, p.213, Penguin

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• It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.

  Max Frisch

  Meaning Of Life, Sound, Stories

  Max Frisch (1994). “I'm Not Stiller”, p.55, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Flourishing goes beyond happiness, or satisfaction with life. True, people who flourish are happy. But that's not the half of it. Beyond feeling good, they're also doing good-adding value to the world.

  Barbara Fredrickson

  People, Feel Good, Feelings

  Barbara Fredrickson (2009). “Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the Upward Spiral That Will Change Your Life”, p.17, Harmony

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• Then may we not fairly plead in reply that our true lover of knowledge naturally strives for truth, and is not content with common opinion, but soars with undimmed and unwearied passion till he grasps the essential nature of things with the mental faculty fitted to do so, that is, with the faculty which is akin to reality, and which approaches and unites with it, and begets intelligence and truth as children, and is only released from travail when it has thus reached knowledge and true life and satisfaction?

  Plato

  Children, Passion, Reality

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• The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.

  Don DeLillo

  Life Is, Written

  Don DeLillo (2010). “Point Omega”, p.17, Pan Macmillan

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• It's true: lives do drift apart for no obvious reason. We're all busy people,we can't spend our time simply trying to stay in touch. The test of a friendship is if it can weather these inevitable gaps.

  William Boyd

  Weather, People, Trying

  William Boyd (2003). “Any human heart: a novel”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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• He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.

  Theodor Adorno

  Running, Believe, Risk

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.38, Univ of California Press

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• All life's training is just exactly what is needed for the true Life-work, still out of view but far away from none of us. Don't grudge me the learning of a new lesson.

  Amy Carmichael

  Christian, Inspiration, Views

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• We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Life Is, Paradox

  Thomas Merton (2008). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation”, p.35, Sounds True

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• Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

  Carl Jung

  Summer, Thinking, Civilization

  Carl Gustav Jung, Meredith Sabini (2002). “The Earth Has a Soul: The Nature Writings of C.G. Jung”, p.37, North Atlantic Books

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• Cynically speaking, one could say that it is true to life to be cynical about it.

  Paul Tillich

  Cynical

  Paul Tillich, F. Forrester Church (1999). “The Essential Tillich”, p.183, University of Chicago Press

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• We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.

  George Orwell

  Splinters, Life Is, Thought Police

  George Orwell (2001). “The Complete Novels of George Orwell: Animal Farm, Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Coming Up for Air, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Nineteen Eighty-Four”, p.1280, Penguin UK

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• Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

  Francoise Sagan

  Art, Believe, Opposites

  "Françoise Sagan, The Art of Fiction No. 15". Interview with Blair Fuller and Robert B. Silvers, www.theparisreview.org. Autumn 1956.

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• To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Character, Personality, Novelists

  "A Reader’s Guide to the Recent Novels of Joyce Carol Oates". Interview, celestialtimepiece.com.

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• True friendship is worth more than can be measured, a quality forever to be treasured. True friends will staunchly stand beside each other, as loyally brother shieldeth brother, remaining firm in spite of war and strife, in poverty or sickness, throughout life. True friendship doth endure while comrades age from boy to youth, from warrior to sage.

  Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  Brother, True Friend, War

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