True Life Quotes - Page 3

• 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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• 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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• Let us remember, too, that greatness is not always a matter of the scale of one’s life, but of the quality of one’s life. True greatness is not always tied to the scope of our tasks, but to the quality of how we carry out our tasks whatever they are. In that attitude, let us give our time, ourselves, and our talents to the things that really matter now, things which will still matter a thousand years from now.

  Spencer W. Kimball

  Attitude, Greatness, Years

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• We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way.

  George Orwell

  Dust, Years, Knowing

  George Orwell (2003). “Nineteen Eighty-four”, Penguin Mass Market

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• We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.

  George Orwell

  Dust, Knowing, Splinters

  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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• It's true; life really is generous to those who pursue their destiny

  Paulo Coelho

  Life, Destiny, Alchemist

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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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• 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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• Let us cultivate love and compassion, both of which give life true meaning. This is the religion I preach. It is simple. Its temple is the heart. Its teaching is love and compassion. Its moral values are loving and respecting others, whoever they may be. Whether one is a lay person or a monastic, we have no other option if we wish to survive in this world.

  Dalai Lama

  Teaching, Heart, Simple

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• More than ever now, I believe it's so important to look as real and true to life as possible, because nobody's perfect. I seem to be on a mission, but I don't want the next generation, your daughters and mine, growing up thinking that you have to be thin to look beautiful in certain clothes. It's terrifying right now. It's out of control. It's beyond out of control.

  Kate Winslet

  Beautiful, Daughter, Growing Up

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• What is defeat in life? It is not merely making a mistake; defeat means giving up on yourself in the midst of difficulty. What is true success in life? True success means winning in your battle with yourself. Those who persist in the pursuit of their dreams, no matter what the hurdles, are winners in life, for they have won over their weaknesses.

  Daisaku Ikeda

  Dream, Giving Up, Mistake

  Daisaku Ikeda (2000). “The Way of Youth: Buddhist Common Sense for Handling Life's Questions”, p.107, Middleway Press

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• Grant me courage to serve others; For in service there is true life.

  Cesar Chavez

  Grants

  "Prayer of the Farm Workers' Struggle". Poem by Cesar Chavez,

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• It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

  Gao Xingjian

  Fiction, Literature, Telling The Truth

  "Living without 'isms'". Interview with Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. August 1, 2008.

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• Home Run portrays the church in its beauty--true life transformation through real and honest relationships with one another and with Jesus.

  Joyce Meyer

  Running, Jesus, Real

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• Our world spins upside down and sometimes we have to lose our grip on the things we value in this life in order to grab on to true life.

  Jon Foreman

  Our World, Order, Down And

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• I do like Canadian poetry. Christian Bök, Anne Carson, Carmine Starnino, and Don McKay are a few of the Canadian poets whose work has been important to me. But I'm not sure that I do see poetry as a world apart. Some of my metaphors are based in the fantastic, but I try to be true to life as I understand it. That understanding is affected by my Canadianness, my Americanness, my whiteness, my gender, my age, my education, my experience...everything about me affects my view of reality. But I try to wrestle against those partialities, not embrace them.

  James Arthur

  Christian, Reality, Understanding

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training...

  Lewis Mumford

  Life, Art, Practice

  "The Conduct Of Life". Book by Lewis Mumford, 1951.

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• The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.

  Salvador Dali

  People, Effort, Portraits

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• To be beautiful means to be yourself.You don't need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself. When you are born a lotus flower, be a beautiful lotus flower, don't try to be a magnolia flower. If you crave acceptance and recognition and try to change yourself to fit what other people want you to be, you will suffer all your life. True happiness and true power lie in understanding yourself, accepting yourself, having confidence in yourself.

  Nhat Hanh

  Beautiful, Being Yourself, Lying

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• There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you've got.

  Anne Tyler

  May, Life Is, Ends

  Anne Tyler (2001). “Back when We Were Grownups: A Novel”, Knopf

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• You can't lead a true life without suffering

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Suffering

  Mahatma Gandhi (1951). “A Day Book of Thoughts from Mahatma Gandhi”

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• Love of country cannot be a supersized version of individual narcissism. True love of country-of this country-is love of our children, of a creed that promises them a better life before it promises us anything, and embraces the sacrifices needed to make that better life. True love of country is giving ourselves to a cause and a purpose larger than ourselves. And that cause is to make liberty worth having, to make the pursuit of happiness deeper than the quest for personal pleasure, and to leave a legacy of progress and possibility.

  Eric Liu

  Love, Country, Children

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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

  Facts, Courses, Journalistic

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

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