Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? --Mary Oliver (in The Lost Art of Breathing)

We sleep, but the loom of life never stops, and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up in the morning. --Henry Ward Beecher (in The Nettle Dress)

I do not want to get to the end of my life and find that I just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well. --Diane Ackerman (in Women on the Road)

We've forgotten what the child understands intuitively: that language comes from the deep wilderness of life itself, that it comes from play, and that the unsuspected appears from nowhere again and again. --Andy Couturier (in Andy Couturier: Writing Open the Mind)

When you are present in your own life it extends infinitely in every direction. --John Tarrant (in You Don't Have to Know: Our Dark Materials)

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may never complete this last one,
but I give myself to it. --Rainer Maria Rilke, translation Joanna Macy, Anita Barrows (in Widening Circles: An Interview with Joanna Macy)

All life-forms are in fact processes not things. --Merlin Sheldrake (in Merlin Sheldrake: Entangled Life)

What gives me hope is that life unfailingly responds to the advances of love. --Nipun Mehta (in Nipun Mehta: A Deeper Thanksgiving)

No matter what life throws at you, or how unfair you think it is, never give up. Pick yourself up and go on. -- (in The Queen of Basketball)

It's a calming thing, to learn there's a word for something you've felt all your life but didn't know was shared by anyone else. --John Koenig (in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)

A better world for wildlife means a better world for human life. --Carl Safina (in Carl Safina: Mother Culture)

It's absolutely necessary to have human exemplars. And I think it's necessary in terms of exemplary experiences. If you've never experienced what it is to have a really, really good and intimate friend and have been able to share that friendship, your life not only is emptier, but you're really at sea. --Lee Hoinacki (in Davis Dimock: The Gift)

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. --Marie Curie (in The Most Beautiful Science of the Year)

Whenever we look at life, we look at networks. --Fritjof Capra (in The Systems View of Life)

Life is often more complex than the stories we like to tell about it. --Daniel Kahneman (in Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement)

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. --Marie Curie (in The Science of a Meaningful Life: Top 10 Insights from 2022 )

Perhaps the most liberating moment in my life was when I realized that my self-loathing was not a product of my inadequacy but, rather, a product of my thoughts. --Vironika Tugaleva (in Emotional Reappraisal: A Form of Creativity)

Wholeness is a kind of attitude or approach to the whole of life. If we can have a coherent approach to reality then reality will respond coherently to us. --David Bohm (in Separation Without Separateness: A Day That Changed My Life)

Life is far more interesting than it needs to be, because the forces that guide it are not merely practical. --David Rothenberg (in David Rothenberg: The Joy & Mystery of Interspecies Music Making)

Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is. --Saul Bellow (in Why Beauty Matters)

I think I'm in rather honest company in asserting that there is an authentic self that's got nothing to do with your life history. You can lose contact with it, but you can never destroy it, and it's always been there. --Gabor Mate (in Gabor Mate: Healing Into Wholeness in a Toxic Culture)

Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness. --Leo Tolstoy (in 2000 Years of Kindness)

Our brains renew themselves throughout life to an extent previously thought not possible. --Michael S. Gazzaniga (in The Power of Brain Training)

The Greek division of human life into "mind," "body," "emotions," "psyche," and "spirit" underlies the modern Western view. The Semitic languages do not divide reality in this way. They provide multiple words for the subconscious self, all tied to the communal self. They imply a continuum between what we call spirit and body, not a division. --Neil Douglas-Klotz (in Hidden Teachings on Life & Death)

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. --Neale Donald Walsch (in Remote Wonders : A Conversation with Elaine Ling)

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind. --Henri Frederic Amiel (in Say Wow: A Conversation with Poet Chelan Harkin)

A degraded habitat will produce degraded humans. If there is to be any true progress, then the entire life community must progress. --Thomas Berry (in The Rights of All Beings)

Embracing unrest is a journey for life, without a perfect endpoint. It's about changing your way of being with yourself when you don't feel good, so when unrest calls, you approach discomfort and access the power of your emotion. --Sandra Parker (in Four Ways We Avoid Our Feelings & What to Do Instead)

To the one who knows how to look and feel, every moment of this free wandering life is an enchantment.
--Alexandra David-Neel (in How to Grow Re-Enchanted with the World )

Sanitizing your thoughts and your preoccupations not only squanders vital energy that would be better spent in your creative endeavors, but your not-so-presentable life can be enormously enriching and provide the compost for the development of compassion. --Darlene Cohen (in The Skills Necessary to Deal with Anguish)

What cultivating attention to detail introduces is spaciousness, space around thoughts and activities that allows you to live a rich and satisfying life right in the middle of misery. --Darlene Cohen (in Curiosity: A Sponge for Terror)

Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life. --Barbara Kingsolver (in A Whetstone to the Spirit: An Interview with Barbara Kingsolver)

That which you create in beauty and goodness and truth lives on for all time to come. Don't spend your life accumulating material objects that will only turn to dust and ashes. --Denis Waitley (in Beauty & the Dumpster)

Feeling burdened rather than uplifted by everyday duties is more a mindset than a measure of what is going on in your life. --Kelly McGonigal (in How to Make Stress Your Friend)

Ice has a social life. Its changeability shapes the culture, language and stories of those who live near it. --Robert Macfarlane (in 10 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Ice)

The main thing was, I didn't want to allow my fears to govern my life. I wanted to be led more by admiring, even hopefully by understanding, the world rather than by the anguishes of internal imaginings. --Jane Wodening (in Pilgrimage Up Longs Peak)

So much held in heart in a life. So much held in heart in a day, an hour, a moment. --Brian Doyle (in Joyas Voladoras)

Only now are we beginning to understand that all life on Earth depends on the freedom to move. --David Attenborough (in Instructions for Traveling West)

You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all the existences, and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls. --Rev. Howard Thurman (in Excavating Ancestral Wisdom)

I love a broad margin to my life. --Henry David Thoreau (in A Broad Margin)

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.
--Kahlil Gibran (in Beannacht (Blessing) for Our Death)

All over, the countryside opens up into crackings and creakings, into a boiling of healthy new life.
It's as if we were inside a huge honeycomb of light which was also the interior of an immense, flaming-hot rose. --Juan Ramón Jiménez (in The Donkey & the Meaning of Eternity: A Love Letter to Life)

Ways of life change only in living. --Wendell Berry (in Jessica Gigot: Moon)

I want to inhabit my life like a porch. --Rebecca Wells (in A Case for the Porch)

In a strange way the spiritual life isn't "useful" or "successful." But it is meant to be fruitful. And fruitfulness comes out of brokenness.
--Henri Nouwen (in It Takes Brokenness to Find It)

We are absolutely a part of the cycle of water. All of life is. --Valerie Segrest (in The Many Lives of Water)

Life and death are one thread,
the same line viewed from different sides. --Lao Tzu (in Life After Death)

Real self-care involves making difficult decisions that will pay off in the long run as we build a life around the relationships and activities that matter most to us. When done well, real-self care is empowering. --Pooja Lakshmin (in Pooja Lakshmin: Self Care the Right Way)

The true life of the bowl began the moment it was dropped. --Ancient Kintsugi quote (in Kintsugi: The Golden Joinery of Love)

For me, sacredness is an experience of the inner radiance of life, the unseen force that transforms and nourishes the physical world but is never limited by it. There is something more to it, a mystery that is never totally grasped. --Anthony Lawlor (in Beware the Fairy Host)