He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life. --Boris Pasternak (in Bhutan's Dark Secret to Happiness)

It is a seeing of every moment of life against the horizon of death, and a challenge to incorporate that awareness of dying into every moment so as to become more fully alive. --David Steindl-Rast (in Learning to Die)

Enjoy the little things in life because one day you`ll look back and realize they were the big things. --Kurt Vonnegut (in How Happy Brains Respond to Negative Things)

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit. --Nelson Henderson (in Planting Seeds: )

Simple, genuine goodness is the best capital to found the business of this life upon. It lasts when fame and money fail, and is the only riches we can take out of this world with us. --Louisa May Alcott (in Unlocking Multiple Forms of Wealth)

No, it won't all go the way it should. But I know the heart of life is good. --John Mayer (in Living Reverence: There is a Spark in Everything)

The unexamined life is not worth living. --Socrates (in The Disease of Being Busy)

Sometimes I think there are only two instructions we need to follow to develop and deepen our spiritual life: slow down and let go. --Oriah Mountain Dreamer (in Slow Down to Get Ahead)

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. --Kahlil Gibran (in 5 Life Lessons from My Specially-Abled Son)

Writing humbles us in a way that is vital for our character growth, by reminding us about the limits of the self and our appropriate place in the vast flow of life. --Homaira Kabir (in Finding Meaning in a Digital Age)

Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?' --Martin Luther King, Jr. (in Learning Generosity from a Homeless Child)

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion. --Maya Angelou (in What Matters Most?)

Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. --Plato (in The Lullaby Project: Homeless Mothers Make Music)

For a long time I have known that our interior world is the soil in which the seeds of art take root. Without this seed in which the magic part of life is hidden, and from which a work of art can be born, there is no art, there is no music. --Thomas de Hartmann (in On Art & Mindfulness )

Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. --Plato (in The Lady in Number Six)

Life is all about breaking those mental barriers: leaping across and clean over those little invisible fences. --Prakash Iyer (in 50 Years Ago She Did Something No Woman Ever Had)

My life is my message. --Mahatma Gandhi (in Living Gandhi's Message In Inner City Oakland)

Humankind has not woven the thread of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect. --Chief Seattle (in Robin Wall Kimmerer: The Grammar of Animacy)

The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in. --Morrie Schwartz (in Letting Love Come In: Lessons from a Nursing Home)

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. --Pablo Picasso (in Earthscapes: Art that Goes Out with the Tide)

Trouble makes us one with every human being in the world - and unless we touch others, we're out of touch with life. --Oliver Wendell Holmes (in Breathing Love into a Community)

To be an artist is to believe in life. --Henry Moore (in A Library Where Kids Learn to Tinker)

Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast - you also miss the sense of where you are going and why. --Eddie Cantor (in Food Waste and the Culture of Rush)

Trust is the glue of life...It's the foundational principle that holds all relationships. --Stephen Covey (in A World Where We Trust Strangers)

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. --Melody Beattie (in Thanksgiving Spotlight on Gratitude)

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. --Parker J. Palmer (in On Discerning Your Purpose & Letting Your Life Speak)

Deep ecologists assert that there is an ontological realism, that humans are part of the natural system, the web of life, and that we can rediscover our authentic existence. --Bill Devall (in Free Nature)

I've learned that making a living is not the same thing as making a life. --Maya Angelou (in Remote Wonders: A Conversation with Elaine Ling)

If you want to touch the past, touch a rock. If you want to touch the present, touch a flower. If you want to touch the future, touch a life. --Author Unknown (in Giving the Homeless a Hand Up with Technology)

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. --Joseph Chilton Pearce (in Physicist David Bohm on Creativity)

A book, too, can be a star, 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,' a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe. --Madeleine L'Engle (in A Reading List For The Spirit)

Life is as dear to a mute creature, as it is to man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not die, so do other creatures. --Dalai Lama (in The Vet Who Is Saving India's Orphaned Animals)

I am confused by life, and I feel safe within the confines of the theatre. --Helen Hayes (in Broadway Theater Gives Troubled Teens a Second Act)

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (in More Than Your Average Cup of Joe)

People's great creativity and diversity, our desire for contribution and relationships, blossom when the heart of our community is clear and beckoning, and when we refrain from cluttering our paths with proscriptions and demands. The future of community is best taught to us by life. --Margaret Wheatley (in The Promise & Paradox of Community)

Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife. --Kahlil Gibran (in Luc and the Lovingtons: Music as a Force of Love)

Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint. --Angela Duckworth (in Beyond Grit: The Science of Creativity, Purpose and Motivation)

Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.
--Marcus Aurelius (in Red Onions: Transformed by Beauty)

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. --William Shakespeare (in The Axis & the Sycamore)

There is something in the nature of tea that leads us into a world of quiet contemplation of life. --Lin Yutang (in Wu De: Tea Is the Great Connector)

Gratefulness is that fullness of life for which we are all thirsting. -- Brother David Steindl-Rast (in Gratefulness: An Opportunity to Practice)

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit. --Nelson Henderson (in Graduation: A Song & Speech for the Ages)

Every life speaks to the power of what can be done. --Oprah Winfrey (in Give That Which is Organic To You: A Recipe to Avoid Burnout)

Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every minute of every day. Do it! I say. Whatever you want to do, do it now! --Pope Paul VI (in What Makes Life Worth Living in the Face of Death?)

The energy of the mind is the essence of life. --Aristotle (in Another World)

There is a secret in all things. And that secret...makes life and reality and the moment so full, so vast... --Enrique Martínez Celaya (in The Whisper of the Order of Things)

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. --- Berthold Auerbach - (in Between Medicine and Music)

Every noble life leaves its fibre interwoven forever in the work of the world. --John Ruskin (in The Age of We Need Each Other)

Life is an adventure, it's not a package tour. --Eckhart Tolle (in Koan: A Conversation with Vaea Marx)

For life and death are one, even as the river and sea are one. --Kahlil Gibran (in The Life of Death)