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Living Quotes

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Living Quotes

“Living in a capricious world means accepting that we do not live within a stable moral cosmos that will always reward people for what they do. We should not deny that real tragedies happen. But at the same time, we should always expect to be surprised and learn to work with whatever befalls us. If we continue this work, even when tragedies come our way, we can begin to accept the world as unpredictable and impossible to understand perfectly. And this is where the promise of a capricious world lies; if our world is indeed constantly fragmented and unpredicatable, then it is something we can constantly work on bettering. We can go into each situation resolved to be the best human being we can be, not because of what we'll get our of it, but simply to affect others around us for the better, regardless of the outcome. We can cultivate our better sides and face this unpredicatble world, transforming as we go.”

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Book:The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life
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“Who’s to say we aren’t dead until we learn what we are living for?” Stephen placed his hands behind his head and leaned back casually in the folding camping chair. “We all need to know what’s missing in our lives. At a funeral people say everything a person has accomplished in their life, but what if they missed something? What if there was one thing you never realized you needed to do? What if you had a chance to go back and do it?”

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Book:The Death of Mungo Blackwell
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“Though we didn't know it they were the good years. So much that was unknown to us lay in the future, so much unbelievable and bad, and we didn't worry about any of it. We were broke, without prospects and with no possessions of worth, and yet we were right to think life was sweet. We had so little we didn't even know how little we had. We didn't care. All that we didn't have was uninteresting and irrelevant. The future was an infinite horizon over which the sun still glimmered its early morning promise. Everything had a smell and every smell was fresh ⁠— the morning air, the sun on the bitumen, the evening rain. There was just today and that felt like more than enough.”

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Book:First Person
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“And while a difficult past may seem at first to hamper our living our life's purpose, sometimes it serve the purpose, too. Or it is the purpose—to fully experience and understand a certain kind of human problem.”

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Book:The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You
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“The effect of a single good deed could last for centuries, like planting a sapling of a long-living tree or writing a book that humans can benefit from generation after generation, or discovering a medicine, or inventing a useful invention. The power of good deeds could last forever; it is us who decide whether to leave a good impact during our lives or not.”

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Author:Noora Ahmed Alsuwaidi
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“Everyone thinks I have a death wish, ya know. But I don't want to die. Dying is easy. No I want to live. But getting close to death is the only way to feel alive. And once you do it makes you realize that everything you were doing before wasn't actually living. It was just making due. Call me crazy, but I think we do the best living when the stakes are high.”

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Book:A Gathering of Shadows
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“We're led to believe that all these material things will make us happy, that they signify success and contentment, when, in actual fact, the opposite is true. All that this clutter does is anchor you to one place. I think all you really need to be happy is what that little girl down on the beach has - the sun on your back, food on the table and someone to love who loves you in return. If it's so simple, though, why do we dither around for so many years looking for something else?”

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Book:Then. Now. Always.
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“Before this, I couldn't understand why a person would commit suicide. And while I now have the perspective that only comes from distance, and the perspective always comes, I know the power of a lie has to shrink time into what seems the eternal end of things. It is a true miracle I survived that hour. I wasn't numb anymore. I was allowed to feel the brunt of it. The bones penetrated my chest in a sudden rip, emptying a body of blood down my shirt and onto my lap. The blood pooled in the lap of my pants and seeped into the carpet in my hotel room. I clasped my hand over my heart and knelt between the bed and the television and rolled onto the floor and cried out to God a lamenting demand that he would come and save me from the sorrow that, for the immensity of it, I could only attribute to him in the first place. I didn't want to learn whatever it was he wanted to teach me. I cried to him an angry petition for rescue. I doubted him and needed him at the same time. God seemed to me, in that moment, a cruel father burning a scar into my skin with his cigarette. And yet I knew he was the only one with the power to make the pain go away.”

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Book:A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
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