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Living Quotes

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Living Quotes

“We were standing by the window, the mist pressed and broke in waves against the panes—and I felt that behind it lurked again the secret, the hidden, the past things, the damp days of horror, the desolation, the filth, the shreds of a waste life, the perplexity, the misguided frittering away of strength in an aimless existence; but here, before me in the shadow, disconcertingly near, the quiet breathing, the unseizable present—warmth, clear living—I must hold it, I must win it.”

“Let your ideas die, let your art die, let your fame die, let all these disappear, but you live! You are more important than your thoughts, more important than your art and your fame, you are more important than all your works! Never change life with anything else! If necessary, give up everything, everything but life!”

“It is not everyone who dies that actually lived. And of those who live, only a few are alive. Those who live get to make a living from doing what they love or don't love to do. But those who are alive, they give to make a life from being who they were meant to be. So live, know, do and get - if you only want to make a living. But be alive, be wise, become and give - if you really want to make a life.”

“They say "Life is short" but that is NOT true. Life is endless and so is Time. Both are in God's hands, immeasurable, and wait for no man. It is actually “Living and Timing”, both measured by a Clock and a Calendar, that are short and will pass away. A man may live for 200 years, but that is still "short" compared to the endless Life and Time. Like the path of a snake on the rock, so is Living without having Life and Timing without understanding Times & Seasons. In Living and Timing, always remember that we will not always be here, so let’s make the BEST USE of WHAT we have WHEN we still have it.”

“Hesse, the passionate reader who could not live without books, nevertheless harbored just as large a degree of skepticism toward the written word. For everything that was written ran the risk of having no life thereafter, of being nothing but an assemblage of dead letters. It was this Franciscan sympathy for poverty, including poverty of the spirit, that led him to see books differently than the educated bourgeois elite did. Books were alive like trees or clouds in the sky, they were our companions on that journey that ended inevitably in our death. But the key question was, Do we perish in our entirety, or does something of us live on - perhaps in the written word? For Hesse, true education, of which proper reading formed an integral part, must lead to inner growth. But proper reading is the same as proper living: one can only learn this art if one does not imagine one knows what it consists of in advance. One must always be open to new discovery, like a wayfarer who cannot see his goal but instead carries it within himself.”

“But a man must live. Not for nothing do we invest so much of ourselves in other people's lives—or even in momentary pictures of people we do not know. It cuts both ways: the happy group inside the lighted window, the figure in long grass in the orchard seen from the train stay and support us in our dark hours. Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.”