No objects of value… are worth risking the priceless experience of waking up one more day.

 –Jack Smith

Life is not a spectacle or a feast: it is a predicament.

–George Santayana

One’s only real life is the life one never leads.

 –Oscar Wilde

May you live all the days of your life.

–Jonathan Swift

The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike, and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune.

 –Boris Pasternak

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am. I am. I am.

–Sylvia Plath

You only live once – but if you work it right, once is enough.

 –Joe E. Lewis

As you grow older you will find that your desires are never really fulfilled. In fulfillment there is always the shadow of frustration, and in your heart there is not a song but a cry. The desire to become – to become a great man, a great saint, a great this or that – has no end and therefore no fulfillment; its demand is ever for the “more,” and such desire always breeds agony, misery, wars. But when one is free of all desire to become, there is a state of being whose action is totally different. It is. That which is has no time. It does not think in terms of fulfillment. Its very being is in its fulfillment.

 –J. Krishnamurti

Sometimes it seems to me that in this absurdly random life there is some inherent justice in the outcome of personal relationships. In the long run, we got no more that we have been willing to risk giving.

 –Sheldon Kopp

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

 –Ranier Maria Rilke

It is impossible to live pleasurably without living wisely, well and justly, and impossible to live wisely, well and justly without living pleasurably.

 –Epicurus

If you don’t conquer your own fears, than you pass them on to your children.

–Chinese Proverb

We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive in the flesh, and part of the living incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eyes are part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my very own self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute, except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

 –D. H. Lawrence

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on.

–Robert Frost_

We must cultivate and defend particularity, individuality, and irregularity — life. Human beings do not have a future in the collectivism of bureaucratic states or in the mass society created by capitalism. Every system, by virtue as much of its abstract nature as of its pretension to totality, is the enemy of life. As a forgotten Spanish poet, Jose Moreno Villa, put it with melancholy wit:_“I have discovered in symmetry the root of much iniquity

–Octavio Paz

 

(Each week this column features quotations gleaned from the readings and experiences of our editors, reporters, readers, and friends. All are invited to submit quotations for inclusion here. They may be sent to Gleanings, c/o The Newtown Bee, 5 Church Hill Road, Newtown, CT 06470 or emailed to editor@thebee.com.)