How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people, like the Chekhov story ‘The Lady With the Little Dog.’
We’ve been taught to believe that actions speak louder than words. But I think words speak pretty loud all of our lives; we carry these words in our head.
I was suffering from a peculiar and persistent sense that I was being pursued, and also the conviction that under the political order of the times, our lives had no meaning.
By bringing nature into our lives, we invite humility.
From racial profiling and being pulled over just for ‘driving while black’ to this new phenomenon of killing unarmed people out of some preconceived idea of fear, our lives and our children’s lives are not being valued.
I love things on the decline because that’s really the natural progression of our lives. We’re born, we’re feisty for the first couple of years, and then the inevitable decline begins.
I’m not one of those New Age types that believe ‘it’s all meant to be’ and that our lives have been scripted by an invisible hand.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
What’s fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.
There are moments in our lives that are more difficult than others. And I can look at each song and remember where I was during those times – from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows.
What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal – that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the chance to make of our lives what we will.
Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.
Our lives are politically wound.
Astronauts are very professional and when they’re preparing for launch, they prepare for it as the most serious endeavor of our lives.
Conscience is the mirror of our souls, which represents the errors of our lives in their full shape.
I was bullied as a boy – lots of kids are, but hopefully most of us get on with our lives and grow up.
Most great plays of the past lose their grip on immediacy; on application to our lives right now.
I don’t think many people have a very good understanding of leisure and the importance it plays in our lives.
In our lives in a lot of ways it’s all about fake. You’ve got people wanting things for fake reasons.
The world’s pretty big. I have to see everything, do everything, eat everything. You’ll never be as young as you are right now, so while your legs still work, while you still have the breath in your lungs, go. At the end of our lives, we only regret the things we didn’t do.
Complete objectivity is not an option. We are all subjective about the way we respond to ‘what is,’ whether it’s the people we encounter, the circumstances in our lives, or ourselves. What we can do is reduce our subjectivity – what I call ‘I see, therefore it is.’
We all have thoughts and feelings that we believe are fundamental to our lives but that are better left unspoken.
With my boyfriend, we can make sexist jokes to each other because we know it’s absolutely not true. If I get home from a long day and he says: ‘Go on, get in the kitchen,’ it’s funny because we know it’s not our lives.
I am a great enthusiast and early adopter of technology, but sometimes I wonder whether the inexorable integration of technology in our lives could diminish some of our quintessential human capacities, such as compassion and cooperation.
The one kind of person I have a lot of trouble understanding is the kind of person that says the existence of God or religion doesn’t matter, it’s not an important decision. I think it’s vitally important; it’s what all our lives are based on.
It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.
Our lives our guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes.
Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error. The error is thinking that when someone stands in the way of our wants, we can justify getting that person out of our lives. Abortion and racism stem from the same poisonous root, selfishness.
Even in this glowering age, morality animates our lives with meaning.
My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don’t want our lives to end.
The moral case for individual initiative in a free economy holds that people have a God-given right to use their creativity to produce things that improve our lives.
The American Dream is a phrase we’ll have to wrestle with all of our lives. It means a lot of things to different people. I think we’re redefining it now.
We try to organize the world, which isn’t organized the way our brains want to organize it. We tell stories about the people in our lives, we project ideas onto them. We project relationships with people, we make our lives into stories. I don’t think we can avoid doing that.
There is nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for Hope, and there is nothing he wouldn’t do for me… We spend our lives doing nothing for each other.
Our stories come from our lives and from the playwright’s pen, the mind of the actor, the roles we create, the artistry of life itself and the quest for peace.
