Life is just a chance to grow a soul.
Abraham Lincoln:
And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.Life on the planet is born of woman.Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn outTrue religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness.Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.Ethics cannot be based upon our obligations toward [people], but they are complete and natural only when we feel this Reverence for Life and the desire to have compassion for and to help all creatures insofar as it is in our power. I think that this ethic will become more and more recognized because of its great naturalness and because it is the foundation of a true humanism toward which we must strive if our culture is to become truly ethical.Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.
Civilization and Ethics, 1949Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life and that to destroy, harm, or to hinder life is evil. Affirmation of the world -- that is affirmation of the will to live, which appears in phenomenal forms all around me -- is only possible for me in that I give myself out for other life.Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.People living deeply have no fear of death.The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.The most decisive actions of our life ... are most often unconsidered actions.Life is a process. We are a process. The universe is a process.How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.Love life and life will love you back. Love people and they will love you back.Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
