#if

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh. —chapter 1, "Economy ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#life

A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again. ↗

— Jean Renoir

#life

That's one of the tragedies of this life - that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous. ↗

— Preston Sturges

#life

The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay. ↗

— Richard Rodriguez

#essay #life #private #public #richard-rodriguez

The plays should have the half-life of plutonium. ↗

— Suzan-Lori Parks

#plays #theater #life

Though she'd try to do otherwise, she had never been able to stop cluttering her present with her past. Now somebody she didn't know would pack her treasures into plastic bags and carry them away. A life, at its end, is a pile of cloth and paper, and goods that can be bagged and labelled. None of the best things - the voice and the laugh, the tilt of the head, the things seen and felt and spoken - are allowed to stay behind. ↗

— Sonya Hartnett

#life

Человек один не может...Все равно человек один не может ни черта ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#life

I worship impersonal Nature, which is neither "good" or "bad", and who knows neither love nor hatred. I worship Life; the Sun, Sustainer of life. I believe in the Law of everlasting struggle, which is the law of life, and in the duty of the best specimens of our race — the natural élite of mankind — to rule the earth, and evolve out of themselves a caste of supermen, a people 'like unto the Gods'. ↗

— Savitri Devi

#nature #truth #life

I know what I should love to do–to build a study; to write, and to think of nothing else. I want to bury myself in a den of books. I want to saturate myself with the elements of which they are made, and breathe their atmosphere until I am of it. Not a bookworm, being which is to give off no utterances; but a man in the world of writing–one with a pen that shall stop men to listen to it, whether they wish to or not. ↗

— Lew Wallace

#life

If we think we will have joy only by praying and singing psalms, we will be disillusioned. But if we fill our lives with simple good things and constantly thank God for them, we will be joyful, that is, full of joy. And what about our problems? When we determine to dwell on the good and excellent things in life, we will be so full of those things that they will tend to swallow our problems. ↗

— Richard J. Foster

#gratitude #joy #simplicity #life