Inspirational Quotes on Life

“Ne da sovražim – da ljubim, sem na svetu.”

“God doesn't mock us. He never gives us a goal that we cannot accomplish in His strength. I want to assure you, you can glorify God, you MUST glorify God. But you have to determine deep within your heart that you're going to do it His way.”

“...ask yourself, "Who's getting the glory in this ministry?" You see, if we do ministry OUR way, it won't be for His glory, because our ways are not His ways.”

“Each man has his day, and the time of life is brief for all, and never comes again.”

“True resignation consists of this: that man, feeling his subordination to the course of world events, makes his way toward inward freedom from the fate that shapes his external existence. Inward freedom gives him the strength to triumph over the difficulties of everyday life and to become a deeper and more inward person, calm, and peaceful. Resignation, therefore, is the spiritual and ethical affirmation of one’s own existence. Only he that has gone through the trial of resignation is capable of accepting the world.”

“Say your prayers in a garden early, ignoring steadfastly the dew, the birds, and the flowers, and you will come away overwhelmed by its freshness and joy; go there in order to be overwhelmed and, after a certain age, nine times out of ten nothing will happen to you.”

“It is essential of the happy life that a man would have almost no mail.”

“Another kind of bodily pleasure is that which results from an undisturbed and vigorous constitution of body, when life and active spirits seem to actuate every part. This lively health, when entirely free from all mixture of pain, of itself gives an inward pleasure, independent of all external objects of delight; and though this pleasure does not so powerfully affect us, nor act so strongly on the senses as some of the others, yet it may be esteemed as the greatest of all pleasures; and almost all the Utopians reckon it the foundation and basis of all the other joys of life, since this alone makes the state of life easy and desirable, and when this is wanting, a man is really capable of no other pleasure.”

“Suffering is life.”

“إنني في حاجة إلى قصاص وعدل، وإلا دمرت نفسي. وهذا القصاص الذي أطالب به، أنا لا أريده في لا نهاية لا يمكن الوصول إليها، وفي أبدية تفوقني، وإنما أنا أريد أن أراه على هذه الأرض، أن أراه بعيني.”

“we have grown so out of the habit of even living that we sometimes feel sort of loathing for "living life", and therefore we cannot bear to be reminded of it. You see, we have reached the point where we look upon real "living life" almost as a burden, almost as servitude, and we are all agreed amongst ourselves that it is much better to live life according to books.”

“This life you cry up so much is what I wanted to extinguish by suicide, whereas my dream, my dream—oh, it has revealed to me a great, new, regenerated intensity of life!”

“What happiness there had been in those days! What freedom! What hope! What an abundance of illusions! She had none left now. Each new venture had cost her some of them, each of her successive conditions: as virgin, wife and mistress; she had lost them all along the course of her life, like a traveler who leaves some of his wealth at every inn along the road.”

“No, I'd better not speak of it. It's a secret for me alone, of vital importance for me, and not to be put into words. This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy and enlightened all of a sudden as I dreamed. Just like the feeling for my child, there was no surprise in this either. Faith—or not faith—I don't know what it is—but this feeling has come just as imperceptibly through suffering, and has taken firm root in my soul. I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly. There will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife. I shall still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it. I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying. But my life now—my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me—every minute of it—is no more meaningless as it was before, but has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”

“It is dreadful that one cannot tear our the past by the roots. We cannot tear it out but we can hide the memory of it.”

“- The aim of civilization is to enable us to get enjoyment out of everything. - Well, if that is its aim, I'd rather be a savage.”

“women are the pivot on which everything turns!”

“He felt that if they had both not kept up appearances, but had spoken, as it is called, from the heart—that is to say, had said only just what they were thinking and feeling—they would simply have looked into each other's faces, and Konstantin could only have said, "You're dying, you're dying!" and Nikolay could only have answered, "I know I'm dying, but I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid!" And they could have said nothing more, if they had said only what was in their hearts. But life like that was impossible, and so Konstantin tried to do what he had been trying to do all his life, and never could learn to do, though, as far as he could observe, many people knew so well how to do it, and without it there was no living at all. He tried to say what he was not thinking, but he felt continually that it had a ring of falsehood, that his brother detected him in it, and was exasperated at it.”

“(...) he always thinks of a dinner party as lasting all night; and he always thinks of a night as lasting forever. When the working women in the poor districts come to the doors of the public houses and try to get their husbands home, simple minded “social workers” always imagine that every husband is a tragic drunkard and every wife a broken-hearted saint. It never occurs to them that the poor woman is only doing under coarser conventions exactly what every fashionable hostess does when she tries to get the men from arguing over the cigars to come and gossip over the teacups. These women are not exasperated merely at the amount of money that is wasted in beer; they are exasperated also at the amount of time that is wasted in talk. It is not merely what goeth into the mouth but what cometh out the mouth that, in their opinion, defileth a man.”

“In the heated idleness of youth we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication of that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss. We were inclined to ask, "Who wants to gather moss, except silly old ladies?" But for all that we begin to perceive that the proverb is right. The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.”