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.

Albert Schweitzer:

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, 1949

Albert Schweitzer:

Reverence 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.

Alice Walker:

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.

Alice Walker:

Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.

Amelia Burr:

Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.

Anais Nin:

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.

Anais Nin:

People living deeply have no fear of death.

Anais Nin:

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

Anais Nin:

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

André Gide:

The most decisive actions of our life ... are most often unconsidered actions.

Anne Wilson Schaef:

Life is a process. We are a process. The universe is a process.

Annie Dillard:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Barbara Kingsolver:

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.

Barry Lopez:

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.
Arctic Dreams

Baruch Spinoza:

What everyone wants from life is continuous and genuine happiness.

Ben Jonson:

A good life is a main argument.

Benjamin Disraeli:

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Benjamin Franklin:

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that the stuff life is made of.

Bertrand Russell:

Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].
I have wished to know why the stars shine.

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.

This has been my life; I found it worth living.
adapted

Bertrand Russell:

The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Brother David Steindl-Rast :

Gratefulness is the key to a happy life that we hold in our hands, because if we are not grateful, then no matter how much we have we will not be happy -- because we will always want to have something else or something more.

Buckminster Fuller:

Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

Buddha:

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard:

Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish each moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived.
played by Patrick Stewart, from the film "Star Trek: Generations"

Carl Jung:

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Carl Sandburg:

Our lives are like a candle in the wind.

Carl Sandburg:

Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

Charlotte Bronte:

Life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.

Chinese proverb:

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.

Colette:

I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.

Colette:

Life is nothing but a series of crosses for us mothers.

Corita Kent:

Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed.

Corita Kent:

Life is a succession of moments. To live each one is to succeed.

Dorothy Thompson:

Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.

Dorothy Thompson:

Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.

E. B. White:

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.

Charlotte, "Charlotte's Web"

Edith Wharton:

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

Edna St. Vincent Millay:

My candle burns at both its ends;
It will not last the night;
But oh, my foes, and oh, my friends --
It gives a lovely light.

Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Life is a quest and love a quarrel ...

Elbert Hubbard:

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Elbert Hubbard:

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived. Curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

I think somehow we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

Elie Wiesel:

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.

(Oct. 1986)

Elizabeth Drew:

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

Emily Dickinson:

Love—is anterior to Life—
Posterior—to Death—
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth—

Emily Dickinson:

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain.
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Emily Dickinson:

That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.

Emily Dickinson:

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

Erik H. Erikson:

Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired.

Ernest Becker:

The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

Ernest Becker:

[W]e now know that the human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of life and the fear of death... Heidegger brought these fears to the center of his existential philosophy. He argued that the basic anxiety of [humanity] is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world. That is, both fear of death and fear of life, of experience and individuation.

Ernest Becker:

I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?

Ernest Dowson:

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses;
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

F. Forrester Church:

Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.

Franklin P. Jones:

Love doesn't make the world go 'round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.

Frederick Buechner:

The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.

Friedrich Nietzsche:

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

End at 12:49

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