Category Archives: Quotes to Live By

Because finding great quotes to live by is like finding buried treasure. These are my very favorite quotes to live by, and the reasons they’ve heavily impacted my life. I’ve tried to choose a good spread. Some of these quotes to live by are excerpts of poetry, others are lines of philosophy, and still others are just simple, profound, old world wisdom. I hope you find them both powerful and amazing.

Quotes to Live By — A Way that Seems Right

February 24, 2010

The next of my favorite quotes to live by, is a quote I had forgotten about until just recently.  It was a quote that heavily impacted my life as a younger man, showing me that life was something different than what I thought it was as a child, and that if I wasn’t careful, I would end up on a pathway I had never wanted to be on.  This quote to live by comes from the Bible, from the book of Proverbs, chapter 14, a book dedicated to life wisdom.  It says simply:

“There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.”

I’ve often marveled at how easily I’ve been fooled in life into traveling a pathway that ends up leading nowhere — inevitably finding myself stranded on some forgotten byway with nowhere left to travel.  And always, looking back down the pathway that finally has come to and end, it seems so obvious in hindsight that the path was always going to lead to nowhere, and I can’t believe that I didn’t see it beforehand.

One of my wishes, as a man who realizes that life is short, has always been to live my life with purpose and meaning — in essence, to do those things in life that are really worth doing.  There’s a prayer in the Psalms that I’ve adopted as part of my prayers to God.  It’s from Psalm 119, and the Psalmist simply pleads to God:

“Turn my eyes away from worthless things.“

I don’t know why, but human beings, in their natural state, often have such a hard time identifying worthless pursuits until it’s too late.  Hollow things often have such captivating promises.  So often we spend our time and effort on paths that lead to death, never giving a second thought to the notion that maybe what we’re doing isn’t really something worth this precious thing called life.  One of my biggest regrets in life is spending so much time and energy on paths that lead nowhere and pursuits that end up worthless.

In my mind, the quote to live by at the beginning of this post is one of the most solemn declarations ever made about humanity.  How sad is it that human beings are so easily taken in by things that prove hollow, that we often don’t realize, until it’s too late, that what we’ve been spending our time striving to achieve really isn’t what we thought it was.  How many a mid-life crisis could have been avoided if we would have, just for a little while, taken the time to make sure that our life’s pursuits were really things that would bring meaning and purpose into our hearts.

I always keep this quote at the top of my quotes to live by.  I have been fooled enough in life — have spend my time and energy resigned to what seemed good enough at the time.  It is my prayer and hope that my eyes will be turned away from worthless things and my feet away from paths that lead to death.




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Quotes to Live By — On Time

February 2, 2010

Thoreau, who has always had my favorite quotes to live by, once said, “Time is but the stream I go a fishing in.”  It’s a quote I’ve always loved, and though I’ve always tried to keep it as a mentality, recently, more than ever before, I’ve begun to feel the slow tug of time at my doorstep. Time, instead of the once mellow stream I’ve gone a fishing in, now seems more like the swift current that’s slowly dragging me away.  I’ve posted some of my favorite quotes to live by and poems about time, in hopes of breaking the nagging discouragement that sometimes comes to find me when times seems like it’s running out and slipping away.  The first excerpt is by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, his poem “A Psalm of Life”:

“Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou are, to dust thou returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than today.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.”

I’ve always been very encouraged by that poem, especially the third stanza.  It encourages me that, when I don’t know what to do, I ought to just do something to better myself, so that tomorrow finds me better off than today.  Simple things, done consistently, often end up becoming big things.  The next excerpt is from a poem by Thomas Moore entitled “Farewell, But Whenever You Welcome the Hour”:

“Let fate do her worst, there are relics of joy,
Bright dreams of the past, which she cannot destroy;
Which come in the night-time of sorrow and care,
And bring back the features that joy used to wear.
Long, long be my heart with such memories filled!
Like the vase, in which flowers have once been distilled
You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.”

This poem echoes the sentiments of the last post I made, about being “Wrecks of another world, whose ashes are still warm.”  Equally true is the shattered vase, whose scent still carries the smell of roses.  It’s a very cool word picture, and it reminds me to be thankful for things, even when they don’t work out — to hold onto the scent of the roses amid the chaos.  The last is another poem, one that I inscribed onto the back of a special bookmark that someone once hand made for me.

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may
Old time is still a flyin’
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will by dyin’”

I love that reminder to live life to the full, to realize that meaningful things don’t last forever.  I hope you liked these poems and quotes to live by!



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Quotes to Live By — Wrecks of Another World

January 15, 2010

Lord Byron, the famous English poet, wrote many beautiful poems and quotes to live by.  Among his most famous of works was his poem which begins “She walks in beauty like the night.”  He said something once, a description of human beings, that I’ve always loved, my favorite of his quotes to live by.  Of human beings he said that we are:

“Wrecks of another world, whose ashes are still warm.“

I so often feel this way, a man only seldom doing what he’s really meant to do in life, faintly glowing with purpose at times, but mostly simply doing what’s expected of me.  And yet sometimes, though rarely, the breath of inspiration will blow and stir the embers red and glowing, and I’ll remember again that life is something more than what I have yet lived.  And every time the breath of inspiration stirs, I always look back on my life in distress, wondering why it’s been so long since I’ve really lived my life with resolve, lived deliberately.  Which leads to the second of the quotes to live by.  This one is from another famous poet, Pablo Neruda, who said:

“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.“

It seems as though I am two men.  The one man, which I have been for most of my life, cares little as he goes about his days.  He bides his time in happiness, yet never really in joy; in concern, yet never really in passion; in comfort, yet never really in peace.  But then, invariably, something will happen, some situation will arise, which will cause the breath of inspiration to flow over my ashes, and stir them to a new glow.  I’ll feel as though I’ve been wasting my time just settling for good enough, as though the status quo is all there ever is.  I’ll feel a new resolve to live deliberately and to the full, and I’ll remember again that love is so short and forgetting is so long.  This expression of indefinable resolve and inspiration was once expressed by the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who said:

“It seems to him, according to the poet’s explanation, as if something inexpressible thrusts itself forward from his inmost being, the unspeakable, for which indeed language has no vessel of expression.  Even the longing is not the inexpressible itself.  It is only the hastening after it.“

It’s such an odd thing to be struck with a feeling of resolve and inspiration that tells me only that I need to do better — to live more deliberately, to love more fiercely, and to be a better man.  I suppose that Kierkegaard is exactly right, there is no expression for this type of feeling.  So what then, is man to do, when the breath of inspiration blows over the wrecks of his ashes and stirs within him a resolve to be better than what he is?  I suppose that that is why I take such comfort in the Lord, for I know that deep down, my truest and greatest desires can never be met or fulfilled by my own actions, and though it may be inexpressible and unattainable to me, it isn’t to Him.

Mountainside If you liked this post, you’ll definitely like Ben’s book Mountainside — a philosophical and poetical work that explores the depths of life and modern society.


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Quotes to Live By — Socrates, the Unexamined Life

January 10, 2010

There’s an ancient Greek quote to live by that I’ve always strongly connected with.  It was a simple command etched into stone on the side of one of their buildings.  The command was simply to “Know Thyself.”  When I first read about that quote, I didn’t really understand what it was saying.  How can a person not know themselves, I wondered?  But slowly, as I began to mature into a man, it started making sense.  And then I came across another great quote, this one also attributed to the ancient Greeks, to Socrates himself, which cemented the idea in my mind.  He said:

The unexamined life is not worth living

When I read that as a younger man, it really caused me to take a look at life in different terms.  I began to realize that society has a plan and a course for each one of us.  In today’s world, a person goes to college, gets a good job, spends the next 30 years of his life buying himself a place to sleep, has 2.5 children, and most likely gets a divorce. That is the simple path that modern society would have each of us aspire to.  But I have always wanted something more than that.  Once I read this quote from Socrates, I no longer simply wanted to blindly walk the path set out in front of me by the society of the day.  And once I began to study and explore the different facets of life, I began to understand what it meant to know myself.  And I came across another saying in the book of Proverbs in the Bible that echoes the words of Socrates:

The wisdom of the prudent is to give thought to their ways

Just on the surface of things, it seems like an almost foolish, silly idea to just sit around and think about life.  Life is life.  You just live it.  And yet, there’s something more, something deeper to be found if each of us would just spend some time examining life and giving thought to our ways.  In a recent book, an author David Straker describes how, becoming adults, before we really have much experience with the world, human beings are what he describes as unconsciously incompetent.  We don’t really know how to do a whole lot, and what’s worse, we don’t even understand how much we really don’t know about life and the world around us.  But as we progress, we transition from a state of unconscious incompetence, to a state conscious incompetence where we at last realize all the things we really don’t know.  We finally sit down to really understand ourselves, to understand life and explore the things in life that are really worth doing.  I think of another quote by Confucius:

To know that you don’t know what you don’t know, that is true wisdom

It’s interesting, before I spent time getting to know myself, I thought I had the world figured out.  But as I sat down to really explore life, I realized just how much I was missing as a human being.  I suppose that’s a good thing though.  Humility is definitely a pathway to wisdom and to God.  Maybe that’s the whole point.


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Quotes to Live By — Living Deliberately

December 21, 2009

Out of any author I’ve read, Henry David Thoreau definitely has the most inspirational quotes to live by. This one comes from his book Walden, and was the main quote in my life that convinced me that I ought to spend a great deal of time in solitude, reflecting on life and how to best live it.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.”

Thoreau spent two full years in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts, in a home he built himself.  He eagerly sought solitude, and through it, something more.  And through his experience, I learned not to be afraid of solitude, but rather to seek it and look forward to it.  As a teenager growing up in a big city, solitude always seemed like a terrifying concept — alone with nothing to do.  But now that I’ve spent a significant amount of time in solitude, I can say that nothing was more beneficial to my growth as a man and a human being.  I’m going to finish with an excerpt from a Robert Frost poem about him wishing to disappear into a large forest and be lost to his thoughts and the trees.

“I should not be withheld but that some day
into their vastness I should steal away
Fearless of ever finding open land,
or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.
I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.
They would not find me changed from him they knew–
Only more sure of all I thought was true.”

That poem gives me chills every time I read it.  His final two lines are the perfect description of the benefit of solitude — gaining a deep sense of confidence about the life you lead, knowing how to live deliberately, what’s worth fighting for and what’s not.  I hope you enjoyed these two quotes to live by on the benefit of solitude.


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