Best 255 quotes in «real life quotes» category

The argument was this: a civilization shackled to the strictures of excessive control on its populace, from choice of religion through to the production of goods, will sap the will and the ingenuity of its people – for whom such qualities are no longer given sufficient incentive or reward. At face value, this is accurate enough. Trouble arrives when the opponents to such a system institute its extreme opposite, where individualism becomes godlike and sacrosanct, and no greater service to any other ideal (including community) is possible. In such a system rapacious greed thrives behind the guise of freedom, and the worst aspects of human nature come to the fore, a kind of intransigence as fierce and nonsensical as its maternalistic counterpart. And so, in the clash of these two extreme systems, one is witness to brute stupidity and blood-splashed insensitivity; two belligerent faces glowering at each other across the unfathomed distance, and yet, in deed and in fanatic regard, they are but mirror reflections. This would be amusing if it weren’t so pathetically idiotic…

The artistic life is a long and lovely suicide precisely because it involves the negation of self; as Highsmith imagined herself as her characters, so Ripley takes on the personae of others and in doing so metamorphoses himself into a 'living' work of art. A return to the 'real life' after a period of creativity resulted in a fall in spirits, an agony Highsmith felt acutely. She voiced this pain in the novel via Bernard's quotation of an excerpt from Derwatt's notebook: 'There is no depression for the artist except that caused by a return to the self'.

The critical point is that thousands of people are swept into the criminal justice system every year pursuant to the drug war without much regard for their guilt or innocence. The police are allowed by the courts to conduct fishing expeditions for drugs on the streets and freeways based on nothing more than a hunch...and once inside the system, people are often denied attorneys or meaningful representation and pressured into plea bargains by the threat of unbelievably harsh sentences - sentences for minor drug crimes that are higher than many countries impose on convicted murderers. This is the way the roundup works, and it works this way in virtually every major city in the United States.

The filmmaking process taught me that I need to be authentic—in my scripts and in real life.

the great mountain when seen from a distance shall always seem closer to us but to get to it, and to climb to its apex to get the best view, we may need to take and experience the real walk with resilience and tenacity.

(...) The floor itself was inscribed with a mosaic in the data-pattern mode, representing the entire body of the Curia case law. At the center, small icons representing constitutional principles sent out lines to each case in which they were quoted; bright lines for controlling precedent, dim lines for dissenting opinions or dicta. Each case quoted in a later case sent out additional lines, till the concentric circles of floor-icons were meshed in a complex network. The jest of the architect was clear to Phaethon. The floor mosaic was meant to represent the fixed immutability of the law; but the play of light from the pool above made it seem to ripple and sway and change with each little breeze. Above the floor, not touching it, without sound or motion, hovered three massive cubes of black material. These cubes were the manifestations of the Judges. The cube shape symbolized the solidity and implacable majesty of the law. Their high position showed they were above emotionalism or earthly appeals. The crown of each cube bore a thick-armed double helix of heavy gold. The gold spirals atop the black cubes were symbols of life, motion, and energy. Perhaps they represented the active intellects of the Curia. Or perhaps they represented that life and civilization rested on the solid foundations of the law. If so, this was another jest of the architect. The law, it seemed, rested on nothing.

The great thing about real life is that it belongs to you. You can make it up as you go along!

The idea of a slow approach to the luxury of leisure drove him wild. He was, of course, progressing toward it, but, like a child eating his ice cream so slowly that he couldn't taste it at all.

The hardest thing in life is a man to be honest with himself

The individual is reminded that in him, no less than in the Archetypal Universe, real life must be born if real life is to be lived.

There were times when you could feel that the world would be a better place if Annagramma got the occasional slap around the ear. The silly unthinking insults, her huge lack of interest in anyone other than herself, the way she treated everyone as if they were slightly deaf and a bit stupid…it could make your blood boil. But you put up with it because every once in a while you saw through it all. Inside there was this worried, frantic little face watching the world like a bunny watching a fox, and screaming at it in the hope that it would go away and not hurt her.

Then we are nothing to him,’ said the merchant, sorrow brimming in his eyes. ‘I surrendered everything, all my wealth, for yet another indifferent god. If he cannot protect us, what is the point?’ She wished that she had an answer to such questions. Were these not the very grist of priestly endeavours? To grind out palatable answers, to hint of promising paths to true salvation? To show a benign countenance gifted by god-given wisdom, glowing as if fanned by sacred breath? ‘It is my feeling,’ she said, haltingly, ‘that a faith that delivers perfect answers to every question is not a true faith, for its only purpose is to satisfy, to ease the mind and so end its questing.’ She held up a hand to still the objections she saw awakened among these six honest, serious believers. ‘Is it for faith to deliver peace, when on all sides inequity thrives? For it shall indeed thrive, when the blessed walk past blissfully blind, content in their own moral purity, in the peace filling their souls. Oh, you might then reach out a hand to the wretched by the roadside, offering them your own footprints, and you may see the blessed burgeon in number, grow into a multitude, until you are as an army. But there will be, will ever be, those who turn away from your hand. The ones who quest because it is in their nature to quest, who fear the seduction of self-satisfaction, who mistrust easy answers. Are these ones then to be your enemy? Does the army grow angered now? Does it strike out at the unbelievers? Does it crush them underfoot?

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you just can't help it.

The real world reveals itself like surprise gifts on our doorstep, special moments that seem above and beyond the reality of others. These times are full, beautiful and meaningful beyond words, even when wrapped in pain.

There are two important days in your life. The day you discovered you were alive and the day you forgot about it

There is an absolute power that truly empowers without corrupting

There was the dream of happiness and then there was what was real.

Then nothing became something, and I was born, and I wrought great havoc in the world in the time allotted to me, and I returned to nothingness

The old vacuum cleaner keeps dying on her over and over until at last the cleaning woman scares it by yelling: "Motherfucker!

The real life is not before you; the real life is not behind you; the real life, dear friend is where you are because where you are belongs to now, to this very moment and only this moment is real!

There is a great deal of fantasy in real life and real in fantasy.

These days, faith is a lot like Wisconsin: a series of repetitive ups and downs, the natural rise and fall of the road that stretches before you. Boring. Beautiful. Ridiculous sometimes, as when the road eases into the Wisconsin Dells and there are suddenly giant plastic animals and water slides and a huge haunted mansion tilted along the road.

this was an outstanding family subject in our real life.

The worst poverty isn’t about not having enough money to survive. Poverty of love is the worst thing you can be deprived of.

The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.

The system will always be defended by those countless people who have enough intellect to defend but not quite enough to innovate.

This is real life, Master Stephen. Happily ever after takes effort.

This life is not perfect, live it to the full, it's all we have

Una buena librería es, en realidad, un discreto agujero negro que sabe leer.

Though sincerity is a word which rings its meaning in the mind when it is mentioned, its real meaning in real sense is neither the meaning we imagine nor the spoken word but in action. Yes, it is action that determines what sincere means in reality. Real action that stands the test of time does not only give a true meaning to the word sincere in our mind and mind’s eye but it also creates a real picture of who a real sincere person is in our minds and mind’s eye.

To a young man, even a student of the most fabulous and powerful school on the Civilized Worlds, the times during which he comes to maturity always seem normal no matter how extraordinary, how turbulent with change they really are. Imminent change and danger act as drugs upon the human brain, or rather, as rich foods that nourish the urge toward more life. And how easily one becomes used to such nourishment. Those who survive the signal events of history – the wars, plagues, alien contacts, vastenings, speciations and religious awakenings – develop a taste for ferment and evolution next to which all the moments of 'normal' existence will seem dull, flat, meaningless. (Indeed, viewed from a godly coign of vantage across more than two million years, nothing about humankind's astonishing journey from the grassy veldts of Afarique to the galaxy's cold, numinous stars can be seen as normal.)

To live a hard life was to make solid and impregnable every way in, until no openings remained and the soul hid in darkness, and no one else could hear its screams, its railing at injustice, its long, agonizing stretches of sadness. Hardness without created hardness within. Sadness was, she well knew, not something that could be cured. It was not, in fact, a failing, not a flaw, not an illness of spirit. Sadness was never without reason, and to assert that it marked some kind of dysfunction did little more than prove ignorance or, worse, cowardly evasiveness in the one making the assertion. As if happiness was the only legitimate way of being. As if those failing at it needed to be locked away, made soporific with medications; as if the causes of sadness were merely traps and pitfalls in the proper climb to blissful contentment, things to be edged round or bridged, or leapt across on wings of false elation. Scillara knew better. She had faced her own sadness often enough. Even when she discovered her first means of escaping it, in durhang, she’d known that such an escape was simply a flight from feelings that existed legitimately. She’d just been unable to permit herself any sympathy for such feelings, because to do so was to surrender to their truth. Sadness belonged. As rightful as joy, love, grief and fear. All conditions of being. Too often people mistook the sadness in others for self-pity, and in so doing revealed their own hardness of spirit, and more than a little malice.

Tiffany got up early and lit the fires. When her mother came down, she was scrubbing the kitchen floor, very hard. “Er…aren’t you supposed to do that sort of thing by magic, dear?” said her mother, who’d never really got the hang of what witchcraft was all about. “No, Mum, I’m supposed not to,” said Tiffany, still scrubbing. “But can’t you just wave your hand and make all the dirt fly away, then?” “The trouble is getting the magic to understand what dirt is,” said Tiffany, scrubbing hard at a stain. “I heard of a witch over in Escrow who got it wrong and ended up losing the entire floor and her sandals and nearly a toe.” Mrs. Aching backed away. “I thought you just had to wave your hands about,” she mumbled nervously. “That works,” said Tiffany, “but only if you wave them about on the floor with a scrubbing brush.

True love makes you sleep and dream. But loud reality wakes you up

We don't know where we come from and where we go, we fill the missing links with whatever our imaginations can provide us

Waiting for ‘real life’ to begin when you’re ‘ready’ means you’ll never be ready for real life because real life never happens when you’re ready.⁣⁣

Water in, water out until there is no water to run and the riverbed runs dry. That's life

We all have the best laid plans for our children, and they go and ruin it all by growing up any way they want to. What the hell was it all for, then? (Real Life and Liars)

We become increasingly aware that the human dream, the human drama, with all its questionable, damaging, and often malevolent intention is not real life at all.

We deal with so many nightmares on a regular basis. When I’m watching a horror movie, there’s a pattern, a sense of control in them. I’m just an observer, not having to deal with any of the repercussions. It’s a nice dream to think monsters play by the rules, that they’ve got a pattern you can unlock and follow. Real life’s messy, and the chaos leaves you devastated in the wake.

We live in a world when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

We know how to dream beautifully! And in our dreams we are always extraordinarily active! We cross oceans, found colonies, introduce ideal governments, and die as Kings or at least Presidents of Republics! In actual life, however, we groan, we are miserable, and we greatly resent being obliged to bother about going to the Bank, in order to receive the interest of the capital acquired for us by our more energetic ancestors.

We live like sheep in line waiting to be slaughtered in a slaughterhouse. We eat and laugh and fight as we see those in front of us fall to the knife

What is life but an ongoing war?

Whatever you give a woman, she will make greater. If you give her sperm, she'll give you a baby.. If you give her a house, she'll give you a home. If you give her groceries, she'll give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she'll give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her. So, if you give her any crap, be ready to receive a ton of shit!

When I got back to my office Tween was there. She rose from the foyer couch as I wheezed in off the ramp. I took one look at her and said, “Come inside.” She followed me through the inner door. I waved my hand over the infra-red plate and it closed. Then I put out my arms. She bleated like a new-born lamb and flew to me. Her tears were scalding, and I don’t think human muscles are built for the wrenching those agonized sobs gave her. People should cry more. They ought to learn how to do it easily, like laughing or sweating. Crying piles up. In people like Tween, who do nothing if they can’t smile and make a habit-pattern of it, it really piles up. With a reservoir like that, and no developed outlet, things get torn when the pressure builds too high. I just held her tight so she wouldn’t explode. The only thing I said to her was “sh-h-h” once when she tried to talk while she wept. One thing at a time.

What's the use of life without health? It's like living dead

When a great team loses through complacency, it will constantly search for new and more intricate explanations to explain away defeat. After a while it becomes more innovative in thinking up how to lose than thinnking up how to win.

[...] when you look at the world, you put on the goggles of custom, habit and tribal wisdom lest the truth make you insane [...] you see the world reflected in your own image; you see yourself reflected to the image of the world [...]

When writing fiction, you learn to only put things and characters in, that are going to progress your story. There is something to be learned about that approach in real life