True Life Quotes - Page 3

• The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

  Wallace Stevens

  Art, Real, Play

  7 Copy quote

• He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.

  Theodor Adorno

  Running, Believe, Risk

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.38, Univ of California Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• True friendship is worth more than can be measured, a quality forever to be treasured. True friends will staunchly stand beside each other, as loyally brother shieldeth brother, remaining firm in spite of war and strife, in poverty or sickness, throughout life. True friendship doth endure while comrades age from boy to youth, from warrior to sage.

  Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  Brother, True Friend, War

  9 Copy quote

• Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you’ve always known.

  Frank Herbert

  Life, Attitude, Teaching

  Frank Herbert (2010). “Dune”, p.422, Hachette UK

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Let us remember, too, that greatness is not always a matter of the scale of one’s life, but of the quality of one’s life. True greatness is not always tied to the scope of our tasks, but to the quality of how we carry out our tasks whatever they are. In that attitude, let us give our time, ourselves, and our talents to the things that really matter now, things which will still matter a thousand years from now.

  Spencer W. Kimball

  Attitude, Greatness, Years

  72 Copy quote

• We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way.

  George Orwell

  Dust, Years, Knowing

  George Orwell (2003). “Nineteen Eighty-four”, Penguin Mass Market

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.

  George Orwell

  Dust, Knowing, Splinters

  George Orwell (2001). “The Complete Novels of George Orwell: Animal Farm, Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Coming Up for Air, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Nineteen Eighty-Four”, p.1280, Penguin UK

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's true; life really is generous to those who pursue their destiny

  Paulo Coelho

  Life, Destiny, Alchemist

  16 Copy quote

• We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Life Is, Paradox

  Thomas Merton (2008). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation”, p.35, Sounds True

  66 Copy quote

  Show source

• Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

  Carl Jung

  Summer, Thinking, Civilization

  Carl Gustav Jung, Meredith Sabini (2002). “The Earth Has a Soul: The Nature Writings of C.G. Jung”, p.37, North Atlantic Books

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is no true life within a false life.

  Theodor Adorno

  6 Copy quote

• Blessed be the true life that the pauses between its throbs are not death!

  George MacDonald

  Blessed, Pauses

  George MacDonald (2015). “Lilith”, p.37, Booklassic

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Truth, Mean, Reality

  5 Copy quote

• The naturalistic literature of this country has reached such a state that no family of characters is considered true to life whichdoes not include at least two hypochondriacs, one sadist, and one old man who spills food down the front of his vest.

  Robert Benchley

  Family, Country, Character

  Robert Benchley (1922). “Love Conquers All”

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I was captured by the songs as much as the singer. They grabbed my heart. The reality of Country Music moved me. Even when I was a kid, I liked the sad songs... songs that talked about true life. I recognized this music as a simple plea. It beckoned me.

  Harlan Howard

  Country, Song, Heart

  8 Copy quote

• This book blew me away. Kelly Parra writes with the keen eye of an artist. Graffiti Girl is warm, gutsy, and true-to-life - an unflinching, honest portrayal of young adults. A seamless and impressive debut.

  Anne Frasier

  Girl, Book, Writing

  4 Copy quote

• I do believe that the outward and the inward life correspond; that if any should succeed to live a higher life, others would not know of it; that difference and distance are one. To set about living a true life is to go on a journey to a distant country, gradually to find ourselves surrounded by new scenes and men; and as long as the old are around me, I know that I am not in any true sense living a new or a better life.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Country, Travel

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.356, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It has nothing to do with age, it's not our languages, religion, gender, coulour of our skin; It's a soul within a well, that echoes deep beneath the ego's shell. True life can't ever start, until we offer up our heart.

  Dawud Wharnsby Ali

  Heart, Echoes, Ego

  "Song: 'Rachel' ('Out Seeing The Fields')". 2007.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Only in a true life or death scenario can you have mental clearness to know that you cannot feel guilty for surviving.

  George Zimmerman

  Life, Guilty, Feels

  "George Zimmerman accuses Obama of inflaming racial tensions" by Jethro Mullen, www.cnn.com. March 24, 2015.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• How a big majority of book critics and authors have come to believe and to teach that no book is true to life unless it is true to the worst in life, God knows.

  Gene Stratton-Porter

  Believe, Book, Majority

  28 Copy quote

• It's hard to find really original, compelling works of fiction, for women especially. I find that these true life stories about these women that I'm so blessed to play are some of the most compelling stories, and the truth is stranger than fiction.

  Hilary Swank

  Blessed, Play, Fiction

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Words are not necessary to one's experience of the true life.

  Don DeLillo

  4 Copy quote

• I do like Canadian poetry. Christian Bök, Anne Carson, Carmine Starnino, and Don McKay are a few of the Canadian poets whose work has been important to me. But I'm not sure that I do see poetry as a world apart. Some of my metaphors are based in the fantastic, but I try to be true to life as I understand it. That understanding is affected by my Canadianness, my Americanness, my whiteness, my gender, my age, my education, my experience...everything about me affects my view of reality. But I try to wrestle against those partialities, not embrace them.

  James Arthur

  Christian, Reality, Understanding

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.

  Don DeLillo

  Life, Memories, Thinking

  Don DeLillo (2010). “Point Omega”, p.17, Pan Macmillan

  36 Copy quote

  Show source

• If it is true ... that no one has a life worth thinking about whose life story cannot be told, does it not then follow that life could be, even ought to be, lived as a story, that what one has to do in life is to make the story come true?

  Hannah Arendt

  Life, Thinking, Doe

  Hannah Arendt, Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (2007). “Reflections on Literature and Culture”, p.271, Stanford University Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source