Quotes
Quotes about Living
Such is the aspect of this shore;
'T is Greece, but living Greece no more!
So coldly sweet, so deadly fair,
We start, for soul is wanting there.
Brave men were living before Agamemnon.
The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame
Over his living head like heaven is bent,
An early but enduring monument,
Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
In sorrow.
Trust no future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, act in the living present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!
Ye are better than all the ballads
That ever were sung or said;
For ye are living poems
And all the rest are dead.
Authors--essayist, atheist, novelist, realist, rhymester, play your part,
Paint the mortal shame of nature with the living hues of art.
Wake in our breast the living fires,
The holy faith that warmed our sires;
Thy hand hath made our nation free;
To die for her is serving Thee.
That we devote ourselves to God, is seen
In living just as though no God there were.
How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!
Good, to forgive;
Best, to forget!
Living, we fret;
Dying, we live.
Work, and thou wilt bless the day
Ere the toil be done;
They that work not, can not pray,
Can not feel the sun.
God is living, working still,
All things work and move;
Work, or lose the power to will,
Lose the power to love.
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.
Not what we would, but what we must
Makes up the sum of living;
Heaven is both more and less than just
In taking and in giving.
"Learn while you're young," he often said,
"There is much to enjoy, down here below;
Life for the living, and rest for the dead!"
Said the jolly old pedagogue, long ago.
"The living need charity more than the dead."
Is life worth living? Yes, so long
As there is wrong to right.
So long as faith with freedom reigns
And loyal hope survives,
And gracious charity remains
To leaven lowly lives;
While there is one untrodden tract
For intellect or will,
And men are free to think and act,
Life is worth living still.
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no man lives forever,
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
But I believe that God is overhead
And as life is to the living, so death is to the dead.
A rose to the living is more
Than sumptuous wreaths to the dead.
When one told Plistarchus that a notorious railer spoke well of him, "I 'll lay my life," said he, "somebody hath told him I am dead, for he can speak well of no man living."
The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, in so far as it stands ready against the accidental and the unforeseen, and is not apt to fall.
On one occasion Aristotle was asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated: "As much," said he, "as the living are to the dead."
As when, O lady mine!
With chiselled touch
The stone unhewn and cold
Becomes a living mould.
The more the marble wastes,
The more the statue grows.
We were halves throughout, and to that degree that methinks by outliving him I defraud him of his part.
