We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist. So, for a time, if such a passion come to fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows pass across sundials. It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book will become familiar; the beautiful corner of the road will have been turned too many times. Well, this is the saddest story. Ford Madox Ford
This life is not nice. Catch 22 1970 Starring Alan Arkin & Martin Balsam & Richard Benjamin & Arthur Garfunkel & Jack Gilford & Anthony Perkins & Martin Sheen & Jon Voight & Orson Welles & Buck Henry & Bob Newhart & Paula Prentiss et al, director Mike Nichols, Garfunkel
That’s the problem, mum. I’m not dead. I’ve gotta live. Born on the Fourth of July 1989 starring Tom Cruise & Willem Dafoe & Kyra Sedgwick & Raymond J Barry & Jerry Levine & Frank Whaley & Caroline Kava & Cordelia Gonzalez & Ed Lauter & John Getz & Michael Wincott & Edith Diaz & Bob Gunton et al, director Oliver Stone, Ronny
Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way. And don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines. Richard Nixon
Remember, always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you. But those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself. Richard Nixon
Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things ... Life is one crisis after another. Richard Nixon
What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance. Richard Nixon
Life – overrated I reckon. Blackadder II: Chains, Blackadder to Melchett, BBC 1986
Madam, life without you is like a broken pencil. Pointless. ibid. Blackadder to Elizabeth
All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince chIII
A prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent. ibid. chVI
For of men it may generally be affirmed, that they are thankless, fickle, false studious to avoid danger, greedy of gain, devoted to you while you are able to confer benefits upon them, and ready, as I said before, while danger is distant, to shed their blood, and sacrifice their property, their lives, and their children for you; but in the hour of need they turn against you. ibid.
So how can we determine what’s real and what’s not? We can’t. We can just pick and choose what we want to believe and rationalize it as best we can. Reality, after all, is basically a movie projected inside our heads. It’s based on the colors our senses permit us to see, the sounds they permit us to hear and whatever else our brains let slip through the gates. But outside our limited senses, surrounding us, there is, unquestionably, a much greater reality, a universe we live in but cannot see. Well, most of us, anyway. Out there, in the dark, All Things Are Possible. Richard B Spence, The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy
I am so happy to be alive. That’s the one thing I’d like for people to know. Sometimes people walk by and slip up and say the wrong thing about me, and I’ll smile. They wonder why am I smiling. Because I’m happy that I’m alive. George Foreman
The world is full of people who want to play it safe, people who have tremendous potential but never use it. Somewhere deep inside them, they know that they could do more in life, be more, and have more – if only they were willing to take a few risks. George Foreman, Knockout Entrepreneur
Boxing is real easy. Life is much harder. Floyd Mayweather junior
Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life. Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poetry
Life doesn’t make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy’s job is to point out that it doesn’t make sense, and that it doesn’t make much difference anyway. Eric Idle
We all need something to help us unwind at the end of the day. You might have a glass of wine, or a joint, or a big delicious blob of heroin to silence your silly brainbox of its witterings but there has to be some form of punctuation, or life just seems utterly relentless. Russell Brand, My Booky Wook
Most people they just er drift through life without any real aims. They are weak. But it’s no good just sitting there whining. You’ve got to get up and do something about it. Now not that it isn’t a fight, of course it is. Life is a fight. People they always seem to be against you. Play for Today: Abigail’s Party ***** written and directed Mike Leigh, starring Alison Steadman, Laurence, BBC 1977
The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues. Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
I often wonder whether life is worth living. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Life is for the living.
Death is for the dead.
Let life be like music.
And death a note unsaid. Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems
It was kind of a piercing kind of a sound. It was piercing and mellow at the same time. And I think that’s what really struck me about just the loneliness of the human condition. And for some reason I rather thought that black people actually captured that rather very well in music was this kind of loneliness in the human condition, that no matter how much you yearn for communion, yearn for community, in the end there is this loneliness and there’s no way you can escape it. Gerald Early
We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end. Lewis Mumford
I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ’Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death. Thomas Paine, The American Crisis
About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times. C G Jung
You’re fucked. You thought you were going to be someone, but now it’s obvious you’re nobody. You haven’t got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you’re looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That’s pretty heavy. That’s worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You’ve got the choice of a slow, painful death, or a quick, merciful one. Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa. Eugene Ionesco
Life is not an easy matter ... You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness. Leon Trotsky
There are winners and there are losers and that’s it! The Call Centre Christmas, Nev, BBC 2014
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww! Jack Kerouac