Decent Life Quotes

It is important that our relationship with farm animals is reciprocal. We owe animals a decent life and a painless death. I have observed that the people who are completely out of touch with nature are the most afraid of death ... ~ Temple Grandin

I decided that I was ready to assume this position when I discovered that the chance to save the country was very meager. I was prepared to sacrifice myself for this country and its 90 million people. They want food, fuel and electricity and yearn for a decent life. Any president who does not pay attention to such details or is unable to provide the minimum level of stability should leave office. ~ Abdel Fattah El-Sisi

For that reason the simple test of the slogan 'Consume Less' as a basis for social action on the environment would be to tell it to the blacks in the ghetto. The message will not be very well received for there are many people in this country who consume less than is needed to sustain a decent life. ~ Barry Commoner

No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction
toward anarchy and poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

It's easy to pinpoint when it all started, that moment of walking into his sun-soaked classroom and feeling his eyes drink me in for the first time, but it's harder to know when it ended, if it really ended at all. I think it stopped when I was twenty-two, when he said he needed to get himself together and couldn't live a decent life while I was within reach, but for the past decade there have been late-night calls, him and me reliving the past, worrying the wound we both refuse to let heal. ~ Kate Elizabeth Russell

I figure I'll win the fight in twenty years or so anyways when I end up with a decent life and their unemployed and living at home. ~ Alexandra Robbins

In New Orleans the funerals remind us that Life is bigger than any individual life, and it will roll on, and for the short time that your individual life joins the big stream of Life, cut some decent steps, for God's sake. ~ Tom Piazza

Lenin did not write as eloquently about religion as Marx, nor did he write about it often. He wielded Marx's 'opium of the people' from time to time, but his own metaphor was alcoholic. In his 1905 essay, 'Socialism and Religion,' he wrote of 'the distribution of state-clerical gin' in which 'slaves of capital drown their human shape and their claims to any decent life.' His alternative metaphor suggests a shift from thinking of religion as anesthesia to thinking of it - much as Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov did - as a vice. ~ Roland Elliott Brown

I wake up one day and it's twenty-plus years later, and here I am still. That's getting left behind. And even then, you can have a decent life. You know why I'm still here? It's because I'm content. Maybe even happy. I found my path. My life is simple. I wake up in the morning. I eat my Cheerios, drink my coffee, think my thoughts. I go home after work and sit on my back patio and pet my dog and listen to music and myself breathing. It feels good to be alive and exist. Most things haven't worked out for me - especially love - but that's all right. I'm not as pretty as I used to be. More of my life's behind me than in front of me. Who knows how many years I took off it while I was partying. But I'm a lot healthier now, if you can believe it.
"I get lonely sometimes, but so does everyone else. We're all looking for some sort of salvation in something sometimes we try to find it in people. We find out salvation, and it slips through our fingers. We find it again. We get left behind. Living is hurting, but I'll take living over the alternative any day. Consciousness is a marvelous gift. It took almost dying to make me realize that. Hell, I'm just rambling now. Anyway, having said all this, you did not get left behind. ~ Jeff Zentner

I'm not scared of hell. I lived a decent life, and I don't think there is such a place, anyway. I'm scared there's nothing." He struggled for breath. A pearl of blood was swelling in the corner of his right eye. "There was nothing before, we all know that, so doesn't it stand to reason that there's nothing after?" "But there is." Dan wiped Charlie's face with the damp cloth. "We never really end, Charlie. I don't know how that can be, or what it means, I only know that it is. ~ Stephen King

> First, move out of that big Manhattan loft and head upstate. You'll find a little place you can afford and start a new life. Maybe get a job teaching at a community college. Maybe meet a girl at Best Buy, start dating. She'll put up with your crazy habits. You'll put up with her musical tastes.

> I don't understand. What's going on here?

> Time will pass. You'll make it official. You'll settle down, get a starter house. Two boys. Yellow Lab. Minivan.

> That. . . That isn't me.

> Why not? It could be. You'll make art in the basement for yourself for a while. The boys'll get married. Have kids of their own. Maybe y'get divorced. Meet someone new. And yeah, you'll wonder what could have been. But less, as the years go by. "Just wasn't meant to be," you'll say. And there'll be good times along the way. Sweet memories. Until it starts to wind down. Until your body fails. Until you don't recognize the world around you. Until it's time to go.

> That. . . isn't me. It can't be.

> Why not? It's a decent life. Food, sex, running water, a roof. Not to mention love and family. Those aren't small things.

> But it's not enough.

> You kids, you're so spoiled! Y'know billions would kill for a life like that. So what if the art thing didn't work out? Is it really that important?

> It's all I have. ~ Scott McCloud

The wild girl is with me always; she is my rage and my hunger, and if I live what passes for a decent life in this world, it is because I know to say no to the thing inside me that yearns, even now, to burn it all down. ~ Mary Stewart Atwell

Afterwards, sometimes she dared to remember being in his arms. How, after only clumsy couplings with others, she and this man had straightaway come together as a perfect fit. How they moved together, in effortless synchronicity and with such deep pleasure. How when their exercise left them exhausted, she cried a little, so Vinius wiped her eye with his index finger, murmuring kindly, 'No tears!' before they both fell into profound sleep.
How her troubled mind had drowned in peace, her body melting against his...

He was dead. No point speculating. Cherish the past for what it was, an ideal, a signal that human happiness might be a possibility. Raise your standards. Make a decent life, Lucilla. Life is all there is. If it's only once, it must be good... He had been right. If perfection only happened once, that was better than never. Now nothing for her would ever again entail complete despair. So thank you, Gaius Vinius Clodianus, son of Marcus, thank you for your good deed, a deed that brightened somebody's dark world. ~ Lindsey Davis

The people who keep asking if they can't lead a decent life without Christ, don't know what life is about; if they did they would know that 'a decent life' is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for. ~ C.S. Lewis

The proclamation of the Gospel is destined primarily to the poor, to those who often lack the essentials for a decent life. The good news is first announced to them, that God loves them before all others and comes to visit them through the acts of charity that the disciples of Christ carry out in his name. ~ Pope Francis

Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life.
[ Live 8 Concert, Mary Fitzgerald Square, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2 July 2005] ~ Nelson Mandela

There is not way that you can have a decent life as a man if you aren't awake and aware every moment. Show up for your own life. Don't pass your days in a stupor, content to swallow whatever watery ideas modern society may bottle feed you through the media, satisfied to slumber through life in an instant gratification sugar coma. The most extraordinary gift you've been given is your own humanity, which is about consciousness. So honor that consciousness. ~ Eustace Conway

Sustainable development is not an option! It is the only path that allows all of humanity to share a decent life on this, one planet. Rio+20 gives our generation the opportunity to choose this path. ~ Sha Zukang

I would not have put it this way in those days, but because I was born a woman, I could never become an adult. I would always be a minor, my decisions made for me. I would always be
a unit in a vast beehive. I might have a decent life, but I would be dependent - always - on someone treating me well.
I knew that another kind of life was possible. I had read about it, and now I could see it, smell it in the air around me: the kind of life I had always wanted, with a real education, a real job, a real marriage. I wanted to make my own decisions. I wanted to become a person, an individual, with a life of my own. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever ... and the other one scared me out of my mind. ~ Frederik Pohl

We are violating every aspect of life by turning everything into a ripoff because we have adopted the view that insatiable individualistic greed must run the world. We are living in a very dangerous age in which insatiably greedy men are prepared to sacrifice anybody's health and tranquility to satisfy their own insatiable greed for money and power. I am aghast at what selfishness, and the drive for power have done to our society. I worry as I find the world so increasingly horrible that I do not see how anything as wonderful as your life can escape. The best thing you can do is to keep some enclaves of satisfying decent life. I am fed up with everything but God and nature and human beings (whom I love and pity, as I always did). I feel glad I am a Christian, glad that I am without allegiance to any bloc, party, or groups, except to our Judeo-Christian tradition (modified by science and common sense). God keep you all and help you to grow. ~ Carroll Quigley

Farewell, eyes that I loved! Do not blame me if the human body cannot go three days without water. I should never have believed that man was so truly the prisoner of the springs and freshets. I had no notion that our self-sufficiency was so circumscribed. We take it for granted that a man is able to stride straight out into the world. We believe that man is free. We never see the cord that binds him to wells and fountains, that umbilical cord by which he is tied to the womb of the world. Let man take but one step too many... and the cord snaps.

Apart from your suffering, I have no regrets. All in all, it has been a good life. If I got free of this I should start right in again. A man cannot live a decent life in cities, and I need to feel myself live. I am not thinking of aviation. The airplane is a means, not an end. One doesn't risk one's life for a plane any more than a farmer ploughs for the sake of the plough. But the airplane is a means of getting away from towns and their bookkeeping and coming to grips with reality. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

So, who are they really, these hundred thousand white supremacists? They're every white guy who believed that this land was his land, made for you and me. They're every down-on-his-luck guy who just wanted to live a decent life but got stepped on, every character in a Bruce Springsteen or Merle Haggard song, every cop, soldier, auto mechanic, steelworker, and construction worker in America's small towns who can't make ends meet and wonders why everyone else is getting a break except him. But instead of becoming Tom Joad, a left-leaning populist, they take a hard right turn, ultimately supporting the very people who have dispossessed them.

They're America's Everymen, whose pain at downward mobility and whose anger at what they see as an indifferent government have become twisted by a hate that tells them they are better than others, disfigured by a resentment so deep that there are no more bridges to be built, no more ladders of upward mobility to be climbed, a howl of pain mangled into the scream of a warrior. Their rage is as sad as it is frightening, as impotent as it is shrill. ~ Michael S. Kimmel

Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality. ~ Mohsin Hamid

You can't criticize people for wanting to have a decent life or wanting to live decently. ~ Angela Davis

Like the character I played in 'Jekyll', we all have different masks we put on for different occasions. As much as we all want to lead decent lives, we're also attracted by the idea that something dark may lurk within us. ~ James Nesbitt

We owe them [animals] a decent life and a decent death, and their lives should be as low-stress as possible. That's my job. I wish animals could have more than just a low-stress life and a quick, painless death. I wish animals could have a good life, too, with something useful to do. People were animals, too, once, and when we turned into human beings we gave something up. Being close to animals brings some of it back. ~ Temple Grandin

Of all the characteristics needed for both a happy and morally decent life, none surpasses gratitude. Grateful people are happier, and grateful people are more morally decent. ~ Dennis Prager

Everyone working 40 hrs a week should have a shot at a decent life. ~ Joe Biden

Apart from whether collectivism, the "communist vermin," is a danger to decent life, the communism gnawing at his entrails was no more than a natural longing for something better, a protest against persistent hunger transformed into a love for this strange doctrine, whose essence he could never grasp but whose translation, "bread for the poor," was something which he understood and, more importantly, filled him with hope. ~ Ernesto Che Guevara

Even though I've never met my dad and don't really want to, I share some of his talents. Along with being the messenger of the gods, Hermes is the god of merchants-which explains why I'm good with money-and travelers, which explains why the divine jerk left my mom and never came back. He's also the god of thieves. He's stolen things like-oh, Apollo's cattle, women, good ideas, wallets, my mom's sanity, and my chance at a decent life.
Sorry, did that sound bitter? ~ Rick Riordan

A decent life, even a short life, will always be far better than an exceptionally long life lived in ruin. ~ Steven J. Carroll

It seemed to him that in Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they dodged. A decent life was the train that hadn't hit you, the slumlord you hadn't offended, the malaria you hadn't caught. ~ Katherine Boo

These are things I'd never seen before, they were very disturbing and they were very compelling to try and do something to change the situation for the animals. Farm animals are providing us with the food to stay alive, so I think we really owe them a decent life while they are alive. ~ Jan Cameron

Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people. ~ Robert Higgs

Mankind's feeling of responsibility to create a decent life and make it worth living with dignity has always been stronger than the will to kill life. ~ Tawakkol Karman

Briefly, then, life, to the pessimist, is a motiveless desire, a constant pain and continued struggle, followed by death, and so on, in secula seculorum, until the planet's crust crumbles to dust. ~ Edgar Saltus

It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life. ~ George Orwell

Go within and release yesterday's sorrow so you may embrace today's joy. ~ Liz Hester

We so easily forget that we came into life with nothing. Whatever we get soon seems our natural right, not a gift. And we forget the giver. Then our gaze shifts from what we have been given to what we dont have yet ... ~ Henry B. Eyring

All art is immoral.... For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life, and of that practical organization of life that we call society."
―Oscar Wilde ~ Oscar Wilde

Man's life is militia against man's malice. ~ Baltasar Gracian

I am a great believer in having the power to end your life and knowing that, in extremis, you can. But I would not want to involve anybody else in my actions if it could imperil them. ~ Deborah Moggach

The fruitfulness of our life depends in large measure on our ability to doubt our own words and to question the value of our own work. The man who completely trusts his own estimate of himself is doomed to sterility. All he asks of any act he performs is that it be his act. If it is performed by him, it must be good. All words spoken by him must be infallible. The car he has just bought is the best for its price, for no other reason than that he is the one who has bought it. He seeks no other fruit than this, and therefore he generally gets no other. ~ Thomas Merton

I would say if you are having a tough time in your life, then going to a club and getting laughs, it does make you feel better for that hour and a half show. It gets your mind off of it. ~ Jon Lovitz

When, thirty-five years ago, I tried to give a summary of the ideas and principles of that social philosophy that was once known under the name of liberalism, I did not indulge in the vain hope that my account would prevent the impending catastrophes to which the policies adopted by the European nations were manifestly leading. All I wanted to achieve was to offer to the small minority of thoughtful people an opportunity to learn something about the aims of classical liberalism and its achievements and thus to pave the way for a resurrection of the spirit of freedom after the coming debacle. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Another turn in my life happened when I took on the Canada Council. ~ Maureen Forrester

When I consider my life objectively, it does not seem particularly happy. Yet I cannot really call it unhappy, despite all my mistakes. After all, it is quite foolish to talk about happiness and unhappiness, for it seems to me that I would not exchange the unhappiest days of my life for all the happy ones. ~ Hermann Hesse

I believe that there is some spiritual entity that's greater than us. I do not belong to any specific organized religion. I have always believed that, and I believe it even more so now. I believe that someone was listening to me, and someone is giving me an incredibly blessed life. ~ Jane Seymour

What need had the businessman to scribble or philosophize when he dominated the imagination of his time and the frantic materialism that was his principle of existence had become the haunting central figure in contemporary life? ~ Alfred Kazin

We think our world into being. ~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

Ninety-nine percent of everything you do in life is attitude. If you have a relationship with God ... you're going to learn to ask the one question in life that covers everything: How can I help you? ~ Walter Levine

It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen. ~ Anthony Burgess

Remember, they've never seen you before in their life. ~ Andy Warhol

My first life fled without a fight and left nothing behind, so I doubt it was a loss worth mourning. A man I don't remember mixed genes with a woman I can't recall, and I was called to the stage. I stumbled through the curtain, squinting into the blinding light of the birth canal, and after a brief and banal performance, I died.
This is the arc of the average life - unexamined, unremarked, unremarkable - and it should have ended there. In simpler times, life was a one-act play, and when it was over we took our bows and caught our roses and enjoyed any applause we earned, then the spotlight faded and we shuffled backstage to nibble crackers in the greenroom of eternity. ~ Isaac Marion

I think of him now, ragged and lost, staggering across a desert, the path behind him littered with all the shiny little pieces that life has ripped from him. ~ Khaled Hosseini

You Make Me"
(feat. Salem Al Fakir)

[Vocals by Salem Al Fakir]

We are one,
One for sure.
All united,
You'll want some more.

Oh Oh Oh Oh
You make me!
Oh Oh Oh Oh
You make me!

We are one,
One for sure.
All united,
You'll need no more

Oh Oh Oh Oh
You make me!
Oh Oh Oh Oh

All my life I've been, I've been waiting for someone like you (yeah)
All my life I've been, I've been waiting for someone like you (yeah)

I've been looking for someone like you (yeah)
I've been waiting for someone like you (like you [x4])

You make me!

[Instrumental break]

We are one,
One's for sure.
All united,
You'll want some more.

Oh Oh Oh Oh
You make me!
Oh Oh Oh Oh
You make me!

We are one,
One's for sure.
All united,
You'll need no more

Oh Oh Oh Oh
You make me!
Oh Oh Oh Oh

All my life I've been, I've been waiting for someone like you (yeah)
All my life I've been, I've been waiting for someone like you (yeah)

I've been looking for someone like you (yeah)
I've been waiting for someone like you (like you [x4]) ~ Avicii

A basic truth of management - if not of life - is that nearly everything looks like a failure in the middle. ~ Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Redefine Yourself will help you overcome the obstacles that have plagued your life. You will incorporate new adaptive strategies that will not only change your life, but also positively impact those people around you. You will truly redefine yourself and achieve the happiness you've always wanted. You might just achieve that long list of other wants too. ~ Michael Moody

We still check in with each other. She was a big part of my life, and me hers. I don't see how there cannot be [that]. That's life, man. That's life. ~ Brad Pitt

When all the dark clouds roll away And the sun begins to shine I see my freedom from across the way And it comes right in on time Well it shines so bright and it gives so much light And it comes from the sky above Makes me feel so free makes me feel like me And lights my life with love. ~ Van Morrison

Life should be more like hockey. When someone pisses you off, you just beat the shit out of them, then sit in the penalty box for five minutes. ~ Sandman ~ Nicole James

We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The true tragedy of routinely spent life is that its wastefulness does not become apparent till it is too late. ~ Amitav Ghosh

#TRUTH
YOU CAN'T ALWAYS GET WHAT
YOU WANT. BUT YOU SURE AS HELL
CAN LIVE A GREAT LIFE IN THE
PROCESS! ~ Timothy Pina

Life's perhaps the only riddle That we shrink from giving up. ~ W.S. Gilbert

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of human life. ~ Alexander Smith

The life of theoretical philosophy is the best and happiest a man can lead. Few men are capable of it and then only intermittently. For the rest there is a second-best way of life, that of moral virtue and practical wisdom. ~ Aristotle.

When the sky explodes, trees will be left standing on their head, and you shall marvel at the color of their sorrow as you gaze up at the sky above. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

They say certain people aren't good soldiers because if they're in a foxhole all night - you know, if you're creative and smart, you're thinking about all the different ways someone is going to blow your head off. But if you're not that smart, you're just like chilling out. And I feel like that in life. I'm just in the foxhole all fucking day thinking about everything that's going to go wrong in every possible way. ~ Judd Apatow

My mom says, "Just keep in mind when you're choosing a career - money doesn't solve everything, but it sure makes life easier." I ~ Rachel Friedman

speak less about what you have done. think more about what you can do ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I believe it's imperative to bring the light of support and knowledge to patients and families when death is approaching. ~ Lisa J. Shultz

Sleep - death without dying - living, but not life. ~ Edwin Arnold

We are not the problem, we are the questions, our children will be the answers, life the contradiction, love is the reason, and GOD is the belief that our legacy is worth it's place in time. ~ Jevon Scott

The more you love, the more you give, the more you get. ~ Debasish Mridha

The octopuses seemed to be neither friends nor enemies, but in a state of complicated coexistence. ~ Peter Godfrey-Smith