60+ Meaningful Quotes About The Reality Of Life

Published June 3, 2024

What is the meaning of life? I’m pretty sure you’ve asked yourself this question at some point. But most people don’t realize that each of us has a different answer. That’s because we all have different realities.

For some, life might be about leaving a legacy; for others, it’s just one big fight for survival. So, unless we’ve lived through their realities, we have no right to judge or condemn someone for their life choices. Similarly, we can’t let others dictate how we live our lives because they haven’t lived through what we’ve been or are currently going through.

Instead of condemnation, try kindness and understanding. Instead of accepting what life has dealt us, we should strive hard to create the life we’ve always wanted – a life worth living.

If, like a lot of us, you’re still trying to figure out life and how to make the most of it, these meaningful quotes about the reality of life might help:

1. We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will. – Chuck Palahniuk
2. Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you are living? – Bob Marley
3. The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. – Mark Twain
4. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. – Oscar Wilde
5. Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced. – Soren Kierkegaard
6. I have found that if you love life, life will love you back. – Arthur Rubinstein
7. Life is really simple, but men insist on making it complicated. – Confucius
8. We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom. – Leo Tolstoy
9. We can’t plan life. All we can do is be available for it. – Lauryn Hill
10. The best portion of a good man’s life is his little nameless, unencumbered acts of kindness and of love. – Wordsworth
11. If life were predictable it would cease to be life and be without flavor. – Eleanor Roosevelt
12. Every moment is a fresh beginning. – T.S. Eliot
13. You couldn’t hide from bad things and pretend they didn’t exist, that left you with a dream world, and dream worlds eventually crumble. You had to face the truth. And then decide what you wanted.  – Sarah Cross
14. Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway. – Anonymous
15. You create your own reality. – Jane Roberts
16. If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one. – Dolly Parton
17. Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving. – Albert Einstein
18. Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like. – Lao Tzu
19. It is not length of life, but depth of life. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
20. There were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations. – Jodi Picoult
21. Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life. – Omar Khayyam
22. Life is about making an impact, not making an income. – Kevin Kruse
23. You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. – Dr. Seuss
24. Life isn’t a matter of milestones, but of moments.  – Rose Kennedy
25. Your life’s work determines your legacy and the impact that you have on the world. – Germany Kent
26. If you live long enough, you’ll make mistakes. But if you learn from them, you’ll be a better person. – Bill Clinton
27. Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
28. Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. – George Bernard Shaw
29. You’re only here for a short visit. Don’t hurry, don’t worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way. – Walter Hagen
30. Life is 10 percent what you make it, and 90 percent how you take it. – Irving Berlin
31. If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things. – Albert Einstein
32. You don’t get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd. – Neil Gaiman
33. Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality. – Nikos Kazantzakis
34. You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough. – Mae West
35. I believe we are here on the planet Earth to live, grow up and do what we can to make this world a better place for all people to enjoy freedom. – Rosa Parks
36. You don’t have to disrespect and insult others simply to hold your own ground. If you do, that shows how shaky your own position is. – Red Haircrow
37. Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive. – Dalai Lama XIV
38. You can’t just wish change; you have to live the change in order for it to become a reality. – Steve Maraboli
39. Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. – Robert Louis Stevenson
40. Never let hard lessons harden your heart; the hard lessons of life are meant to make you better, not bitter. – Roy T. Bennett
41. You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories. – Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
42. The greatness of humanity is not in being human, but in being humane. – Mahatma Gandhi
43. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
44. We are more often frightened than hurt, and we suffer more from imagination than from reality. – Seneca
45. Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be. – Jack Welch
46. The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend. – Robertson Davies
47. The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction. – Rachel Carson
48. The more real you get the more unreal the world gets. – John Lennon
49. The dreams we are chasing and the reality that is chasing us are always parallel; they never meet. – Ai Yazawa
50. Too much of the time, we are blinded by our own pursuits of people to love us, people that don’t even matter, while all that time we waste and the people who do love us have to stand on the sidewalk and watch us beg in the streets! It’s time to put an end to this. It’s time for us to let ourselves be loved. – C. Joybell C.
51. If you’ve never eaten while crying you don’t know what life tastes like. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
52. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. – Friedrich Nietzsche
53. Nothing ever becomes real ’til it is experienced. – John Keats
54. You must accept the reality of other people. You think that reality is up for negotiation, that we think it’s whatever you say it is. You must accept that we are as real as you are; you must accept that you are not God. – J.K. Rowling
55. Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once. – Lillian Dickson
56. Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you’ve lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that’s good. – Elizabeth Edwards