"Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions."
"I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?"
— Oscar Wilde

"Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring."
— Oscar Wilde

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
— Bessie Anderson Stanley

"[...] 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!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"And, in the end
The love you take
is equal to the love you make."
— Paul McCartney

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."
— Henry David Thoreau

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."
— Sylvia Plath

"Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Live simply so others may simply live."
— Mother Teresa

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."
— Henry David Thoreau (Civil Disobedience and Other Essays: Collected Essays of Henry David Thoreau)

"Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry."
— Jack Kerouac

"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile. "
— Albert Einstein

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."
— Søren Kierkegaard