A Quote by Henry David Thoreau

Don't get to the end of your life and realize you have never lived. — © Henry David Thoreau
Don't get to the end of your life and realize you have never lived.
Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?
When you have lived the life I've lived, when you've loved and suffered, and been madly happy and desperately sad -- well, that's when you realize you'll never be able to set it all down. Maybe you'd rather die first.
I did it because I thought I could die quickly if I lived like that. I couldn't end my life, leaving behind my younger sister. I thought that if I lived that way I would get punished and end this crappy life early. But now I want to live. Because I have a reason to live.
Now don't think that awakening is the end. Awakening is the end of seeking, the end of the seeker, but it is the beginning of a life lived from your true nature.
When you realize who you live for, and who's important to please, a lot of people will actually start living. I am never going to get caught up in that. I'm gonna look back on my life and say that I enjoyed it - and I lived it for me.
I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
And that's how things are. A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there. . . . And at the end of your life, your whole existence has the same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.
I used to get tons of letters that said, "I'll never get to wear you," or "I'll never get married in one of your dresses," or "I'll never have an evening gown like the one I saw on the red carpet." I thought that was sad, because you give your life to this and you end up reaching very few people. So that was a major goal for me - to be able to reach and encourage more women, to encourage them to express themselves and be what they want to be.
I feel a responsibility, as I get older, to be responsible to what I've experienced, to what I've lived and been in a position to witness. I realize now that as a consequence of having lived the life I have, quite apart from the one, as I understand it, lived by most American writers, maybe I now know some things and have some stories to tell that others don't know about or wouldn't be able to tell. Maybe there's an intrinsic value in that lived experience and knowledge, though of course what you do with it is everything.
It's taken me longer still to realize what a short span there is between those life experiences and the rest of your life. That's a job for the people who lived through it.
And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.
Sometimes you just have to turn the page to realize there's more to your book of life than the page you're stuck on. Stop being afraid to move on. Close this chapter of hurt, and never re-read it. It's time to get what your life deserves, and move on from the things that don't deserve you. Don't try to fix what's been broken in your past, let your future create something better.
I've been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it's too late, but I see now how badly I've deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to an end.
Perhaps we clutch at life only when we have never lived or trusted it. Then death seems the last and greatest defeat, the end of something never felt.
You get to a certain point in your life where you get closer to the end of your life than the beginning, and it colors your life, in a way.
Life's funny. You have to find a way to keep going, to keep laughing, even after you realize that none of your dreams will come true. When you realize that, there's still so much of a life to get through.
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