A Quote by Robert A. Heinlein

Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.

Robert A. Heinlein

Quote Topics

Birth Breath Effort Even Free Life Life Is Nothing Only Pain Purchased Through Value

Quote Author

Robert A. Heinlein
American - Writer
July 7, 1907 - May 8, 1988

Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain... The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion... and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself--ultimate cost for perfect value

Robert A. Heinlein

There is an old song which asserts 'the best things in life are free.' Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted...and get it without toil, without sweat, without tears. Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.

Robert A. Heinlein

Gasping for breath, the body still battling for life.

Truman Capote

Especially with athletic pubalgia and the patellar tendonitis - I used to bowl six balls and then I used to be gasping for breath. And there would be pain all over the place.

Ravichandran Ashwin

What is difficult to understand is that without conscious effort, nothing is possible. Conscious effort is related to higher nature. My lower nature alone cannot lead me to consciousness. It is blind. But when I wake up and I feel that I belong to a higher world, this is only part of conscious effort. I become truly conscious only when I open to all my possibilities, higher and lower. There is value only in conscious effort.

Jeanne de Salzmann

She expected the pain, when it came. But she gasped at its sharpness; it was not like any pain she had felt before. He kissed her and slowed and would have stopped. But she laughed, and said that this one time she would consent to hurt, and bleed, at his touch. He smiled into her neck and kissed her again and she moved with him through the pain. The pain became a warmth that grew. Grew, and stopped her breath. And took her breath and her pain and her mind away from her body, so that there was nothing but her body and his body and the light and fire they made together.

Kristin Cashore

Peace purchased at the cost of any part of our national integrity is fit only for slaves, and even when purchased for such a price it is a delusion, for it cannot last.

William Borah

This final sprint of Breaking Bad is like nothing I've ever seen. It's TV as a crescendo, as a magnet, as a wave. These episodes aren't ending so much as they're gasping for breath.

Andy Greenwald

Life and existence have no value in themselves. We mean nothing; not even those who are needed mean anything. The only thing of real value is what we produce.

Ninni Holmqvist

There is no pain greater than this; not the cut of a jagged-edged dagger nor the fire of a dragon's breath. Nothing burns in your heart like the emptiness of losing something, someone, before you truly have learned of its value.

R. A. Salvatore

Jesus, I wondered, what do you do with pain so bad it has no redeeming value? It cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that it has woven itself into your system so deeply that there is no way to objectify or push it outside or find its beauty within. That is the pain I’m feeling now. Its so bad, its useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

I would rather dwell in the dim fog of superstition than in air rarefied to nothing by the air-pump of unbelief-in which the panting breast expires, vainly and convulsively gasping for breath.

Jean Paul

Now you can begin to see quite transparently that nothing purchased life is one of argument, If other people don't agree with you you're in big trouble. How far would you get in your work if nobody agreed that what you were doing had value?

Frederick Carl Frieseke

Breath by breath, let go of fear, expectation, anger, regret, cravings, frustration, fatigue. Let go of the need for approval. Let go of old judgments and opinions. Die to all that, and fly free. Soar in the freedom of desirelessness. Let go. Let Be. See through everything and be free, complete, luminous, at home -- at ease.

Surya Das

I love the sound of snow... You can hear it even if you are only standing on a balcony. [The sound] is only minimal, not even a real noise: a breath, a trifle of a sound. You have the same thing in music: if in the score there is a pianissimo marked that ends in nothing. Up thee you can feel this 'nothing'. With an orchestra it is very difficult to achieve it. The Berlin Philharmonic manage it sometimes.