During these uncertain and shaky times, where social distancing and staying inside are the new normal, we are reminded of what really matters most in life.
Here are 16 quotes from books that remind us of what matters most in life.
1. “What matters most are the simple pleasures so abundant that we can all enjoy them…Happiness doesn’t lie in the objects we gather around us. To find it, all we need to do is open our eyes.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
2. “Son, don’t mind what’s missing. Count all that’s free: friendship, laughter, all the love your heart can carry, and time — count time.”
― Nikki Grimes, One Last Word: Wisdom from the Harlem Renaissance
3. “Almost universally, when people look back on their lives while on their deathbed […] they wish they had spent more time with the people and activities they truly loved and less time worrying about aspects of life that, upon deeper examination, really don’t matter at all that much. Imagining yourself at your own funeral allows you to look back at your life while you still have the chance to make some important changes.”
― Richard Carlson, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff … and It’s All Small Stuff: Simple Ways to Keep the Little Things From Taking Over Your Life
4. “When you are in the final days of your life, what will you want?
Will you hug that college degree in the walnut frame? Will you ask to be carried to the garage so you can sit in your car? Will you find comfort in rereading your financial statement? Of course not. What will matter then will be people. If relationships will matter most then, shouldn’t they matter most now?”
― Max Lucado, You Are Special
5. “For at the end of the day, what matters is never the wine, it’s always the moment; it’s always the people.”
― Olivier Magny, Into Wine: An Invitation to Pleasure
6. “Silly girl, it’s not what the universe gives us that matters. It’s what we give the universe.”
― Lauren Myracle, Let It Snow
7. “We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life
8. “The most important quality in the man you decide to marry should be the ability to make you laugh. Beauty fades, careers end, money comes and goes, religions change, children grow up and move away, spouses get sick, struggles happen, family members die, senility sets in when your older, but the ability to make you giggle every day is the most precious gift God can give you to get through all of it.”
― Shannon L. Alder, 300 Questions LDS Couples Should Ask Before Marriage
9. “Things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
10. “There are no lessons to be learned from the past. This is the first thing I learned from it. There is nothing back then that there isn’t here now. There is nothing here now – nothing that matters – that wasn’t back then. What matters. Are you a good person? Do you have any love in your heart? What would you do in a given circumstance? It all comes down to something like that.”
― Tom Lichtenberg, Time Zone
11. “But in the wake of ‘Bullet,’ all the guys wanted to know was, ‘How’s it doing? How’s it selling?’ How to tell them I didn’t give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader’s heart?”
― Stephen King, Everything’s Eventual
12. “Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you, as I’m sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you’re looking for, no matter how much of them you have.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
13. “What matters to you defines your mattering.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
14. “People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that’s not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
15. “What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again.”
― Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
16. “Perspective is as simple as answering this question: If I had 5 months to live would I experience this problem differently?”
― Shannon L. Alder, 300 Questions to Ask Your Parents Before It’s Too Late
Page By Paige 