Louis Auchincloss Quotes

Regardless of whether one is a writer or a reader, one's task consists first of all in mastering a life that is one's own, not imposed or prescribed from without, no matter how noble its appearance may be. For each of us is issued but one life, and we know full well how it all ends.

The knowledge that we are responsible for living the life we have is our most powerful tool.

You are free to give life meaning, whatever meaning you want to give it.

You only have one go at life, which is thrilling. Only you can make yourself into who you want to be. Don't blame anybody else. You are entitled to free fresh air, and that's it. Do the rest yourself.

What is a fear of living? It's being preeminently afraid of dying. It is not doing what you came here to do, out of timidity and spinelessness. The antidote is to take full responsibility for yourself - for the time you take up and the space you occupy. If you don't know what you're here to do, then just do some good.

Our life is our life. If we waste it, we're fools.

You need to think and live your life. You only live once. That's how it is.

When I turned 30, I had this epiphany that my life is my own and my choices are my own.

You're alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it?

If man puts his honor first in relying upon himself, knowing himself and applying himself, this in self-reliance, self-assertion, and freedom, he then strives to rid himself of the ignorance which makes a strange impenetrable object a barrier and a hindrance to his self-knowledge.

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.

Each one of us is left to choose our own quality of life and take pleasure where we find it with the understanding that, like Mom used to say, sooner or later something's gonna get you.

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

I never had time to dream about being anyone else.

I know who I am and what I'm doing in my life and what I've accomplished and continue to accomplish as a performer, as a writer, as an artist, as a person, as a human being.

I never going to satisfy everybody, so I decided to satisfy myself.

In the end, I want to be able to say, 'My life was what I made it.'

Every character is asking: 'What's my place? Why am I here? I don't want the answer to be 'Just because.' You find your own purpose. Each finds the reason to be here and how to contribute.

Everybody eventually discovers that they are an individual with the power to affect their own lives and make it better or not.

By the age of 50, I would like to know that I'm not dead - that there's some continuity to my life.

I'm just living my life.

In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.

If you don't take the chance to live life, what can you say at the end of it?

I made my own assessment of my life, and I began to live it. That was freedom.