Rainer Werner Fassbinder Quotes

All of us want to live, and that is absolutely natural. However, we should learn from childhood on to choose our best way to die. If we don't do that, we end up spending our days like a dog, only in search of harbour, food and expressing a blind loyalty to his owner in return. That isn't enough to make our lives have a meaning.

I don't think life is about a pace, living slow or fast. I think you just live, y'know what I mean?

People say that life is short, but it isn't short. It's very long.

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.

You come into this world as you leave it, on your own. It's made me want to live a life slightly less ordinary.

We each have our lives... What matters is not how long those lives last, but what we do with them.

Human life [is] ... a process of filling in time until the arrival of death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of what kind of business one is going to transact during the long wait.

I can't say that I deserve longlife; I don't. I've just been around long enough. They say, "My God, she's still here."

It is futile to wish for a long life, and then to give so little care to living well.

We are all born to die—the difference is the intensity with which we choose to live.

At any moment, man must decide, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of his existence.

It should be our care not so much to live a long life as a satisfactory one.

A long life is a life well spent.

For even if the allotted space of life be short, it is long enough in which to live honorably and well.

Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long.

Modern science has as its object as little pain as possible, as long a life as possible - hence a sort of eternal blessedness, but of a very limited kind in comparison with the promises of religion.

Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?

Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on this refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.

One of the things that has helped me as much as any other is not how long I am going to live, but how much I can do while living.

The secret to a long life is knowin' when it's time to go.

Come on 'long prosperous life!'

Why you exist, says Nietzsche with Søren Kierkegaard, nobody in the world can tell you in advance; but since you do exist, try to give your existence a meaning by setting up for yourself as lofty and noble a goal as you can.

Our span of life is brief, but is long enough for us to live well and honestly.

A good life is a main argument.

What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?