Vincent Van Gogh Quotes

When you were born, you cried and everybody else was happy. The only question that matters is this - when you die, will you be happy when everybody else is crying?

At the end of our lives we all ask, 'Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter?'

Make every decision based on your last years of life instead of your next 10.

Life was given to me as a favor, so I may abandon it when it is one no longer.

I know how I want to try and live my life. I know I don't want to leave any darkness behind me.

When I'm 80 years old, I don't know what I want to be remembered for.

We're all going to die. While I'm still here, I want to make a difference.

You can't take life for granted.

I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

I guess I worry about weird existential things, like how do we spend our final act. This is a very emotional question. I can't answer it without crying. I think, You're 56 years old, what did you do? You raised two good kids. What am I going to do now that is as meaningful as that? I don't know the answer yet.

The further you go in life, the more you realize what you're going to leave this Earth.

I don't envision a very long life for myself. I think my life will run out before my work does. I've designed it that way.

We live our whole lives, and in our dying moment, we have to ask ourselves, 'What did we really care about? What impact did we make on the world?' The older I get, the more I realize the answers have to do with how we affect and love the people around us.

In my own life, as the nearer I get to the end of life on this earth, the simpler I want to become.

I want to say that since my dad has been diagnosed, I really feel like I understand the meaning of life, and it is not how you die: it is how you live.

I'm hungry in the ways that every artist is, but I also have this extra layer. I've done a lot of things that were consciously not for money, but because I'm so convinced I'm going to die in my mid-30s, I'm like, 'That's not what's important. Doing cool stuff and having that legacy is what's important.'

Love is the great test of the human. The human is tested by our ability to withstand love. Love is so difficult, it is so challenging, it demands of us that we wreck it with ourselves. It demands of us an honesty that few of us could sustain.

You'll never see a U-Haul behind a hearse. ... Now, I've been blessed to make hundreds of millions of dollars in my life. I can't take it with me, and neither can you. It's not how much you have but what you do with what you have.

Jane Fonda, who divided her life into three acts, decided after her sixtieth birthday that she was now facing the final act, and came to the following conclusion: "I thought to myself, well if that's the case and if what I'm scared of isn't death, but getting to the end with regrets, then I've got to figure out what would be the things that I would regret when I got to the last act if I hadn't done them or achieved them by then. And they were: having an intimate relationship and having made a difference."

Remember how often you have postponed minding your interest, and let slip those opportunities the gods have given you. It is now high time to consider what sort of world you are part of, and from what kind of governor of it you are descended; that you have a set period assigned you to act in, and unless you improve it to brighten and compose your thoughts, it will quickly run off with you, and be lost beyond recovery.

I cried a river of tears but he was too heavy to float on them. So I dragged him with me these years across an ocean.

One of the very important things that have to be learned around the time dying becomes a real prospect is to recognize those occasions when we have been useful in the world.

A woman can put up with almost anything; anything but indifference.

Until today, you may not have realized that your life provides the content of your obituary. Just for today, examine your life. Think about all of the things you want to leave behind. Remember, the good thing about doing this today is that you still have time to rewrite your life's content if necessary.

It is not desirable that we should live as in the constant atmosphere and presence of death; that would unfit us for life; but it is well for us, now and then, to talk with death as friend talketh with friend, and to bathe in the strange seas, and to anticipate the experiences of that land to which it will lead us. These forethinkings are meant, not to make us discontented with life, but to bring us back with more strength, and a nobler purpose in living.