Paddy Chayefsky Quotes

I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God's business.

Yeah. Iʼve always felt this way. I mean weʼre born alone, we die alone. And while weʼre here we are absolutely, completely sealed in our own bodies. Really weird. Kinda freaks me out to think about it. We can only experience the outside world through our own slanted perception of it. Who knows what youʼre really like. I just see what I think youʼre like.

I don't want to know what's good, or bad, or true. I let God worry about the truth. I just want to know the momentary fact about things. Life isn't good, or bad, or true. It's merely factual, it's sensual, it's alive. My idea of living sensual facts are you, a home, a country, a world, a universe, in that order.

If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.

I surrender my anxiety and my sense of urgency. I allow God to guide me in the pacing of my life. I open my heart to God's timing. I release my deadlines, agendas, and stridency to the gentle yet often swift pacing of God. As I open my heart to God's unfoldings, my heart attains peace. As I relax into God's timing, my heart contains comfort. As I allow God to set the tone and schedule of my days, I find myself in the right time and place, open and available to God's opportunities.

Do you believe in immortality? No, and one life is enough for me.

The superior Christian lets God strip him of everything that might serve as a false refuge, a secondary trust.

As a painter, cursed or blessed with a terrible and vital sensuousness, I must look for wisdom with my eyes. I repeat, with my eyes, for nothing could be more ridiculous or irrelevant than a 'philosophical conception painted purely intellectually without the terrible fury of the senses grasping each visible form of beauty and ugliness.

The old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn't one of them. Well, this world isn't one either.

Every breath you take, you are getting closer to the grave. But every breath you take, you can also get closer to your liberation.

Much of the Christian religion has largely become “holding on” instead of letting go. But God, it seems to me, does the holding on (to us!), and we must learn the letting go (of everything else).

Life, the permission to know death.

Man is an organ of life, and God alone is life.

We only begin to live life when we learn to accept it on its own terms.

All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!

Don't ignore the five senses in search of a sixth.

Let go and let God. Let Him take over your life and run it. He knows how.

Ideas are born from what is smelled, heard, seen, experienced, felt, emotionalized.

This world is nothing. An illusion. Death is the release.

You're not living until it doesn't matter a tinker's damn to you whether you live or die. At that point you live. When you're ready to lose your life, you live it.

What a relief to be empty! Then God can live your life.

Life is the question and life is the answer, and God is the reason and love is the way.

The person who loves his life will lose it: it could not be otherwise, for to love one's life is a fundamental denial of God's sovereignty, of God's rights, and a brazen elevation of self to the apogee of one's perception, and therefore an idolatrous focus on self, which is the heart of all sin

Was everyone else really as alive as she was?...If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.