Orson Welles Quotes

Ultimately, everyone's life is complex, and it's good to show that.

And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life.

The whole motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end.

Well, I think the main message is there is more to your story. There is more than what happens between the crib and the grave, and that is what I am really trying to speak to, this idea that all of life is this life and that there is nothing more than what we see and experience right here on this earth.

I'm not sure anyone can understand a whole life, even their own.

Man believes and lives.

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

I think from my experience in war and life and science, it all has made me believe that we have one life on this planet. We have one chance to live it and to contribute to the future of society and the future of life. The only "afterlife" is what other people remember of you.

I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.

You try to keep life simple but it never works, and in the end all you have left is yourself.

Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation

Leonard asks me if there's anything I need to know before he dies, I think about it for a minute, turn to him, say what's the meaning of life, Leonard? He laughs, says that's an easy one, my son, it's whatever you want it to be.

I've always found life quite difficult to explain to people or to myself.

For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.

I don't think our lives actually unfold with morals attached to them, or meanings that are easily extracted, or jokes designed to generate sympathy. I wanted to do the opposite - to offer up a life whose meanings can only be perceived through a tangle of desires, confusions, and textural details.

Life is agid, life is fulgid. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time.

Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.

We are not born to survive. Only to live.

we are all supposed to think of reasons to live.

A good writer - and I think it's this way with actors too - even if you have two lines, you have to do the same complete work as if you're number one on the call sheet. If you get in an elevator and somebody gets on, rides two floors and gets off, that person has a reality that goes back to when they were born. They have memories, they have people, they have a life. They are doing something right now that the camera is on them in their space. We live in our own close-up all the time.

Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine

The World is not an idea as asserted by philosophers who have dedicated their entire lives to the exploration of ideas. First and foremost the world is passion. But passion is associated with sadness. Sadness does not only arise from death which makes us face the Eternity, but also from life which causes us to confront the Time.

So unless we form some kind of adequate relationship to death, we're never going to live properly, and if we think of it purely as a medical thing, we have reduced life. We should think of it as some sort of mystery which we can participate in now, not something to be pushed off to one side till the last moments.

All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.

Man lives in time but his life transcends time.