Iyanla Vanzant Quotes

I'm turning 58, and you get that kind of weird, old-guy feeling of you don't have an infinite number of years left and if there's anything you want to say or represent, it's time to try it.

You know, you get to a certain age, 45, 50, I don't know when it happens, I said, 'Jesus, all I got is a certain amount of time. Maybe I should think about using it a little better.'

You reach a point at which you have to view your life through the things you've spent so much time doing. The alternative is a perilous feeling of waste.

If this was the last day of your life, would you spend it the way you're spending today?

I get to thinking about my life, and it sometimes makes me want to make it interesting.

Once people start to think they've wasted parts of their life, or they're wasting their life as they speak, that means there's going to be great dramatic and comedic tension.

Approaching forty, I had a singular dream in which I almost grasped the meaning and understood the nature of what it is that wastes in wasted time.

The uninvestigated life is not worth living. I don't want to live that way.

Men regret their life has been ill-spent, but this does not always induce them to make a better use of the time they have yet to live.

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

When you reach a certain age, you have fulfilled your childhood dream and whatever your first or second adulthood led you to do. Then you're in your third adulthood, the one that leads to the grave, and you ask yourself, "What will I do between now and then?" Instead of thinking in terms of glamour, you start thinking in terms of reform - your contribution to the world.

When you're at a certain point in your time - age, that is, when you're older - you start to realize that, actually, what you leave behind you does count, and so you start to become fundamentally aware of your own destiny, which sounds very grand. It's not grand at all, actually.

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

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 turned 25, something changed in me. I see children in my future 100%. Soon. I started thinking I want my kids to look back and say, 'Wasn't Mummy amazing?' I've really started thinking about what I'm leaving for them.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

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?

Things change when you get to 40. I'm embarrassed even that I'm going through it. In a very morbid way, at 40 you become aware of how long you've been on Earth and you start to question what you're going to use the remaining time doing.

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

I think that everyone at any age should ask themselves, 'where do I want to be today, where do I want to be tomorrow, and where do I want to be in a hundred years?' We all have clear answers to those questions. We only have so much time. It's a real shame if we don't spend our lives trying to do that.

Wonderful things happen when you turn 50: you change perspective. You ask, 'Who am I? What do I want to do with my life? What have I not done that I want to do?'

If you carefully consider what you want to be said of you in the funeral experience, you will find your definition of success.

I think people try to make the most of their time on Earth and also to 'fix' their time on Earth.

Mortal experiences give us the opportunity to assess what we are doing with our lives.

When you allow yourself to really think about the future and the legacy you're leaving, you become gentler.