Mattie Stepanek Quotes

When you're dead, you're dead. No one is going to remember me when I'm dead. Oh, maybe a few friends will remember me affectionately. Being remembered isn't the most important thing, anyhow. It's what you do when you are here that's important.

Who cares about great marks left behind? We have one life... just one. Our life. We have nothing else.

It's more important what you leave to people on this planet. I want my legacy to exist now, currently, not after I'm gone.

Every man dies. Not every man really lives.

Today is reality. Yesterday is history.

You come to the planet with nothing and you leave with nothing, so you'd better do some good while you are here.

You have to live in the present; not on memories.

I'm not interested in my legacy. I made up a word: 'live-acy.' I'm more interested in living.

While I am here, I want to maximize my time on this planet, you know.

If you don't take a risk, you will not be satisfied and happy. I think one must look at creating history.

This is my report on how to live... They say the best way is just to live one day at a time... If you try to live seven days at a time, the week will be over before you know it.

Life is short, the art long.

We should not fret for what is past, nor should we be anxious about the future; men of discernment deal only with the present moment.

There are 30,000 days in your life. When I was 24, I realized I'm almost 9,000 days down. There are no warm-ups, no practice rounds, no reset buttons. Your biggest risk isn't failing, it's getting too comfortable. Every day, we're writing a few more words of a story. I wanted my story to be an adventure and that's made all the difference.

In the medium or long term we'll all be dead. Let's deal with the problems at hand.

You live till you die, and that's the end of it. What good is your legacy when you are dead? I worry about being alive, selling work, having fun, moving and doing things when I am alive.

I believe in past lives but I know nothing about mine and I don't want to know. I live in the present, taking one day at a time.

If the present is really all we have, then the present lasts forever.

Worrying about how you'll be remembered is pointless. Better to try to live your life in such a way that people will respect you while you're still alive.

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we've chosen to do with our life.

Life's too short. You may be on this planet for 80 years at best or who knows, but you can't just pedal around and do the same thing forever.

The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.

How shall we live so as to have the consciousness of not having lived in vain?

I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.