19 Deep Life Quotes to Ponder for How to Live in 2019

Almost exactly a year ago, I shared a post titled 18 Uncommon Statistics to Set Your 2018 Perspective.

It’s still eye-opening to revisit that post and remind myself of some of the stats (note: sources are included in the original post):

80,000: The number of hours spent working in a typical career. If you spend 6 minutes planning for a 2 hour dinner out, that’s the equivalent of spending 4,000 hours (2 working years) planning for an 80,000 hour career.
$40,000: Once you get to an individual income of around $40,000, other factors such as health, relationships and a sense of purpose, seem far more important than income. After a certain point, extra income had no relationship with how happy, sad and stressed people felt.
4,200: The estimated number of religions on Earth. Turns out picking at least one may be good for your health. According to one study, attending faith-based services 4 times per month (no matter the denomination) adds up to 14 years of life expectancy.
960: Roughly the number of waking minutes per day. Or, as Tim Urban from WaitButWhy.com says, you have 100 10-minute blocks each day.
1.4%: The amount of recorded history you may be alive. Recorded history begins around 3,400 BC. The average lifespan (in the US) today is about 79 years. Are you ensuring your brief time here is well spent? “The powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” (Walt Whitman)

For 2019, I’m doing something a little different. I’m a big fan of quotes, so I scoured hundreds of the best quotes I’ve collected over the last few years and pulled out 19 of the most thought-provoking for you.

One of the great things about quotes is that they are up to your own personal interpretation. So, for this post, I’ll present these quotes without commentary and let you ponder them!

19 Deep Life Quotes to Ponder for How to Live in 2019

1. “For fast-acting relief, try slowing down.” — Lily Tomlin

2. “The mind once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimension.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes

3. “What matters most in life is often invisible.” — Duane Elgin

4. “Humanity can still prosper for 150,000 years…but this depends on choosing a voluntary simplicity…growing qualitatively, not quantitatively.” — Matthieu Ricard

5. “Why am I so busy? When everything around me is moving so fast, I stop and ask, ‘Is it the world that’s busy, or is it my mind?’” — Haemin Sunim

6. “We can all agree that the unexamined life is not worth living…but if all you’re doing is examining, you’re not living.” — Adam Leipzig

7. “Once the game is over, the King and the pawn go back in the same box.” ― Italian proverb

8. “The only Zen you find on tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there.” — Robert M. Pirsig

9. “Awareness is the greatest agent for change.” — Eckhart Tolle

10. “Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls…work, family, health, friends, and integrity…Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls…are made of glass.” — James Patterson

11. “You can complain because roses have thorns, or you can rejoice because thorns have roses.” — Tom Wilson

12. “The solution for a lot of the world’s problems may be to turn around and take a forward step.” — Yvon Chouinard

13. “Simplicity is an advanced course.” — Sri Chinmoy

14. “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

15. “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” ― Henry David Thoreau

16. “Priorities must be Planet-Society-Economy as opposed to Economy-Society-Planet…The reality of the world we live in is that the economy is the wholly owned subsidiary of the biosphere.” — Ron Garan, Astronaut