18 Insightful Breathing Quotes

Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again. – L. Frank Baum

The river was so blue it seemed to be breathing. – Brian Morton

The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. – Simone Weil

Do you know why the nose of the bull dog is sloped backwards? So it can keep on breathing without ever letting go. – Winston Churchill

If I’m on a boat I will wave to every breathing thing I pass. If I’m not on a boat I try to avoid every breathing thing I pass. – Caroline Manzo

Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot. – Charles Duke

We watch’d her breathing through the night, Her breathing soft and low, As in her breast the wave of life Kept heaving to and fro. – Thomas Hood

Oh, sir, the loftiest hopes on earth Draw lots with meaner hopes: heroic breasts, Breathing bad air, run risk of pestilence; Or, lacking lime-juice when they cross the Line, May languish with the scurvy. – George Eliot

A spirit, breathing the language of independence, is natural to Englishmen, few of whom are disposed to brook compulsion, or submit to the dictates of others, when not softened by reason, or tempered with kindness. – Joseph Lancaster

I’m convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they’re stones that don’t matter. As long as you’re breathing, it’s never too late to do some good. – Maya Angelou

How agreeable to watch, from the other side of the high stile, this mighty creature, this fat bull of Bashan, snorting, champing, pawing the earth, lashing the tail, breathing defiance at heaven and at me … his heart hot with hate, unable to climb a stile. – Rose Macaulay

Whatever difficulty you face, there are time-tried ways you can listen your way through. Because listening is the doorway to everything that matters. It enlivens the heart the way breathing enlivens the lungs. We listen to awaken our heart. We do this to stay vital and alive. – Mark Nepo

There was nowhere to go, but I turned to go and met Atticus’s vest front. I buried my head in it and listened to the small internal noises that went on behind the light blue cloth: his watch ticking, the faint crackle of his starched shirt, the soft sound of his breathing. ‘Your stomach’s growling,’ I said. ‘I know it,’ he said. – Harper Lee

Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one. – Alan Watts

The [Great] Actor is able to approach in himself a cosmic dread as large as life. He is able to go from his dread to a joy so sweet that it is without limit. Only then will the actor have direct access to the life that moves in him, which is as free as his breathing. And like his breathing, he doesn’t cause it to happen. He doesn’t contain it, and it doesn’t contain him. – Joseph Chaikin

Working hard and doing doing great work is as imperative as breathing. Creating great work warms the heart and enriches the soul. Those of us lucky enough to spend our days doing something we love, something we’re good at, are rich. If you do not work passionately (even furiously) at being the best in the world at what you do, you fail your talent, your destiny, and your god. – George Lois

Telling the truth. I finally have that with my boyfriend, and that makes me vulnerable constantly. Without vulnerability, you’re not really alive. Your vulnerability is your power. Sitting in your house alone, breathing through it. Calling a friend when you need to cry. Being really honest in your therapist’s office. Whatever it is. Bringing it into a role, for me. It is your power. – Daphne Zuniga

it’s true this world our breathing laboured inspires nothing more than obvious disgust a desire to flee without our share and no longer read the headlines we long to return to our ancestral home where our forebears once lived under an angel’s wing we long to find that strange morality which sanctified life to the end we crave something like loyalty like the embrace of mild addictions something that transcends yet contains life we cannot live far from eternity – Michel Houellebecq

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