These sustenance quotes will inspire you. Sustenance, food, and drink are regarded as a source of strength; nourishment, or the maintaining of someone or something in life or existence.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging sustenance quotes, sustenance sayings, and sustenance proverbs.
Best Sustenance Quotes
- “When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.” ~ Jonathan Safran Foer
- “That which you give to another will become your own sustenance; if you light a lamp for another, your own way will be lit.” ~ Nichiren
- “As our bodies live upon the earth and find sustenance in the fruits which it produces, so our minds feed on the same truths as the intelligible and immutable substance of the divine Word contains.” ~ Nicolas Malebranche
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“Our selfishness is so robust and many-clutching that, well encouraged, it easily devours all sustenance away from our poor little scruples.” ~ George Eliot
- “This magical, marvelous food on our plate, this sustenance we absorb, has a story to tell. It has a journey. It leaves a footprint. It leaves a legacy. To eat with reckless abandon, without conscience, without knowledge; folks, this ain’t normal.” ~ Joel Salatin
- “I’m in no way suggesting that I succeed, but it’s inspiring to read somebody who does succeed and from whom, in a general way, you can draw examples and nourishment and sustenance.” ~ Frederick Wiseman
- “My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.” ~ China Mieville
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“No religion has mandated killing others as a requirement for its sustenance or promotion.” ~ Abdul Kalam
- “Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch-or build a cyclotron-without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think” ~ Ayn Rand
- “Give sustenance, Allah. Give sustenance to me.” ~ Khaled Hosseini
- “God, provide me with enough sustenance that my family is taken care of, that neither I remain hungry, nor does my guest go unfed.” ~ Kabir
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“There’s no sustenance in the past.” ~ Violette Leduc
- “Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.” ~ Reinhold Niebuhr
- “To me, working is a form of sustenance, like food or water, and nearly as essential.” ~ Katharine Graham
- “There, I was just a secretary-shaped confederation of atoms, fighting the inevitability of mediocrity and decay. But here, in the Juliaverse… energy was never lost, merely converted from one form to another. Here, I took butter and cream and meat and eggs and I made delicious sustenance.” ~ Julie Powell
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“I define connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.” ~ Brené Brown
- “He does not refuse sustenance to the one who speaks ill of Him. How then could He refuse sustenance to the one whose soul is over flowing with love for Him?” ~ Rabia Basri
- “I am a child of the Enlightenment. I think irrational belief is a dangerous phenomenon, and I try to consciously avoid irrational belief. On the other hand, I certainly recognize that it’s a major phenomenon for people in general, and you can understand why it would be. It does, apparently, provide personal sustenance, but also bonds of association and solidarity and a means for expressing elements of one’s personality that are often very valuable elements. To many people it does that. In my view, there’s nothing wrong with that.” ~ Noam Chomsky
- “When more of the people’s sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government and expenses of its economical administration, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of free government.” ~ Grover Cleveland
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“Currently, more than 4.7 million African Americans receive Social Security benefits, and nearly 8 million people with disabilities depend on Social Security for their daily sustenance.” ~ Chaka Fattah
- “It’s interesting to fantasize having a man sink his teeth into your neck for sustenance, knowing that it isn’t going to be terribly painful but rather very exciting” ~ Frank Langella
- “The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons, where the support and sustenance of the human-animal is incidental. If man in his newfound power and vanity persists in the attempt to remake the planet in his own image, he will succeed only in destroying himself – not the planet. The earth will survive our most ingenious folly.” ~ Edward Abbey
- “Human beings are of such nature that they should have not only material facilities but spiritual sustenance as well. Without spiritual sustenance, it is difficult to get and maintain peace of mind.” ~ Dalai Lama
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“Fasting confirms our utter dependence upon God by finding in Him a source of sustenance beyond food.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “Whatever a man has in superabundance is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance.” ~ Thomas Aquinas
- “A day’s work is a day’s work, neither more nor less, and the man or woman who does it needs a day’s sustenance, a night’s repose and due leisure, whether they be painter or ploughman.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
- “The Biblical world-view is the only one that accepts the reality of evil and suffering while giving both the cause and the purpose, while offering God-given strength and sustenance in the midst of it.” ~ Ravi Zacharias
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“Exactly like everything around us, we are made of the same elements of this earth and are totally dependent on this earth for our sustenance.” ~ Bryan Kest
- “I try not to have a day pass where I don’t read something from the Bible. It’s like my sustenance to me.” ~ Lauryn Hill
- “You should know what is taken out of the ecosystem in order to give you a moment’s sustenance.” ~ Sylvia Earle
- “Cookery, or the art of preparing good and wholesome food, and of preserving all sorts of alimentary substances in a state fit for human sustenance, or rendering that agreeable to the taste which is essential to the support of life, and of pleasing the palate without injury to the system, is, strictly speaking, a branch of chemistry; but, important as it is both to our enjoyments and our health, it is also one of the latest cultivated branches of the science.” ~ Friedrich Accum
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“I was a kid who lived to read. It was the primary pleasure of my existence. It’s still one of the primary pleasures of my existence. It’s where I draw my sustenance.” ~ Kate DiCamillo
- “British food is a celebration of comfort eating. Our traditional savoury recipes are all about warmth and sustenance, our puddings a roll call of sweet jollity, our cakes are deep and cosy. We appear to be a nation in need of a big, warm hug.” ~ Nigel Slater
- “Love of Allah is the power of the heart, the sustenance of the heart, the light of the heart.” ~ Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya
- “The best gift you can ever give your mentor is to grow. They feed off your growth. I believe that everyone has the seed of success inside, but too many people can’t find it in themselves and as a result do not reach their potential. But there are those whose purpose in life is to fertilize the seed of potential in another, who are rewarded by seeing that person grow and blossom before their eyes. Raising up others to a higher level is a mentor’s joy and sustenance.” ~ John C. Maxwell
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“He that distributeth not That which he hath received– His food, his drink, his sustenance– Unto devotee, brahman, beggar, wayfarer– Such a low man as he, they say, is like Unto a lack of rain.” ~ Gautama Buddha
- “My life is a tsunami of inspirations. Number one is that I really do just love my BBQ. I mean it’s the sustenance of mankind. You know, the animal rights of people, if they had their way, 99% of the human race would parish because we sustain ourselves with dead stuff on the grill.” ~ Ted Nugent
- “Newspapers are to the body politic what arteries are to the human body, their function being to carry blood and sustenance and repair to every part of the body.” ~ Henry Ward Beecher
- “Nothing can hide from me the conviction that an immortal soul needs for its sustenance something more than visiting, and gardening, and novel-reading, and crochet-needle, and the occasional manufacture of sponge cake.” ~ Thomas Wentworth Higginson
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“The clich that women, more consistently than men, turn inward for sustenance seems to mean, in practice, that women have richly defined the ways in which imagination creates possibility; possibility that society denies.” ~ Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks
- “My mitochondria comprise a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I suppose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in this way, I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter.” ~ Lewis Thomas
- “Yet what each one does is by no means of little moment. The grass has to put forth all its energy to draw sustenance from the uttermost tips of its rootlets simply to grow where it is as grass; it does not vainly strive to become a banyan tree; and so the earth gains a lovely carpet of green.” ~ Rabindranath Tagore
- “Sycamore trees were held to be sacred in ancient Egypt and are the first trees represented in ancient art. The sycamore, also, was sacred. Peasants gather around them in rituals. In the Land of the Dead there was a sycamore in whose branches the goddess Hathor lived; she leaned out of it giving sustenance and water to deceased souls. In Memphis, Hathor’s epithet was Lady of the Sycamore.” ~ Larry Gates
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“I am delighted if people find that kind of sustenance in novels, but perhaps it’s because they don’t read the Scripture that they are comparing it to, which would perhaps provide deeper sustenance than many contemporary novels.” ~ Marilynne Robinson
- “President David O. McKay (1873-1970) observed that too many couples come to “marriage looking upon the marriage ceremony as the end of courtship instead of the beginning of an eternal courtship. … Love can be starved to death as literally as the body that receives no sustenance. Love feeds upon kindness and courtesy”” ~ David O. McKay
- “The abjectly poor, and all those person whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands today.” ~ Thorstein Veblen
- “We must not only protect the country side and save it from destruction, we must restore what has been destroyed and salvage the beauty and charm of our cities … Once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature, his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
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“Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.” ~ Seamus Heaney
- “Our generation may stand at a crucial breakpoint in history, for we in the presently affluent nations may be the last who can afford to open up the high frontier. What we do during the next ten or twenty years may determine whether future generations will live in a humane and rewarding society, or whether they will spend their lives in desperate contention for the dwindling sustenance afforded by our limited terrestrial resources.” ~ Philip K. Chapman
- “Each of us has a purpose for living beyond our own survival and pleasure. Every individual is like a thread in a beautiful tapestry with a vital contribution to make, not only to the sustenance of life as we know it, but in the creation and development of more beneficial expressions of life.” ~ John Templeton
- “Spirituality is an inner fire, a mystical sustenance that feeds our souls. The mystical journey drives us into ourselves, to a sacred flame at our center. The purpose of the religious experience is to develop the eyes by which we see this inner flame, and our capacity to live its mystery. In its presence, we are warmed and ignited. When too far from the blaze, we are cold and spiritually lifeless. We are less than human without that heat. Our connection to God is life itself.” ~ Marianne Williamson
- “People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down like bears in winter and seek sustenance from their paws.” ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg
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“Life has not taught me to expect nothing, but she has taught me not to expect success to be the inevitable result of my endeavors. She taught me to seek sustenance from the endeavor itself, but to leave the result to God.” ~ Alan Paton
- “If an organised body is not in the situation and circumstances best adapted to its sustenance and propagation, then, in conceiving an indefinite variety among the individuals of that species, we must be assured, that, on the one hand, those which depart most from the best adapted constitution, will be most liable to perish, while, on the other hand, those organised bodies, which most approach to the best constitution for the present circumstances, will be best adapted to continue, in preserving themselves and multiplying the individuals of their race.” ~ James Hutton
- “History is largely a record of human struggle to wrest the land from nature, because man relies for sustenance on the products of the soil. So direct, is the relationship between soil erosion, the productivity of the land, and the prosperity of people, that the history of mankind, to a considerable degree at least, may be interpreted in terms of the soil and what has happened to it as the result of human use.” ~ Hugh Hammond Bennett
- “Hospitality is always an act that benefits the host even more than the guest. The concept of hospitality arose in ancient times when the reciprocity was easier to see: in nomadic cultures, the food and shelter one gave to a stranger yesterday is the food and shelter one hopes to receive from a stranger tomorrow. By offering hospitality, one participates in the endless reweaving of a social fabric on which all can depend-thus the gift of sustenance for the guest becomes a gift of hope for the host.” ~ Parker J. Palmer
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“Only my current situation has enabled me to accomplish the expensive task of demonstrating that the preferred sustenance of painting is painting.” ~ Asger Jorn
- “Whatever a man has in superabundance is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance. So Ambrosius says, and it is also to be found in the Decretum Gratiani: The bread which you withhold belongs to the hungry: the clothing you shut away, to the naked: and the money you bury in the earth is the redemption and freedom of the penniless.” ~ Thomas Aquinas
- “Every minister worthy of the name has to walk the line between prophetic vision and spiritual sustenance, between telling people the comforting things they want to hear and challenging them with the difficult things they need to hear. In Oxford, Daddy began to feel as though all the members wanted him to do was to marry them and bury them and stay away from their souls.” ~ Timothy B. Tyson
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“Nature’s not our enemy, it’s our sustenance; and we need it – and we need nature healthy for us to be healthy and to survive long term” ~ James Cameron
- “I dream of a world where people from different backgrounds are praying and working for the flourishment of communities different from them, and I find my sustenance not only in these stories in scripture, but in stories of human existence also – the story of the Bosnian Muslim man who took to a Serbian couple with a new baby a liter of milk every day during that horrible struggle in the former Yugoslavia, because he said even if our tribes, our nations, are at war with each other, there is something deeply human about me wishing that your baby survives and is secure.” ~ Eboo Patel
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“The wisest among you is he whose sustenance is the fear of Allah.” ~ Umar
- “It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the over-population of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat.” ~ Jeremy Rifkin
- “The table is a meeting place, a gathering ground, the source of sustenance and nourishment, festivity, safety, and satisfaction. A person cooking is a person giving: even the simplest food is a gift.” ~ Laurie Colwin
- “The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification—if not instant, then certainly relatively immediate. Reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to an uncommon degree, you exist. … A journalist always wonders: If my byline disappears, have I disappeared as well?” ~ David Halberstam
