Life Quotes

Quotes About Life From Million Quotes

 

To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life. - Robert Louis Stevenson

The world is hard and cruel. We are here none knows why, and we go none knows whither. We must be very humble. We must see the beauty of quietness. We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us. - W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence, 1919

Just living is not enough... one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower. - Hans Christian Andersen

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me." - Erma Bombeck

[A]ll life budding like a rose and sparkling like its dew. - Edgar Fawcett, "At a Window," Songs of Doubt and Dream, 1891

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. - E.B. White, quoted in Israel Shenker, "E.B. White: Notes and Comment by Author," New York Times, 1969 July 11th

Life is simple, it's just not easy. - Author Unknown

A life without cause is a life without effect. - Barbarella

Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you're alive, it isn't. - Richard Bach

Life is not always fair. Sometimes you get a splinter sliding down a rainbow. - Terri Guillemets

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. - Henry David Thoreau

I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it. - Jack Handey

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it. - Christopher Morley, Thunder on the Left

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee,
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
- Robert Frost, "Cluster of Faith," 1962

In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular. - Kathy Norris

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else. - Emily Dickinson

Yes, I will try to be. Because I believe that not being is arrogant. - Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit. - Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

My life has a superb cast but I can't figure out the plot. - Ashleigh Brilliant

I say, if your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life. - Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave. - Quentin Crisp

As we struggle to make sense of things, life looks on in repose. - Author Unknown

I think I've discovered the secret of life — you just hang around until you get used to it. - Charles Schulz

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets. - Arthur Miller

Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while. - Author Unknown

You can't escape history, or the needs and neuroses you've picked up like layers and layers of tartar on your teeth. - Charles Johnson

Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can. - Danny Kaye

I have a simple philosophy: Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. Scratch where it itches. - Alice Roosevelt Longworth

Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once. - Lillian Dickson

We are born wet, naked, and hungry. Then things get worse. - Author Unknown

Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up. - Author Unknown

Life is a cement trampoline. - Howard Nordberg

To preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances and hostilities, is as great a miracle as to create him. - Jeremy Taylor

Life... is like a box of chocolates — a cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that no one ever asks for, unreturnable because all you get back is another box of chocolates. So, you're stuck with mostly undefinable whipped mint crap, mindlessly wolfed down when there's nothing else to eat while you're watching the game. Sure, once is a while you get a peanut butter cup or an English toffee but it's gone too fast and the taste is fleeting. In the end, you are left with nothing but broken bits filled with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts, which, if you are desperate enough to eat, leaves nothing but an empty box of useless brown paper. - The X-Files

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. - Friedrich Nietzsche

God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled. - Author Unknown

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be. - Grandma Moses

I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer. - Jim Carrey

The great business of life is to be, to do, to do without, and to depart. - John, Viscount Morley, Address on Aphorisms

Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies. - Erich Fromm

My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between, I occupy myself as best I can. - Cary Grant

To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach. - Havelock Ellis

Living involves tearing up one rough draft after another. - Author unknown

My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn. - Louis Adamic

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence. - Thomas Carlyle, Sir Walter Scott, in London and Westminster Review, 12 November 1838

Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark. - Samuel Johnson

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: "I am with you kid. Let's go." - Maya Angelou

Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Why torture yourself when life'll do it for you? - Author Unknown

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. - George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor's Dilemma, 1906

Puritans will never believe it, but life is full of disagreeable things that aren't even good for you. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

'Tis all a chequer board of nights and days,
Where destiny with men for pieces plays;
Hither and thither, and mates, and slays.
- Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, 1859

Life: It is about the gift not the package it comes in. - Dennis P. Costea, Jr.

...the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse. - Walt Whitman, "O Me! O Life!", Leaves of Grass

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. - Mark Twain

Life is the game that must be played. - Edwin Arlington Robinson

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life. - Albert Camus

There is no wealth but life. - John Ruskin

I know what things are good: friendship and work and conversation. These I shall have. - Rupert Brooke

Life will always remain a gamble, with prizes sometimes for the imprudent, and blanks so often to the wise. - Jerome K. Jerome

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. - Henry David Thoreau

Life is not a final. It's daily pop quizzes. - Author Unknown

Eating, loving, singing and digesting are, in truth, the four acts of the comic opera known as life, and they pass like bubbles of a bottle of champagne. Whoever lets them break without having enjoyed them is a complete fool. - Gioacchino Rossini

We mourn the transitory things and fret under the yoke of the immutable ones. - Paul Eldridge

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. - T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Life was a damned muddle — a football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of — everyone claiming the referee would have been on his side. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Any idiot can face a crisis — it's day to day living that wears you out. - Anton Chekhov

Following straight lines shortens distances, and also life. - Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. - Frederick Buechner

Life is all too wondrous sweet, and the world is so beautifully bewildered; it is the dream of an intoxicated divinity... - Heinrich Heine (d.1856), "Ideas: Book Le Grand," 1826, translated from German by Charles Godfrey Leland, Pictures of Travel, 1855

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings...
- Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012), translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation. - W. Somerset Maugham

In life we all have an unspeakable secret, an irreversible regret, an unreachable dream and an unforgettable love. - Diego Marchi

Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life. - Eleanor Roosevelt

I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on.
- Robert Browning

Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove. - Ashleigh Brilliant

Life is an incurable Disease. - Abraham Cowley

Different shades of life make the painting more beautiful. - Mike Dolan, @HawaiianLife

The philosophy of mine earth can be summed as this: Sunshine creates happiness, and I create myself. Nights are long and life is predominantly good. Wind is refreshing. Tea is wisdom. Do the best you can, and be good to yourself so that you can above all be good to others. - Jessi Lane Adams

Human life is purely a matter of deciding what's important to you. - Anonymous, c.1998

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. - Albert Camus

Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination. - Christopher Isherwood

I ask of life to shine meaning in everyone who is searching. - Aurora Hernandez

The only way to have a life is to commit to it like crazy. - Angelina Jolie

Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do. - Bruce Crampton

Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.
- Elinor Hoyt Wylie, Let No Charitable Hope

To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funnybone. - Reba McEntire

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss. - Thomas Carlyle

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on. - Havelock Ellis

Sunday clears away the rust of the whole week. - Joseph Addison

We tear life out of life to use it for looking at itself. - Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Fortunately analysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself remains a very effective therapist. - Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts, 1945, referring to psychoanalysis

Give us Lord, a bit o' sun,
A bit o' work and a bit o' fun;
Give us all in the struggle and sputter
Our daily bread and a bit o' butter.
- From an inn in Lancaster, England

All human things hang on a slender thread, the strongest fall with a sudden crash. - Ovid

The tragedy of life is not that man loses, but that he almost wins. - Heywood Broun

Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we're here we should dance. - Author Unknown

Life is a long process of getting tired. - Samuel Butler

I really enjoy life I'm just not good at it. - Daniel, @blindedpoet

He who has nothing to die for has nothing to live for. - Moroccan Proverb

The kaleidoscope of colour which is my life, shows the interesting choices I've made along the way. - Antie Koekie

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. - Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not the choice. You must take it. The only question is how. - Henry Ward Beecher

The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live. - Flora Whittemore

Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. - Douglas Adams

Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one? - George Bernard Shaw

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life. It goes on. - Robert Frost

Life is like a ten-speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use. - Charles Schulz

There is no finish line. - Nike advertisement

It may be life is only worthwhile at moments. Perhaps that is all we ought to expect. - Sherwood Anderson

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment. - Ludwig Wittgenstein

The art of life is the art of avoiding pain. - Thomas Jefferson

Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man's life. - Vita Sackville-West

The fear of life is the favorite disease of the 20th century. - William Lyon Phelps

Most men make the voyage of life as if they carried sealed orders which they were not to open till they were fairly in mid-ocean. - James Russell Lowell

In the book of life, the answers aren't in the back. - Charlie Brown

The world is a grindstone and life is your nose. - Fred Allen

Not unfortunately the universe is wild — game-flavoured as a hawk's wing. - B.P. Blood

 



The miracle is not to fly in the air, or to walk on the water, but to walk on the earth. - Chinese Proverb

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle. - Thich Nhat Hanh

You live and learn. At any rate, you live. - Douglas Adams

Life just seems so full of connections. Most of the time we don't even pay attention to the depth of life. We only see flat surfaces. - Colin Neenan  [I wonder if this reminds anyone else of Apple's iOS 7 design or if I'm the only old-fashioned one who misses skeuomorphism. —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]

Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit. - Norman Mailer

Life can be easy, it is only question of choosing between solutions and illusions. - Didier D'haese

Everything which is properly business we must keep carefully separate from life. Business requires earnestness and method; life must have a freed handling. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers. - Learned Hand

The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched. - Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Life is the sum of all your choices. - Albert Camus

Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living. - Søren Kierkegaard

How you handle life depends a lot on how you handle plan B, or if you have a plan B. - Nelson DeMille, The General's Daughter, 1992

Life is the fire that burns and the sun that gives light. Life is the wind and the rain and the thunder in the sky. Life is matter and is earth, what is and what is not, and what beyond is in Eternity. - Seneca

Out of a hundred years a few minutes were made that stayed with me, not a hundred years. - Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

If A equals success, then the formula is: A = X + Y + Z, where X is work, Y is play, and Z is keep your mouth shut. - Albert Einstein

I gave my life to learning how to live.
Now that I have organized it all...
It is just about over.
- Sandra Hochman

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic. - Anaïs Nin

Life is a horizontal fall. - Jean Cocteau

Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one. - Dr. Seuss

Mayhap the best thing I ever done in my life was only doing what was easiest for myself. It's allays been easier for me to work nor to sit still, but the real tough job for me 'ud be to master my own will and temper, and go right against my own pride.... perhaps nothing 'ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late. It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right. - George Eliot, Adam Bede

Only a few things are really important. - Marie Dressler

We are like people with short-term leases on summer cottages; we can never seem to make our provisions come out even with our stay. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

The movement of life has to rest in its own music. - Rabindranath Tagore

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. - Henry Miller

Everything that occurs in your life is part of God's plan to wake you up. - Leonard Jacobson

Life is like eating artichokes; you have got to go through so much to get so little. - Thomas Aloysius Dorgan

Summing up, it is clear the future holds great opportunities. It also holds pitfalls. The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o'clock. - Woody Allen, "My Speech to the Graduates," Side Effects, 1980

Life is a ticket to the greatest show on earth. - Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)  [It ends: "As a doctor you'll have a front seat." —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]

Life is beautiful if you flow with its natural beauty. Resistance makes it ugly. - Terri Guillemets

Situated in some nebulous distance I do what I do so that the universal balance of which I am a part may remain a balance. - Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Few of us write great novels; all of us live them. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Life's like a novel with the end ripped out. - Danny Orton and Blair Daly, "Stand"

If you stop struggling, then you stop life. - Huey Newton

Things almost never turn out as horribly — or as wonderfully — as it seems they will. It's the occasional exception to this that keeps us on our toes, both in hope and in dread. - David C. Hill, ***Dave Does the Blog (hill-kleerup.org/blog)

Sometimes questions are more important than answers. - Nancy Willard, quoted in The Meaning of Life, compiled by Hugh S. Moorhead

As if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand.... - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims, "Inspiration"

It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you. - Phillips Brooks

There is a strange reluctance on the part of most people to admit that they enjoy life. - William Lyon Phelps

[W]ith reference to our trip up the river of life.... How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is ever in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber....
It is lumber, man—all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment's freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment's rest for dreamy laziness—no time to watch the windy shadows skimming lightly o'er the shallows, or the glittering sunbeams flitting in and out among the ripples, or the great trees by the margin looking down at their own image, or the woods all green and golden, or the lilies white and yellow, or the sombre-waving rushes, or the sedges, or the orchis, or the blue forget-me-nots.
Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.
You will find the boat easier to pull then, and it will not be so liable to upset, and it will not matter so much if it does upset; good, plain merchandise will stand water. You will have time to think as well as to work. Time to drink in life's sunshine—time to listen to the Æolian music that the wind of God draws from the human heart-strings around us... - Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), 1889

The world itself is but a series of footnotes to a vast unfinished masterpiece. - Vladimir Nabokov

The swing on your porch is a better liver of life than the chair in front of your computer. - Terri Guillemets

Thoreau once thought the moon was larger over the United States than over the Old World, the sky bluer, the stars brighter, the thunder louder, the rivers longer, the mountains higher, the prairies vaster, and he mystically concluded that the spirit of man in America should be larger and more expansive "else why was America discovered?" Thoreau was wrong, and Thoreau was right. There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it, and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself. - Lin Yutang, On the Wisdom of America

When everything doesn't go perfectly as hoped, it isn't tragedy — it's life. - Terri Guillemets

One day can make your life. One day can ruin your life. All life is is four or five big days that change everything. - Riding in Cars with Boys, Beverly Donofrio (book), Morgan Ward (screenplay)

Life isn't fair, but it's still good. - Author Unknown

When life gives you lemonade, make lemons. Life will be all like, "What?!" - "Phil's-osophy" by Phil Dunphy (Christopher Lloyd, Steven Levitan, and Dan O'Shannon, Modern Family, "Schooled," original airdate 2012 Oct 10)

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way around. - David Lodge, The British Museum Is Falling Down, 1965

If a man in the morning hear the right way, he may die in the evening without regret. - Confucius

To drink the sunshine and to dream at night.... - Author Unknown, "The Fall of Man"

Each day of human life contains joy and anger, pain and pleasure, darkness and light, growth and decay. Each moment is etched with nature's grand design — do not try to deny or oppose the cosmic order of things. - Morihei Ueshiba

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature. - Joseph Campbell

I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself. - François Truffaut

In small proportions we just beauties see,
And in short measures life may perfect be.
- Ben Jonson, To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison, 1640

We should give meaning to life, not wait for life to give us meaning. - Stacy

Let me ask you, O, you men of the time, who are bent upon pleasure... I beg of you, if by some chance this obscure book falls into your hands, do not smile with noble disdain, do not shrug your shoulders; do not be too sure that I complain of an imaginary evil; do not be too sure that human reason is the most beautiful of faculties, that there is nothing real here below but quotations on the Bourse, gambling in the salon, wine on the table, a healthy body, indifference toward others, and the orgies which come with the night.
For some day, across your stagnant life, a gust of wind will blow. Those beautiful trees that you water with the stream of oblivion, Providence will destroy; you will be reduced to despair.... in short I tell you, all frozen as you are, you are capable of loving something; some fiber of your being will be torn and you will give vent to a cry that will resemble a moan of pain. Some day, wandering about the muddy streets, when daily material joys shall have failed, you will find yourself seated disconsolately on a deserted bench at midnight.
O! men of marble, sublime egoists, inimitable reasoners who have never given way to despair or made a mistake in arithmetic, if this ever happens to you, at the hour of your ruin you will remember Abelard when he lost Heloise....
Believe me, when in your distress you think of Abelard you will not look with the same eye... you will feel that the human reason can cure illusions but not sorrows; that God has use for Reason but He has not made her the sister of Charity.... You will look about you for something like hope, you will shake the doors of churches to see if they still swing, but you will find them walled up... destiny will mock at you and for reply give you a bottle of wine.... - Alfred de Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century/La Confession d'un enfant du siècle, 1836, translated from French by Kendall Warren

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and there is a 100% mortality rate. - R.D. Laing

It's just life. Just live it. - Terri Guillemets

[L]ife is just like a big puzzle but you can't look at it and focus, you've... just got to close your eyes and let it come together. - Corey Miller, LA Ink, "LA Ink Grand Opening" (season 1, episode 3, original airdate 2007 August 21st)

Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas. - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942, translated from French by Lewis Galantière

Live for the roots
Love the green
Dance with the blossoms
- Terri Guillemets

[L]ife is a journey and not a destination... the heart must be set upon those matters of character which are eternal and not upon those matters of sensation which pass away. - Lynn H. Hough

Many of us are equal to life's emergencies who cannot bear its day-after-dayness. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Life is like an onion; you peel off layer after layer and then you find there is nothing in it. - James Gibbons Huneker

Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor. - Ogden Nash

I do like a little bit of butter to my bread. - A.A. Milne, When We Were Very Young

I believe in pink. I believe that laughing is the best calorie burner. I believe in kissing, kissing a lot. I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong. I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day and I believe in miracles. - Audrey Hepburn

No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made silently. - Agnes de Mille

The way my life goes, I can't tell if there are pits in my cherries or cherries among my pits, philosophically speaking. - Rhann Morgan

Life may be defined to be the power of self-augmentation or assimilation, not of self-nurture; for then a steam-engine over a coal-pit might be made to live. - Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

 



My friend asked me the essence of life and I smiled. - Mike Dolan, @HawaiianLife

Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars. - Henry Van Dyke

People find it hard to be both comic and serious, though life manages it easily enough. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Life is a long lesson in humility. - James M. Barrie

Life grows beautiful flowers over old scars. - Terri Guillemets

It has done me good to be somewhat parched by the heat and drenched by the rain of life. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

You fool,
You have been dangling
For such a long time!
When will you seize the opportunity
Or feel the necessity
To untangle the taut knot
Of your bondage-life?
- Sri Chinmoy, Ten Thousand Flower-Flames

In life, as in restaurants, we swallow a lot of indigestible stuff just because it comes with the dinner. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings. - Richard Dawkins

Sometimes in the poem of Life
we hit a defective verse.
Don't bother trying to rewrite it,
move along, don't make it worse.
- Terri Guillemets

Reason and justice tell me there's more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism. - Anton Chekhov

To live is like to love — all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it. - Samuel Butler

Life is easier than you'd think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable. - Kathleen Norris

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. - Mark Twain

Our search should not be a flight from life. - TKV Desikachar

[T]hat blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
- William Wordsworth, 1798

Though the circular round-and-round of routine be the bulk of life's affairs, make an occasional jutting diversion — of fun, love, or something that will outlast you — so the shape and motion of your life shall resemble the round lifegiving sun with bright rays shining forth from all directions. - Terri Guillemets

Life's a party. Invite yourself. - Gary Johnson

One wanders through life as if wandering through a field in the dark of night, wearing a blindfold and very heavy shoes, with a poisonous toad waiting patiently beneath a clump of weeds, knowing full well that eventually you will step on him. - Lemony Snicket

Beauty is precious, you see, and the more beautiful something is, the more precious it is; and the more precious something is, the more it hurts us that it will fade away; and the more we are hurt by beauty, the more we love the world; and the more we love it, the more we are saddened that it is like finely powdered salt that runs away through the fingers, or is puffed away by the wind, or is washed away by the rain. - Louis de Bernières, Birds Without Wings

Though we live amid promiscuous pressures, spiritual clutter and forgetfulness, we probably still value the integrity of life. - Baker Brownell, The College and the Community, 1952

Life is not like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today might burn your ass tomorrow. - Author Unknown

There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes. - José Ortega y Gasset

The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe. - Peter De Vries, Let Me Count the Ways, 1965

Every creatures stalks some other, and catches it, and is caught. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

A great part of life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure. - Robert Louis Stevenson

I have come one step away from everything. And here I stay, far from everything, one step away. - Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Star Trek fans usually know the metaphors of life better than most mainstream poets. - Terri Guillemets

Life is like a cobweb, not an organization chart. - H. Ross Perot

A man who has work that suits him and a wife, whom he loves, has squared his accounts with life. - Friedrich Hegel

Anxiety and distress, interrupted occasionally by pleasure, is the normal course of man's existence. - Joseph Wood Krutch

Life is one big judgment call. (And a neverending series of little ones.) - Terri Guillemets

Life is abundance, as in nature when all conditions are right the tree bears fruit. - Mike Dolan, @HawaiianLife

Lifeless with a heartbeat. - Daniel, @blindedpoet

There are no extra pieces in the universe. Everyone is here because he or she has a place to fill and every piece must fit itself into the big jigsaw puzzle. Deepak Chopra

I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit, but if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer.... I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me. - Richard Phillips Feynman

Life is just a series of trying to make up your mind. - Timothy Fuller, Reunion with Murder, 1941

The history of man for the nine months preceding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting and contain events of greater moment than all the three score and ten years that follow it. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Song of Love, the Song of Hate,
the Songs of Praise and of Thanksgiving;
I've learned them all, but there remains
one called the Melody of Living.
- Frederic Ridgely Torrence, The House of a Hundred Lights: A Psalm of Experience After Reading a Couplet of Bidpai, 1899

Life is little more than a loan shark: It exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes. - Luigi Pirandello

There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last. - Robert Louis Stevenson

Red life boils in my veins.... Every woman is to me the gift of a world.... I hear a thousand nightingales.... I could eat all the elephants of Hindostan and pick my teeth with the spire of Strasburg Cathedral.... Life is the greatest of blessings, and death the worst of evils... - Excerpts from Heinrich Heine's Ideen: Das Buch Le Grand, 1826, translated from German and artfully compiled in Israel Zangwill's Dreamers of the Ghetto, "From a Mattress Grave," 1897

I live! Red life boils in my veins, earth yields beneath my feet, in the glow of love I embrace trees and statues, and they live in my embrace. Every woman is to me the gift of a world. I revel in the melody of her countenance, and with a single glance of my eye I can enjoy more than others with their every limb through all their lives. - Heinrich Heine (d.1856), "Ideas: Book Le Grand," 1826, translated from German by Charles Godfrey Leland, Pictures of Travel, 1855

I think miracles exist in part as gifts and in part as clues that there is something beyond the flat world we see. - Peggy Noonan

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. - H.L. Mencken

Almost everything in life is easier to get into than out of. - Agnes' Law

Chance is always powerful, let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish. - Ovid

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work — that goes on, it adds up. - Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Life is a series of collisions with the future. - José Ortega y Gasset

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Life is half spent before we know what it is. - George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, 1651

When life throws you lemons, make orange juice. It will leave them wondering how the hell you did that. - Author Unknown

Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it. - Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust — we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper. - Albert Einstein, in The Saturday Evening Post, 26 October 1929

Life is the greatest of blessings and death the worst of evils.... all great, powerful souls love life. - Heinrich Heine (d.1856), "Ideas: Book Le Grand," 1826, translated from German by Charles Godfrey Leland, Pictures of Travel, 1855

Jack Palance: "Do you know what the secret of life is? One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don't mean shit."
Billy Crystal: "Yeah, but what's that one thing?"
Jack Palance: "That's what you've got to figure out."
- From the movie City Slickers

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian. - Dennis Wholey

Life is an endless struggle full of frustrations and challenges, but eventually you find a hair stylist you like. - Author Unknown

Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? is not life one? - Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. - Crowfoot, 1890, as quoted in Catch the Whisper of the Wind compiled by Cheewa James

Have you noticed that life, real honest-to-goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in the newspapers? - Jean Anouilh, The Rehearsal, 1950

..."Sloppy, raggedy-assed
old life. I love it. I never
want to die."
- Dennis Trudell, "View," in The Fiddlehead, January 1969

Life is great. Don't let circumstances and society fool you into believing it's not. - Terri Guillemets

God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny. - Garrison Keillor

Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive. - Mel Brooks

Unbeing dead isn't being alive. - e.e. cummings

The meaning of life is not an unquestionable answer; it is an unanswerable question. - Terri Guillemets

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious. - Brendan Gill

The blanket of life is kind and warm for those who can find its snuggle. - Terri Guillemets  [A few years after writing this, I came across Marion Howard's "Life is like a blanket too short. You pull it up and your toes rebel, you yank it down and shivers meander about your shoulder; but cheerful folks manage to draw their knees up and pass a very comfortable night." —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]

When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash — at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance. - Thomas Merton