quotations about life
Life is not a mere exterior movement, the movement of the being in its relations to other beings, but it is also, and especially, an internal movement from the visible to the invisible, from the real to the ideal, from the finite to the infinite.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Just because life's meaningless doesn't mean we can't experience it meaningfully.
GLEN DUNCAN
The Last Werewolf
Though life's tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn.
JOHN BARTH
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor
Life is a series of abandonings.
JEFF ABBOTT
The Last Minute
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began,
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Fellowship of the Ring
Man's life is entirely in his operations, which may all be classed under three heads: he thinks, he feels, and he acts -- these three modes of activity exhaust his powers.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
The Doctrine of Life
Man reaches each stage in his life as a novice.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
Every noble life becomes a revelation of the spirit which the love and joy of mankind cannot let perish from remembrance.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a pattern of systems.
BRUCE LEE
Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living
Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down.
GEORGE ELIOT
Romola
All our mortal lives are set in danger and perplexity: one day to prosper, and the next -- who knows? When all is well, then look for rocks ahead.
SOPHOCLES
Philoctetes
Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides
Into the silent hollow of the past;
What is there that abides
To make the next age better for the last?
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration
Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Middlesex
Life appears in a vast variety and innumerable succession of individual forms, since the most salient character of the universe is just that it ceaselessly gives birth to living individuals.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON
Man and the Cosmos: An Introduction to Metaphysics
Every day is a careful balance fought between the despondency that threatens to swamp me and the incredible joy of living.
CHRIS ABANI
Kalakuta Republic
Life is but sighs; and, when they cease, 'tis over.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.
SAUL BELLOW
Herzog
Trifles make the sum of life.
CHARLES DICKENS
David Copperfield
Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?
JOSEPH HELLER
Catch-22
Life is no way to treat an animal.
KURT VONNEGUT
A Man Without a Country