quotations about life
How fugitive and brief is mortal life between the budding and the falling leaf.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Two Moods"
All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Silver Key"
Life is no way to treat an animal.
KURT VONNEGUT
A Man Without a Country
As long as you live, keep learning how to live.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
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
preface, Autobiography
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
It's only life. We all get through it.
DEAN KOONTZ
Dark Rivers of the Heart
Trifles make the sum of life.
CHARLES DICKENS
David Copperfield
Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Middlesex
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 is what you do while you're waiting to die.
DONALD TRUMP
interview, Playboy, Mar. 1990
I look at it this way: How much of the day are you awake? You think, "I've gotta get that dry cleaning, I gotta get this going, and this, and this, and this." And all of a sudden it's dinnertime. And then there's a moment of connection with your spouse or your friends. Then you read and go to bed. Wake up and then it's the same all over. You're not awake, you're not living, you're not experiencing. We start early medicating ourselves. We start kids early, on TV and video games and so on.
TIM ALLEN
Reader's Digest, Oct. 2001
The life of man on earth is, as a rule, a dangerous journey, over and through shoals and quicksands, beset on his way outwardly by snares, traps, and insinuating temptations of all sorts, and inwardly, he is besieged by contending emotions of good and evil, perpetually at war with each other; however watchful must he then be to steer clear of all the dangers that beset him, and how necessary for him to keep his eye on the chart and compass God has provided him with for his guidance, and to pray for wisdom to understand it correctly. As on he travels day by day, the scenes he often passes through are varied, strange, and wonderful: first the road may be said to be through a smooth and quiet valley, then there comes a hill to climb; if climbed successfully at once, he often tumbles headlong down again, and next time it is more difficult to get up again; on the other hand, should he continue slowly and gradually on his road, he will find the remainder of his journey for the most part uphill, with now and then level and barren spots to cross, every slip or false step, he takes he finds it harder and harder to regain his lost position, and if weak-minded and faint-hearted, he perishes by the way; but if he has the sterling stuff in him, that will ever make a brave, a great, and a good man, with increasing faith and never-dying hope, head erect and body upright, he calmly but with unyielding determination presses on and on, higher and higher, rarely pausing to look back, but gaining summit after summit and peak after peak, till at the close of his career, he has gained earth's highest pinnacles, and his vision made more bright by the glorified blaze of the setting sun of his life below, he raises his eyes aloft, and there, not far distant, in awe-inspiring and dazzling splendour, he beholds with spell-bound rapture the Land of Beulah, the Plains of Heaven, and the homes prepared from the foundation of the world for the faithful earthly servants of their Heavenly Master.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
"On the Life of Man", Short Essays
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
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
They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Just because life's meaningless doesn't mean we can't experience it meaningfully.
GLEN DUNCAN
The Last Werewolf
Thus will we deal with life, my little help-meet. Will we not, eh? What though it blink at us like an owl that is blinded by the sun, we will yet force it to smile.
LEONID ANDREYEV
The Life of Man
Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon itself? And it is of course overestimated, for it is of necessity prejudiced in its own favour.
JACK LONDON
The Sea Wolf
Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.
JULIAN BARNES
The Sense of an Ending