quotations about life
Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Feast of Stephen
Life was a storm to wander through.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENET
"The Quality of Courage"
Life is a warfare against the malice of others.
BALTASAR GRACIAN
The Art of Worldly Wisdom
Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck.
FRANK HERBERT
Chapterhouse: Dune
Life divine! O life eternal!
Man cannot translate the thought.
Strong the chain that God hath welded;
Link on link hath chain been wrought.
Fabric new each day is woven,
Woven it on God's own loom.
We the threads can ne'er unravel,
Hidden they in Nature's womb.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Dost Thou Know?"
Life consists of nothing but exceptions.
SERGEI LUKYANENKO
Night Watch
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
It's only life. We all get through it.
DEAN KOONTZ
Dark Rivers of the Heart
It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.
ANNE LAMOTT
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death
Perhaps the world can teach us
as when everything seems dead
but later proves to be alive.
PABLO NERUDA
Extravagaria
I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.
JACK LONDON
The Turtles of Tasman
When people say that they are happy with their lives, they do not usually mean that they are literally joyful, or experiencing pleasure, all the time. They mean that, upon reflection on the balance sheet of pleasures and pains, they feel the balance to be reasonably positive over the long term.
DANIEL NETTLE
Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile
The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Blood Meridian
The loves and hours of the life of a man,
They are swift and sad, being born of the sea.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
The Triumph of Time
That was indeed to live -- at one bold swoop to wrest from darkling death the best that death to life can give.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Shaw Memorial Ode"
Philosophers wrestling with the big questions of life are no longer alone. Now scientists are struggling to define life as they manipulate it, look for it on other planets, and even create it in test tubes.
SETH BORENSTEIN
USA Today, Aug. 19, 2007
My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.
CHARLES LAMB
letter to William Wordsworth, Mar. 20, 1822
Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is to make a hole in one with you.
FRED ALLEN
Fred Allen's Letters
Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Middlesex
Life is the tamer of the wild beast of humanity.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"Childhood", A Soliloquy of Life