quotations about life
Living is a hazardous profession.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
You had to take life as it came. It gave no quarter, spared no feelings. Limited no pain. Put no ceiling on happiness.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Innocent
Life is not the unique property of Earth. Nor is life in the shape of human beings. Life takes many forms on other planets and far stars, forms that would seem bizarre to humans, as human life is bizarre to other life-forms.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Dark Brotherhood"
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
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
How strange it is, our little procession of life! The child says, "When I am a big boy." But what is that? The big boy says, "When I grow up." And then, grown up, he says, "When I get married." But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to "When I'm able to retire." And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he has missed it all, and it is gone.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Feast of Stephen
Life is but sighs; and, when they cease, 'tis over.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
One must live as he can.
MAXWELL ANDERSON
Winterset
How fugitive and brief is mortal life between the budding and the falling leaf.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Two Moods"
What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Life-and-death. Lifedeath. One event. One short event. Don't forget.
ROBERT FULGHUM
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Life is Supercalifragilisticexpialidocius.
JULIE ANDREWS
Star Weekly, Apr. 29, 1965
Life is like patchwork: every day there is a fresh bit to be put on. We must understand more correctly how to fit in better the bits needed day by day in repairing this patchwork life of ours. As it is, the three-cornered bits too often get put into the square places; but it is essential for man's happiness that he comprehends and unhesitatingly accepts as a truism that it rests with us to make this patchwork to our own liking; that we have the power to shape this life of ours more regularly, harmoniously, and blend it more perfectly; and that our life as it is, or as it might be, depends upon whether this be done in the right spirit.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays
And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall.
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain
You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.
SAUL BELLOW
Herzog
Real life was messier than fiction, and in it you didn't always have time to do or say the right things.
BENTLEY LITTLE
The Resort
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
No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted.
GEORGE ELIOT
Romola
The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.
ECKHART TOLLE
The Power of Now
And if sometimes, commingled with life's wine,
We find the wormwood, and rebel and shrink,
Be sure a wiser hand than yours or mine
Pours out this potion for our lips to drink.
MAY RILEY SMITH
"Sometime"