LIFE QUOTES XXXV

quotations about life

One of my teachers in grammar school, a nun, used to say, "La vie, c'est bien complique." I'm not sure what that meant to me at the time, but it's become the guiding principle of my life, my writing, my interactions with others. Life is very complicated indeed, and that's what makes it both difficult and interesting. Stereotypes, racism, xenophobia -- most negativity in the world comes out of the natural human desire to oversimplify. Life isn't simple.

JEANNETTE ANGELL

"A talk with author Jeannette Angell: From college lecturer to callgirl and back", Souixland, Oct. 8, 2004

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Life and death have been lacking in my life.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

prologue, Discussion

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Man's life is like the morning dew.

JAPANESE PROVERB


The game of life is good, though all of life may be hurt, and though all lives lose the game in the end.

JACK LONDON

John Barleycorn

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In such a porcelain life one likes to be sure that all is well lest one stumble upon one's hopes in a pile of broken crockery.

EMILY DICKINSON

letter to Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Bowles, Aug. 1858?

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Life is but a field which we soon travel over, and the vale of eternity presents itself.

EDWARD COUNSEL

Maxims


A stream roars downward to a hidden sea
That slumbers moonless, starless, without bound,
Whence comes nor voice, nor form, nor any sound:
The stream is Life, the sea--Eternity.

WILLIAM WILSEY MARTIN

"Life"

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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

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Remember that life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.

SUSAN ROSE BLAUNER

How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me


Life consists of nothing but exceptions.

SERGEI LUKYANENKO

Night Watch

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Our lives fade behind us before we die.

JOHN UPDIKE

Rabbit is Rich

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Our life a harp is, with unnumbered strings,
And tones and symphonies; but our poor skill
Some shallow notes from its great music brings.

JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY

"Dolores"

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The greatest philosophy of life should be to live for the benefit of others as much as one lives for the benefit of self. And that is what philosophers call a footprint on the sands of time.

FEMI ABBAS

"A decade of royalty and faith", The Nation, September 2, 2016


Life consists in molting our illusions. We form creeds today only to throw them away tomorrow. The eagle molts a feather because he is growing a better one.

ELBERT HUBBARD

The American Bible


It is astonishing how much more anxious people are to lengthen life than to improve it; and as misers often lose large sums of money in attempting to make more, so do hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Lacon


A life is a life. The unbearable pain of losing someone you love is identical no matter how differently it is expressed. And yet the varying shades of the global reaction to tragedy based on location, nationality, ethnicity, culture and religion belie our humanity, a harsh reminder that our "global community" is an illusion, despite our seemingly desperate desire to cling to that notion.

ARWA DAMON

"A life is a life, wherever you are", CNN, March 29, 2016


Whatever you live is Life.

ROBERT PENN WARREN

All the King's Men


As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame that comes after is oblivion.

MARCUS AURELIUS

Meditations

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Let me leap naked through life's testing flame,
And bear to lose, and yet endure to win.

KENNETH RAND

"The World-Slave"

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I know that life is a journey I must accept and that pain and confusion are temporary. I know that if I follow my heart, it will lead me where I belong.

JOSH GROBAN

O Magazine, Jan. 2007

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