quotations about life
Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
Where the Blue Begins
Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.
MARY MCCARTHY
The Hounds of Summer and Other Stories
Life is a moment stolen from eternity.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Life is not meant to be hard: if it is, we make it so.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
The zest for life of those unusual men and women who make a great zealous success of living is due more often in good part to the craftiness and pertinacity with which they manage to overlook the misery of others. You can watch them watch life beat the stuffing out of the faces of their friends and acquaintances, although they themselves seem to outwit the dense delays of social custom, the tedious tick-tock of bureaucratic obfuscation, accepting loss and age and change and disappointment without suffering punctures in their stomach lining.
EDWARD HOAGLAND
Tigers & Ice
For disappearing acts, it's hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work.
DOUG LARSON
attributed, Almanac of the Infamous, the Incredible, and the Ignored
Life is a means of extracting fiction.
ROBERT STONE
attributed, Writers at Work
You should live everyday like it's your birthday.
PARIS HILTON
attributed, The Ultimate Book of Quotations
Every second of my regular, boring life is a beautiful gift.
MOLLY JO ROSE
"Life is fullest before the 25th hour", U.S. Catholic, September 1, 2016
A somewhat depressing lesson that we learn from life is that there is no guaranteed sure-fire formula for happiness.
MICHAEL W. EYSENCK
Happiness: Facts and Myths
A shiftless clerk, I take the days on trust,
Nor strip them of their spoil before they go.
KARLE WILSON BAKER
"The Dusty Way", Blue Smoke
We find that the more a cultivated reason devotes itself to the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the further does man get away from true contentment.
IMMANUEL KANT
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
Life is laughter amid a rosary of death.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
attributed, Only Mystery: Federico García Lorca's Poetry in Word and Image
All life is a dream, my children, but you are not the dreamer; the Dreamer rests on a bed of down plucked from the breast of the swan of eternity. He turns in His sleep sometimes, and a world comes to an end; He smiles in His sleep sometimes, and men know the Golden Age; sometimes He is restless, too, and the revolutions come. Will the Dreamer never awake? Who knows! I would hold Him sleeping; For if He should rise from His nest on the down of eternity, He might rub His drowsy eyes -- and I should forget to be.
ELSA BARKER
Songs of a Vagrom Angel
The lives of people are like young trees in a forest. They are being choked by climbing vines. The vines are old thoughts and beliefs planted by dead men.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"Seeds", The Triumph of the Egg
Most people can't imagine a life that is any different from the one they are actually living. They can dream about it, they can even go into the streets and demonstrate for it, but they still can't imagine what it would be like.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light
Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
A Visit to Funen with Hans Christian Andersen
Success makes life easier. It doesn't make living easier.
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
Q, August, 1992
Life is very like a battle or a game of chess; and there ought to be some plan of the campaign.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays