quotations about life
To withhold from living is to die ... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.
ANAIS NIN
diary, Mar. 6, 1936
The real thing, this! and all these endless days, these days of senseless drudgery, it was this that set his soul in fever -- in a craze -- to break away, to feel the crushing bliss of life that wars with life -- the seethe and hiss.
CONRAD AIKEN
"Youth"
A long life is a life well spent.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Pere Goriot
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
"Modern Fiction", The Common Reader
As a well spent day affords happy sleep, so does a life profitably employed afford a happy death.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
I just can't get used to life.
EUGENE IONESCO
Rhinoceros
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
I shall not say, our life is all in vain,
For peace may cheer the desolated hearth;
But well I know that, on this weary earth,
Round each joy-island is a sea of pain.
HENRY ABBEY
"While the Days Go By"
Life is a journey we are always travelling; but, unlike most others, seldom care we to reach the end.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Life is made up of marble and mud.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The House of the Seven Gables
Each person's life is a continuum of unique experiences.
MITCH ANTHONY
Your Clients for Life
One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found -- and it is found in terrible places.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Life is a muddle. It seems a brilliant muddle, if you are an optimist; a dull one, if you aren't; but in neither case can you deny that it is the muddlers who keep it going.
MAX BEERBOHM
The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm
I have ever had the conviction, resistant to all rational considerations, that at some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal which is my life, with its so many misreadings, is slips and fluffs, will be done with and that the real drama for which I have ever and with earnestness been preparing will at last begin. It is a common delusion.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
How deceptively light they are, the truly decisive steps we take in life.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
One brief journey betwixt heaven and earth,
Then, alas! we are the same old dust of ten thousand ages.
LI BAI
"The Old Dust"
All research suggests that life on this Earth is an accident, that if you take a kettle of primordial soup and shake it enough, shock it enough, even freeze it enough, you get organic compounds. Allow these compounds to suffer random accidents long enough and you get life. That's life with a capital L. The fundamentalists are outraged that something as sacred and important as Life could be an accident. They want it to be a result of a command, a plan, a blueprint, a simple, orderly, well-engineered, easily understood project designed by a deity who ... would figure all tolerances and fudge them by a safety factor of five or ten. Well, fuck them. Accidents happen. We're one of them.
DAN SIMMONS
Lovedeath
The life you think you should want ... is always the life that looks safest.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death?
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
Méditations Poétiques