quotations about life
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
I just can't get used to life.
EUGENE IONESCO
Rhinoceros
So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
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
A good life keeps off wrinkles.
SPANISH PROVERB
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
Every now and then life sold you an illusion of design. A coincidence, a parallel, a sledgehammer symbol. The goods were always faulty. You forked over the cash only to discover they'd fallen apart by the time you got home. But life kept at it. Life couldn't help it. Life was a compulsive salesman.
GLEN DUNCAN
Talulla Rising
When life is lived as a living-and-dying in the primordial, nonsubstantial nothingness, one realizes that life is bottomlessly life and death is bottomlessly death. Life does not change into death, and death does not take away life.
MASAO ABE
Zen and the Modern World
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"
Our life is nothing, it is true, but our life is divine. A breath of nature annihilates us, but we surpass nature in penetrating far beyond her vast phantasmagoria to the changeless and the eternal.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
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
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
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
Each person's life is a continuum of unique experiences.
MITCH ANTHONY
Your Clients for Life
One brief journey betwixt heaven and earth,
Then, alas! we are the same old dust of ten thousand ages.
LI BAI
"The Old Dust"
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 wide, limitless. There is no border, no frontier.
BRUCE LEE
Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living
Life is a journey we are always travelling; but, unlike most others, seldom care we to reach the end.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The life you think you should want ... is always the life that looks safest.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country