quotations about life
Each person's life is a continuum of unique experiences.
MITCH ANTHONY
Your Clients for Life
That's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.
FREDERIK POHL
Gateway
If life is a death sentence, then we all have plenty of time to kill.
GREGORY ADAMS
"Review: Life Is a Death Sentence", Exclaim, June 10, 2016
The life you think you should want ... is always the life that looks safest.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
If life is not a continual denial of the past, then it is nothing.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Reasonable Life
She seemed to listen to life as though life were the most cunning and charming of confidence men: knowing perfectly well that she was being conned, she, nevertheless, again and again, gave the man the money for the Brooklyn Bridge. She never gained possession of the bridge, of course, but she certainly learned how to laugh. And the tiny lines in her face had been produced as much by laughter as by loss.
JAMES BALDWIN
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
When I sit down to the feast of life ... I'm so busy planning on how to pick up the check, and wondering what the other people think of me for paying it, and wondering if I have enough money in my pocket to pay the bill, that I don't get around to eating.
FREDERIK POHL
Gateway
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
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
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 journey we are always travelling; but, unlike most others, seldom care we to reach the end.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
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
Life thunders on.
LOLA RIDGE
"Frank Little at Calvary"
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"
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
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 good life keeps off wrinkles.
SPANISH PROVERB
One brief journey betwixt heaven and earth,
Then, alas! we are the same old dust of ten thousand ages.
LI BAI
"The Old Dust"
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