quotations about life
A life knows few revelations; these must be followed when they come.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit at Rest
Life, in a sense, is living and surviving. And all that makes for living and surviving is good. He who follows the fact cannot go astray, while he who has no reverence for the fact wanders afar.
JACK LONDON
The Kempton-Wace Letters
Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
IRVIN D. YALOM
The Schopenhauer Cure
A bubble of air in the blood, a drop of water in the brain, and a man is out of gear, his machine falls to pieces, his thought vanishes, the world disappears from him like a dream at morning. On what a spider thread is hung our individual existence!
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
You sit
Like a rain puddle in hell
Knitting the socks
Of your life.
CHARLES SIMIC
My Noiseless Entourage
So precious life is! Even to the old, the hours are as a miser's coins!
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Broken Music"
Life is a garden forever in flower.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Entre-Acte Reveries"
Life is distressing insomuch as we give exaggerated importance to altogether unimportant matters. Drifting along, I have observed that we men and women disturb ourselves about trifles, overlooking in the needless excitement the innumerable beauties which wait upon the way. Every ripple is not a wave, every wind is not a hurricane. Why worry whilst we are still upon the stream? It will be time enough to trouble when we meet the sea.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
But life is not the wax or wick of the candle, it is the burning. It is not the complex nitrates and the carbon compounds in which it sits but their combustion.
BAKER BROWNELL
The New Universe