quotations about life
If life is often so hard as this, I don't see how we ever shall get through it.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
Life is what you put into it and how much you take out of it. You put in more than is expected, and you take out less than you want.
MICHAEL J. FOX
Good Housekeeping, June 2011
There are sad times, of course, but then life is a mixture and an authentic life story is the good, the bad, and everything in between.
NIK FARAH
"Recording a life is so precious", The Star, August 12, 2016
Life ... is only heavy and none else; there is only the one trip, all heavy. Heavy that leads to the grave. For everyone and everything.
PHILIP K. DICK
A Scanner Darkly
He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach -- that it makes no sense.
PHILIP ROTH
American Pastoral
Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.
RICHARD BACH
Illusions
The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Lila
Life is, alas, one eternal combat.
SARAH BERNHARDT
The Idol of Paris
There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.
SAUL BELLOW
AGNI interview, 1997
I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
STEPHEN HAWKING
The Daily News
Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
V. S. NAIPAUL
Half a Life
Behind every man's external life, which he leads in company, there is another which he leads alone, and which he carries with him apart. We see but one aspect of our neighbor, as we see but one side of the moon; in either case there is also a dark half, which is unknown to us.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Mr G: A Novel About the Creation
It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.
ANNE LAMOTT
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
Life is short, if we are only said to live when we enjoy ourselves; and if we were merely to count up the hours we spent agreeably, a great number of years would hardly make up a life of a few months.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Affections", Les Caractères
Life is one long struggle in the dark.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on.
ROBERT BROWNING
In a Balcony
The realization that life is absurd and cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.
ALBERT CAMUS
attributed, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd
Into the void of silence, into the empty space of nothing, the joy of life is unfurled.
C. S. LEWIS
The Magician's Nephew
Life is the thing--the song of life--
The eager plow, the thirsty knife!
CONRAD AIKEN
"Youth Imperturbable"