LIFE QUOTES XXXI

quotations about life

How strange it is, our little procession of life! The child says, "When I am a big boy." But what is that? The big boy says, "When I grow up." And then, grown up, he says, "When I get married." But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to "When I'm able to retire." And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he has missed it all, and it is gone.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Feast of Stephen


Life was a sorrowful throb of this Matter teaching it anguish,
Teaching it hope and desire trod out too soon in the mire,
Life the frail joy that regrets its briefness, life the long sorrow.

SRI AUROBINDO

Gems from Sri Aurobindo

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A life ill spent makes a sad old age.

SPANISH PROVERB


For some reason or the other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured--disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui--in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.

HENRY MILLER

Tropic of Cancer

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You had to take life as it came. It gave no quarter, spared no feelings. Limited no pain. Put no ceiling on happiness.

DAVID BALDACCI

The Innocent

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God made life simple. It is man who complicates it.

CHARLES LINDBERGH

Reader's Digest, July 1972


My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to William Wordsworth, Mar. 20, 1822

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The most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it.

SINCLAIR LEWIS

Arrowsmith


If I don't have time to live my life well the first time, when am I going to find the time to go back and live it over?

ROBERT FULGHUM

Uh-Oh

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One must live as he can.

MAXWELL ANDERSON

Winterset

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Life is not a bed of roses.

ENGLISH PROVERB


Ah! what is human life?
How, like the dial's tardy-moving shade,
Day after day slides from us unperceiv'd!
The cunning fugitive is swift by stealth;
Too subtle is the movement to be seen;
Yet soon the hour is up--and we are gone.

EDWARD YOUNG

Busiris, King of Egypt: A Tragedy

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The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

Blood Meridian


Q: Is life a dream or a meditation? A: Life is a meditation when you know it is a dream.

BABA HARI DASS

Yoga Journal, May 1977

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Life is a school of probability. In the writings of every man of patient practicality, in the midst of whatever other defects, you will find a careful appreciation of the degrees of likelihood; a steady balancing of them one against another; a disinclination to make things too clear, to overlook the debit side of the account in mere contemplation of the enormousness of the credit.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Estimates of Some Englishmen and Scotchmen

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Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Feast of Stephen

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In bowling and in life, if a person made the spares, the strikes would take care of themselves.

STEPHEN KING (as Richard Bachman)

Blaze

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I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

NEIL GAIMAN

American Gods

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And if sometimes, commingled with life's wine,
We find the wormwood, and rebel and shrink,
Be sure a wiser hand than yours or mine
Pours out this potion for our lips to drink.

MAY RILEY SMITH

"Sometime"


Dreams dawn and fly: friends smile and die,
Like spring flowers.
Our vaunted life is one long funeral.
Men dig graves, with bitter tears,
For their dead hopes; and all,
Mazed with doubts, and sick with fears,
Count the hours.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

"A Question: To Fausta"

Tags: Matthew Arnold