quotations about life
Life is not a bed of roses.
ENGLISH PROVERB
When something makes no sense, sometimes you make something of it. A joke. A spiritual practice. A life.
HEATHER SELLERS
Good Housekeeping, Jan. 2011
Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Proud Highway
Life doesn't do anything to you. It only reveals your spirit.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
The Power of Thinking Big
There is nothing at all in life, except what we put there.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles", The Writings of Madame Swetchine
The understanding of human existence that sees life as having death as its inevitable end presumes that life is lived only in opposition to dying and seeks the conquest of death; that is, immortality, or eternal life. Here, death is always seen as alien to life, something to be overcome. In contrast to this, the understanding of human existence as a continuous living-and-dying does not view life and death as objects in mutual opposition but as two aspects of indivisible reality. Present life is understood as something that undergoes continuous living-and-dying.
MASAO ABE
Zen and the Modern World
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
Some things in life are out of your control. You can make it a party or a tragedy.
NORA ROBERTS
Vision in White
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
Life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
We will never recognize the true value of our own lives until we affirm the value in the life of others.
RONALD REAGAN
"Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation"
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
The life of man on earth is, as a rule, a dangerous journey, over and through shoals and quicksands, beset on his way outwardly by snares, traps, and insinuating temptations of all sorts, and inwardly, he is besieged by contending emotions of good and evil, perpetually at war with each other; however watchful must he then be to steer clear of all the dangers that beset him, and how necessary for him to keep his eye on the chart and compass God has provided him with for his guidance, and to pray for wisdom to understand it correctly. As on he travels day by day, the scenes he often passes through are varied, strange, and wonderful: first the road may be said to be through a smooth and quiet valley, then there comes a hill to climb; if climbed successfully at once, he often tumbles headlong down again, and next time it is more difficult to get up again; on the other hand, should he continue slowly and gradually on his road, he will find the remainder of his journey for the most part uphill, with now and then level and barren spots to cross, every slip or false step, he takes he finds it harder and harder to regain his lost position, and if weak-minded and faint-hearted, he perishes by the way; but if he has the sterling stuff in him, that will ever make a brave, a great, and a good man, with increasing faith and never-dying hope, head erect and body upright, he calmly but with unyielding determination presses on and on, higher and higher, rarely pausing to look back, but gaining summit after summit and peak after peak, till at the close of his career, he has gained earth's highest pinnacles, and his vision made more bright by the glorified blaze of the setting sun of his life below, he raises his eyes aloft, and there, not far distant, in awe-inspiring and dazzling splendour, he beholds with spell-bound rapture the Land of Beulah, the Plains of Heaven, and the homes prepared from the foundation of the world for the faithful earthly servants of their Heavenly Master.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
"On the Life of Man", Short Essays
My life is one long blooper reel!
TOM WILSON
Ziggy, Jan. 12, 2000
But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Women in Love
As long as you were prepared to stay in it life found room for you. Life was like that, helplessly promiscuous, a doorman who let everyone in.
GLEN DUNCAN
Talulla Rising
Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?
JOSEPH HELLER
Catch-22
Life is not a mere exterior movement, the movement of the being in its relations to other beings, but it is also, and especially, an internal movement from the visible to the invisible, from the real to the ideal, from the finite to the infinite.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.
SAUL BELLOW
Herzog