LIFE QUOTES XXXIV

quotations about life

When people say that they are happy with their lives, they do not usually mean that they are literally joyful, or experiencing pleasure, all the time. They mean that, upon reflection on the balance sheet of pleasures and pains, they feel the balance to be reasonably positive over the long term.

DANIEL NETTLE

Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile

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If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

Suttree

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You sit
Like a rain puddle in hell
Knitting the socks
Of your life.

CHARLES SIMIC

My Noiseless Entourage

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

CHARLES LINDBERGH

Reader's Digest, July 1972


Live life fully while you're here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You're going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process!

ANTHONY ROBBINS

Awaken the Giant Within

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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness

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The unfairness of life is indicative of trees. I planted twenty trees on the same block. It's so fucking weird. Six became huge. One is giant. And there are some little shitty ones. Same soil. Same water. Same seed. But those little ones just don't grow. I can't explain it.

TIM ALLEN

Esquire, Nov. 2011

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That was indeed to live -- at one bold swoop to wrest from darkling death the best that death to life can give.

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

"Shaw Memorial Ode"

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In a life without obstacles he would doubtless have abandoned himself to chance and to the voluptuous sauntering of adolescence. As he could be free only for an hour or two a day, his strength flowed into that space of time like a river between walls of rock. It is a good discipline for art for a man to confine his efforts between unshakable bounds. In that sense it may be said that misery is a master, not only of thought, but of style; it teaches sobriety to the mind as to the body. When time is doled out and thoughts measured, a man says no word too much, and grows accustomed to thinking only what is essential; so he lives at double pressure, having less time for living.

ROMAIN ROLLAND

Jean-Christophe

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Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle. What are changes of empires, the wreck of dynasties, with the opinions which supported them; what is the birth and the extinction of religious and of political systems to life? What are the revolutions of the globe which we inhabit, and the operations of the elements of which it is composed, compared with life? What is the universe of stars, and suns, of which this inhabited earth is one, and their motions, and their destiny, compared with life? Life, the great miracle, we admire not, because it is so miraculous. It is well that we are thus shielded by the familiarity of what is at once so certain and so unfathomable, from an astonishment which would otherwise absorb and overawe the functions of that which is its object.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

"On Life", Essays and Letters

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Life is a mixed bag of success and failure.

NAWAZUDDIN SIDDIQUI

The Times of India, May 25, 2016


Well yet, this life such as it is, yet we love it, and loath we are to end it; and if it be in hazard by the law, what running, riding, posting, suing, bribing, and if all will not serve, what breaking prison is there for it!

LANCELOT ANDREWES

Ninety-six Sermons

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Our lives fade behind us before we die.

JOHN UPDIKE

Rabbit is Rich

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Life is a horizontal fall.

JEAN COCTEAU

Opium

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Man's life is like the morning dew.

JAPANESE PROVERB


Life is a stream
On which we strew
Petal by petal the flower of our heart.

AMY LOWELL

"Petals", A Dome of Many-coloured Glass

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He is dead already who doth not feel
Life is worth living still.

ALFRED AUSTIN

"Is Life Worth Living?", Lyrical Poems

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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 is like sex. It's not always good, but it's always worth trying.

PAMELA ANDERSON

Star

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As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame that comes after is oblivion.

MARCUS AURELIUS

Meditations

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