LIFE QUOTES XXXV

quotations about life

Life has possibilities; death has none.

REUEN THOMAS

Thoughts for the Thoughtful

Tags: Thomas Reuen


There was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

NORMAN MAILER

The Deer Park

Tags: Norman Mailer


Life and death have been lacking in my life.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

prologue, Discussion

Tags: Jorge Luis Borges


He lived the life he lived, like anybody, I guess, and he paid his dues, like everybody. Maybe what I mean when I say he made his life so hard was that he always tried to pay his dues in front.

JAMES BALDWIN

Just Above My Head

Tags: James Baldwin


Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon itself? And it is of course overestimated, for it is of necessity prejudiced in its own favour.

JACK LONDON

The Sea Wolf

Tags: Jack London


Life? Bah! It has no value. Of cheap things it is the cheapest. Everywhere it goes begging. Nature spills it out with a lavish hand. Where there is room for one life, she sows a thousand lives, and it's life eats life till the strongest and most piggish life is left.

JACK LONDON

The Sea-Wolf


Life is a Shylock; always it demands
The fullest userer's interest for each pleasure.
Gifts are not freely scattered by its hands;
We make returns for every borrowed treasure.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

"The Law"


The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.

DON DELILLO

Point Omega

Tags: Don DeLillo


Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.

D. H. LAWRENCE

Sons and Lovers

Tags: D. H. Lawrence


Life is often wasted in a search after unattainable advantages, and generally, through the scruples of pride and vanity, our happiness is delayed from day to day, by a rejection of those pleasures and benefits which are within our reach.

CHARLES WILLIAM DAY

The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos

Tags: Charles William Day


Living is a disease from the pains of which sleep eases us every sixteen hours; sleep is but a palliative, death alone is the cure.

CHAMFORT

The Cynic's Breviary

Tags: Sebastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort


When life looks like it's falling apart, it may just be falling in place.

BEVERLY SOLOMON

Good Housekeeping, Aug. 2009

Tags: Beverly Solomon


Life is magical. There is something wonderful in being alive, in having within one's self all sorts of possibilities.

ARTHUR LYNCH

Moods of Life


Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments.

ANAIS NIN

diary, winter, 1931-32


Everything is so comfortable; the tea-urn hisses so plainly, the toast is so warm, the breakfast so neat, the food so edible, that one turns away, in excitable moments, a little angrily from anything so quiet, tame, and sober. Have we not always hated this life?

WILLIAM BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: Walter Bagehot


What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Minima Moralia


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

Tags: Sabine Baring-Gould


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

Tags: Percy Bysshe Shelley


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

PAMELA ANDERSON

Star

Tags: Pamela Anderson


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

Tags: Masao Abe