quotations about life
Short is life, but endless is the theme.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Our life a harp is, with unnumbered strings,
And tones and symphonies; but our poor skill
Some shallow notes from its great music brings.
JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY
"Dolores"
Man's life is like the morning dew.
JAPANESE PROVERB
It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
It is astonishing how much more anxious people are to lengthen life than to improve it; and as misers often lose large sums of money in attempting to make more, so do hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Every day of your life is a day in which you must weigh the messages that rain down upon you. While many of those signals are simply lost in the informational deluge, there are a great number that reinforce or subtly erode the convictions that drive you and guide you in the choices you make as you navigate life.
THOM MOLLOHAN
"World makes no sense without God", Pomeroy Daily Sentinel, September 1, 2016
As regards the present life, it would seem that it is really possible for it, at least, to be made into something very satisfactory, since it is a simple matter of fact that some men, no matter what their condition in life, do contrive to get enjoyment and happiness out of it. To secure success in our vocation, we need a knowledge of its technicalities; to free the mind from doubt, to keep a man superior to temptation, we must give him good moral principles and habits. A purposeless life is deprived of much that is enjoyable in this world. Contrast the life of those who go through the world as if they were here but to eat, sleep, and die--no aim, purpose, or object before them--with that of those who daily work onward with an object before them, the determination to enjoy life, to make the best of life, to do their duty themselves, their fellow-men, and their God; obedient from the pleasure of doing God's will, and virtuous without everlastingly thinking of what virtue is to do for them; the desire to please God, to be living in harmony with Him, developing the highest aspirations of the soul, the moral tastes purified and exalted by daily communion with God, and the wish to live a life in obedience to His authority, compelling yon to be good, feeling yourself under a law whose voice is clear, resolute, and uniform--a law which tells you to adhere to the right, and avoid the expedient--which enables you to act upon principle, and not be led by the impulse of passion, or the plausibility of appearance.
JAMES PLATT
"Is Life Worth Living?", Platt's Essays
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
And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall.
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain
The world is a grindstone and life is your nose.
FRED ALLEN
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
Tell someone you love them because life is short, but shout it in Klingon because life is also terrifying and confusing.
ANONYMOUS
Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a state of constant learning.
BRUCE LEE
Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living
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
Life has possibilities; death has none.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
A life is a life. The unbearable pain of losing someone you love is identical no matter how differently it is expressed. And yet the varying shades of the global reaction to tragedy based on location, nationality, ethnicity, culture and religion belie our humanity, a harsh reminder that our "global community" is an illusion, despite our seemingly desperate desire to cling to that notion.
ARWA DAMON
"A life is a life, wherever you are", CNN, March 29, 2016
Whatever you live is Life.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.
JOHN DOS PASSOS
Three Soldiers
Life is a horizontal fall.
JEAN COCTEAU
Opium
A human life the treasure of the world cannot buy; nor can it redeem one which is misspent; nor can it make full and complete and beautiful a life which is dwarfed and warped and ugly.
JACK LONDON
The Cruise of the Dazzler
Weakest and strongest of the things that God has made, Life is the heir of Death, and yet his conqueror--victim at once and victor. All living things succumb to Death's cradle; Life smiles at his impotence, and makes the grave her cradle.
JAMES HINTON
Life in Nature