quotations about life
Short is life, but endless is the theme.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
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
Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments.
ANAIS NIN
diary, winter, 1931-32
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
Whatever you live is Life.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
Life is a mixed bag of success and failure.
NAWAZUDDIN SIDDIQUI
The Times of India, May 25, 2016
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
Let me leap naked through life's testing flame,
And bear to lose, and yet endure to win.
KENNETH RAND
"The World-Slave"
Desire, both the whispers and the shouts, is the map we have been given to find the only life worth living.
JOHN ELDREDGE
Desire
Life is a horizontal fall.
JEAN COCTEAU
Opium
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
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
Who fears death does not enjoy life.
SPANISH PROVERB
I realized that the ultimate joy in life comes from understanding that life is a process, the tapestry of threads bound together, where some fit in and some fall out of place: people come and go, events do not turn out as we would like to, we plan for the best, yet have to set for the worst. If we try to rush life, control it, get angry about it, it will run away from us. If we embrace life, breathe deeply into it and accept it as a wonder, we will be the richest people in the world in a split second.
MILENA MILICEVIC
"How I Overcame My Biggest Mistake in Life so Far", Huffington Post, June 14, 2016
Life is reduced to a bunch of fights over territory.
KOBO ABE
The Ark Sakura
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
JOHN LENNON
"Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)", Double Fantasy
Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
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
All of life is a foreign country.
JACK KEROUAC
letter, June 24, 1949
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"A Psalm of Life"