LIFE QUOTES XXXVIII

quotations about life

Ah! this beautiful world ... Indeed, I know not what to think of it. Sometimes it is all gladness and sunshine, and heaven itself lies not far off. And then it changes suddenly, and is dark and sorrowful, and clouds shut out the sky. In the lives of the saddest of us, there are bright days like this, when we feel as if we could take the great world in our arms. Then come the gloomy hours, when the fire will neither burn on our hearths nor in our hearts; and all without and within is dismal, cold, and dark.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Hyperion


Most of life is so dull it is not worth discussing, and it is dull at all ages. When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighborhood, subscribe to a different newspaper, fall in and out of love, we are protesting in ways both frivolous and deep against the not to be diluted dullness of day-to-day living.

TRUMAN CAPOTE

Summer Crossing

Tags: Truman Capote


Life is an adventure of passion, risk, danger, laughter, beauty, love; a burning curiosity to go with the action to see what it is all about, to go search for a pattern of meaning, to burn one's bridges because you're never going to go back anyway, and to live to the end.

SAUL ALINSKY

Reveille for Radicals

Tags: Saul Alinsky


Let me leap naked through life's testing flame,
And bear to lose, and yet endure to win.

KENNETH RAND

"The World-Slave"

Tags: Kenneth Rand


Work, whiskey, and cards were life.

HENRY ADAMS

The Education of Henry Adams

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I don't know why life isn't constructed to be seamless and safe, why we make such glaring mistakes, things fall so short of our expectations, and our hearts get broken and our kids do scary things and our parents get old and don't always remember to put pants on before they go out for a stroll. I don't know why it's not more like it is in the movies, why things don't come out neatly and lessons can't be learned when you're in the mood for learning them, why love and grace often come in such motley packaging.

ANNE LAMOTT

Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith


Human life is a pilgrimage from the unknown to the unknown. No one knows whence he emanated or whither he is bound.

FEMI ABBAS

"A decade of royalty and faith", The Nation, September 2, 2016


It's a great time to be alive and talking about life. We just learned that geologists found what appear to be fossilized stromatolites in 3.7-billion-year-old rocks in Greenland. That suggests life popped up on Earth ridiculously soon after the planet formed. And last we learned about the discovery of a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun. Meanwhile we now know planets are common. Maybe the universe is simply throbbing with life!

JOEL ACHENBACH

"The 4 biggest milestones in the history of life on Earth", Albuquerque Journal, September 1, 2016


Life is reduced to a bunch of fights over territory.

KOBO ABE

The Ark Sakura

Tags: Kobo Abe


The advantage of literature over life is that its characters are clearly defined, and act consistently.

JEROME K. JEROME

"Reginald Blake, Financier and Cad"


Life is a crucible. We are thrown into it, and tried.

E. H. CHAPIN

Living Words


Life is a theatre of alarms and contentions.

CHARLES HORTON COOLEY

Human Nature and the Social Order

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When we dead awaken ... we see that we have never lived.

HENRIK IBSEN

When We Dead Awaken

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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

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Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.

JOHN DOS PASSOS

Three Soldiers

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I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

speech during the Great March on Detroit, Jun. 23, 1963

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He whose daily life has been a rounded whole, is easy in his mind.

SENECA

Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales


This is the strange contract between life and language: language keeps naming and life, like a woman seductively escaping her seducer's caress, keeps just a little beyond its names.

GLEN DUNCAN

By Blood We Live

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Scorn ye not the little things,
For life is made from them.

ARDELIA COTTON BARTON

"Little Things"


Life -- and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison -- is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

NEIL GAIMAN

Death Talks About Life

Tags: Neil Gaiman