LIFE QUOTES IV
quotations about life
Each one of us must live the life God gives him; it cannot be shirked.
SOPHOCLES
Philoctetes
That's the problem with being alive ... You've got to keep thinking of what to do.
GLEN DUNCAN
Death of an Ordinary Man
Life is a means of extracting fiction.
ROBERT STONE
attributed, Writers at Work
The zest for life of those unusual men and women who make a great zealous success of living is due more often in good part to the craftiness and pertinacity with which they manage to overlook the misery of others. You can watch them watch life beat the stuffing out of the faces of their friends and acquaintances, although they themselves seem to outwit the dense delays of social custom, the tedious tick-tock of bureaucratic obfuscation, accepting loss and age and change and disappointment without suffering punctures in their stomach lining.
EDWARD HOAGLAND
Tigers & Ice
How small a porton of our life it is that we really enjoy. In youth we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age, we are looking backwards to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day, when we have time.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Looking at your life as a debt may seem the dreariest view of things at a distance; but it cannot really be so. What makes life dreary is the want of motive; but once beginning to act with the penitential, loving purpose you have in your mind, there will be unexpected satisfactions--there will be newly-opening needs--continually coming to carry you on from day to day. You will find your life growing like a plant.
GEORGE ELIOT
Daniel Deronda
Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
But all they are all there scraping along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life's robulous rebus.
JAMES JOYCE
Finnegan's Wake
Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
For disappearing acts, it's hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work.
DOUG LARSON
attributed, Almanac of the Infamous, the Incredible, and the Ignored
Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
A Visit to Funen with Hans Christian Andersen
Life is very like a battle or a game of chess; and there ought to be some plan of the campaign.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays
Life is laughter amid a rosary of death.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
attributed, Only Mystery: Federico García Lorca's Poetry in Word and Image
How small a portion of our life it is that we really enjoy. In youth, we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age, we are looking backwards to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day when we have time.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
A shiftless clerk, I take the days on trust,
Nor strip them of their spoil before they go.
KARLE WILSON BAKER
"The Dusty Way", Blue Smoke
Life is not meant to be hard: if it is, we make it so.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.
MARY MCCARTHY
The Hounds of Summer and Other Stories
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Macbeth
A somewhat depressing lesson that we learn from life is that there is no guaranteed sure-fire formula for happiness.
MICHAEL W. EYSENCK
Happiness: Facts and Myths
Life is a moment stolen from eternity.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust