quotations about life
Solve the problem of life? Live, and you solve it.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet
EMILY DICKINSON
"That it will never come again"
Life is too short for aught but high endeavor.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Life Is Too Short"
It's your life -- but only if you make it so.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
You Learn by Living
It is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
CHARLES DICKENS
Great Expectations
Nothing was certain; there were many strange twists and devious turns as one hopped down the overgrown bunnytrail of life.
STEPHEN KING
"Big Driver", Full Dark, No Stars
Life is not life unless we can feel it.
SAMUEL BUTLER
"How to Make the Best of Life", Essays on Life, Art and Science
Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?
MARY OLIVER
"Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?", West Wind
When man would make a rose with tools, he fashions petals and leaves of wax, colors them, manufactures a stalk by the same mechanical process -- and the rose is done. When God makes a rose, he lets a bird or a puff of wind drop a seed into the ground; out of the seed there emerges a stalk; and out of the stalk, branches; and on these branches, buds; and out of these buds roses unfold; and the rose is never done, for it goes on endlessly repeating itself. This is the difference between manufacture and growth. Man's method is the method of manufacture; God's method is the method of growth. What man makes is a finished product -- death. What God makes is an always finishing and never finished product -- life.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
Life is a series of sudden disappearances, leave-takings without the proper goodbyes.
KELLY LINK
Stranger Things Happen
Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
Where I come from in the Eastern Region, life is still -- well, things are changing very fast but if one is interested, one can still see signs of what life used to look like.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Conversations with Chinua Achebe
To have found meaning in life is thus the only certain antidote to the deliberate seeking of death. But at the same time, in a strange dialectical way, it is death that endows life with its deepest, most unique meaning.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
Surviving the Holocaust
What fills us is real, sweet, dopey, funny life.
ANNE LAMOTT
"Time Lost and Found", Sunset
One's life should be sufficiently interesting to furnish entertainment in the record.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Ethics of Ambiguity
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
MARY OLIVER
"Sometimes", Red Bird
In a dream thou mayst live a lifetime, and all be forgotten in the morning:
Even such is life, and so soon perisheth its memory.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
The difficulties of life are intended to make us better--not bitter.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
The Power of Thinking Big
His dangerous, overwhelming lust for life had failed to involve him in anything deeper than perhaps half a dozen extremely casual acquaintanceships in about as many bars.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country