quotations about life
Life is a problem. Not merely a premiss from which we start, but a goal towards which we proceed. It is an opportunity for us not merely to get, but to attain; not simply to have, but to be. Its standard of failure or success is not outward fortune, but inward possession.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
V. S. NAIPAUL
Half a Life
Life consists of nothing more than the happiness we can get out of it.
JEAN ANOUILH
Antigone
Life consists of burning up questions.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Selected Writings
Life can be cruel and uncomfortable at times. That doesn't define you. It's how we survive and create a colorful life with our experiences. Good and bad.
PAMELA ANDERSON
interview, Parade Magazine, January 23, 2015
Life ... is only heavy and none else; there is only the one trip, all heavy. Heavy that leads to the grave. For everyone and everything.
PHILIP K. DICK
A Scanner Darkly
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
LIN YUTANG
The Literary Digest, 1938
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death
Perhaps the world can teach us
as when everything seems dead
but later proves to be alive.
PABLO NERUDA
Extravagaria
If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them? People speak about what is in store. But there is nothing in store. The day is made of what has come before. The world itself must be surprised at the shape of that which appears. Perhaps even God.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
The Crossing
If life is often so hard as this, I don't see how we ever shall get through it.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.
RANSOM RIGGS
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Behind every man's external life, which he leads in company, there is another which he leads alone, and which he carries with him apart. We see but one aspect of our neighbor, as we see but one side of the moon; in either case there is also a dark half, which is unknown to us.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
Why, what in the world should we care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time?
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
To keep from dying is not the same as "to live."
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
The realization that life is absurd and cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.
ALBERT CAMUS
attributed, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd
The meaning of our lives is revealed through experiences that at first seem at odds with each other--moments we wish would never end and moments we wish had never begun.
JOHN ELDREDGE
Desire
Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides
Into the silent hollow of the past;
What is there that abides
To make the next age better for the last?
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration
Man reaches each stage in his life as a novice.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
Living is a hazardous profession.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
Life! Don't talk to me about life.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy