quotations about life
Life itself suggests a higher good than life itself can yield.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
Much too oft we make life gloomy--
When happy we might be,
If we gathered more of sunshine,
And not dark shadows see.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
Thoughts
Life is like a moustache. It can be wonderful or terrible. But it always tickles.
NORA ROBERTS
From the Heart
To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
GASTON BACHELARD
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire
Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Beyond the Wall of Sleep"
The most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Arrowsmith
The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a pattern of systems.
BRUCE LEE
Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living
A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.
ANNE LAMOTT
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
Behold the life at ease; it drifts,
The sharpened life commands its course.
GEORGE MEREDITH
"Hard Weather"
Man's life is entirely in his operations, which may all be classed under three heads: he thinks, he feels, and he acts -- these three modes of activity exhaust his powers.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
The Doctrine of Life
The hearts of all men dwell in the same wilderness.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune Messiah
Life is what you put into it and how much you take out of it. You put in more than is expected, and you take out less than you want.
MICHAEL J. FOX
Good Housekeeping, June 2011
Life is a Shylock; always it demands
The fullest userer's interest for each pleasure.
Gifts are not freely scattered by its hands;
We make returns for every borrowed treasure.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"The Law"
I compare human life to a large mansion of many apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me.
JOHN KEATS
letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, May 3, 1818
For some reason or the other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured--disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui--in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Cancer
Life is as the current spark on the miner's wheel of flints;
While it spinneth, there is light; stop it, all is darkness.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
The best life is that which makes the best of life.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon itself? And it is of course overestimated, for it is of necessity prejudiced in its own favour.
JACK LONDON
The Sea Wolf