LIFE QUOTES XXVI

quotations about life

Life is an illusion to be tailored to our needs.

BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON

Dune: House Harkonnen


If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year.

ALICE MEYNELL

"The Rhythm of Life", The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays


What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES

Leisure

Tags: William Henry Davies


Life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Reveries over Childhood and Youth

Tags: William Butler Yeats


I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And then? I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And what next? I get laid, I take a short holiday, but very soon after I fall upon those same thorns with gratification in pain, or suffering in joy -- who knows what the mixture is! What good, what lasting good is there in me? Is there nothing else between birth and death but what I can get out of this perversity -- only a favorable balance of disorderly emotions? No freedom? Only impulses? And what about all the good I have in my heart -- does it mean anything? Is it simply a joke? A false hope that makes a man feel the illusion of worth? And so he goes on with his struggles. But this good is no phony. I know it isn't. I swear it.

SAUL BELLOW

Herzog


Odd thing about death ... it reaffirms life.

RITA MAE BROWN

Hounded to Death

Tags: Rita Mae Brown


Though life's tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn.

JOHN BARTH

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Tags: John Barth


Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Middlesex

Tags: Jeffrey Eugenides


In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.

ISAAC ASIMOV

Fantastic Voyage II

Tags: Isaac Asimov


All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

"The Silver Key"

Tags: H. P. Lovecraft


When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

My Day

Tags: Eleanor Roosevelt


Life is a movement outward, an unfolding.

ELBERT HUBBARD

The American Bible


We are buried when we're born. The world is a place of graves occupied and graves potential. Life is what happens while we wait for our appointment with the mortician.

DEAN KOONTZ

Odd Apocalypse


Into the void of silence, into the empty space of nothing, the joy of life is unfurled.

C. S. LEWIS

The Magician's Nephew

Tags: C. S. Lewis


Life is sad
Life is a bust
All ya can do is do what you must

BOB DYLAN

"Buckets of Rain"

Tags: Bob Dylan


To live means to finesse the processes to which one is subjugated.

BERTOLT BRECHT

On Politics and Society

Tags: Bertolt Brecht


Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day that we die.

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

"Nephelidia"

Tags: Algernon Charles Swinburne


This life is only the anteroom of a greater reality to come.

WM. PAUL YOUNG

The Shack

Tags: Wm. Paul Young


Funny. You talk of life as if it were a train you have to catch up with. How long have you been trying, three days? And not got a glimpse of it yet, in spite of caviar and champagne?

VICKI BAUM

Grand Hotel


I look at it this way: How much of the day are you awake? You think, "I've gotta get that dry cleaning, I gotta get this going, and this, and this, and this." And all of a sudden it's dinnertime. And then there's a moment of connection with your spouse or your friends. Then you read and go to bed. Wake up and then it's the same all over. You're not awake, you're not living, you're not experiencing. We start early medicating ourselves. We start kids early, on TV and video games and so on.

TIM ALLEN

Reader's Digest, Oct. 2001