quotations about life
The life most of us live are lives we are forced to live by immediate needs, influences, and pressures.
WALTER MOSLEY
Black Genius
The loves and hours of the life of a man,
They are swift and sad, being born of the sea.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
The Triumph of Time
Thus will we deal with life, my little help-meet. Will we not, eh? What though it blink at us like an owl that is blinded by the sun, we will yet force it to smile.
LEONID ANDREYEV
The Life of Man
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES
Leisure
Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Ah! what is human life?
How, like the dial's tardy-moving shade,
Day after day slides from us unperceiv'd!
The cunning fugitive is swift by stealth;
Too subtle is the movement to be seen;
Yet soon the hour is up--and we are gone.
EDWARD YOUNG
Busiris, King of Egypt: A Tragedy
Anything in life is possible if you make it happen.
JACK LALANNE
Fiscal Fitness: 8 Steps to Wealth & Health from America's Leaders of Fitness
Dreams dawn and fly: friends smile and die,
Like spring flowers.
Our vaunted life is one long funeral.
Men dig graves, with bitter tears,
For their dead hopes; and all,
Mazed with doubts, and sick with fears,
Count the hours.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"A Question: To Fausta"
God made life simple. It is man who complicates it.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
Reader's Digest, July 1972
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
Life appears in a vast variety and innumerable succession of individual forms, since the most salient character of the universe is just that it ceaselessly gives birth to living individuals.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON
Man and the Cosmos: An Introduction to Metaphysics
Life doesn't work that way. You can do everything perfectly. Do everything you think you're supposed to be doing. Fulfill every expectation that other people may have. And you still won't get the results you think you deserve. Life is crazy and maddening and often makes no sense.
DAVID BALDACCI
One Summer
Life is real, life should be earnest. To be enjoyed, we must have an aim, an object in life; and to be happy, to enjoy life, the object must be one worthy the highest, purest, best part of our nature.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays
Life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
Life is the apprenticeship to progressive renunciation, to the steady diminution of our claims, of our hopes, of our powers, of our liberty.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Life was a sorrowful throb of this Matter teaching it anguish,
Teaching it hope and desire trod out too soon in the mire,
Life the frail joy that regrets its briefness, life the long sorrow.
SRI AUROBINDO
Gems from Sri Aurobindo
Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Feast of Stephen
That was indeed to live -- at one bold swoop to wrest from darkling death the best that death to life can give.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Shaw Memorial Ode"
The understanding of human existence that sees life as having death as its inevitable end presumes that life is lived only in opposition to dying and seeks the conquest of death; that is, immortality, or eternal life. Here, death is always seen as alien to life, something to be overcome. In contrast to this, the understanding of human existence as a continuous living-and-dying does not view life and death as objects in mutual opposition but as two aspects of indivisible reality. Present life is understood as something that undergoes continuous living-and-dying.
MASAO ABE
Zen and the Modern World
We will never recognize the true value of our own lives until we affirm the value in the life of others.
RONALD REAGAN
"Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation"