LIFE QUOTES
quotations about life
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Life is like walking through Paradise with peas in your shoes.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM, The Maxims of Marmaduke
Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
EUGENE O'NEILL, Lazarus Laughed
Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily.
VINCENT VAN GOGH, letter to Theo van Gogh, Oct. 1884
Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down.
To live is to war with trolls.
Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.
BERTRAND RUSSELL, Philosophical Essays
Life is a game. Money is how we keep score.
Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you can hardly catch it going.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
- Time
- Like a petal in the wind
- Flows softly by
- As old lives are taken
- New ones begin
- A continual chain
- Which lasts throughout eternity
- Every life but a minute in time
- But each of equal importance
CINDY CHENEY, "Time"
Life is too short to blend in.
- One Moment in Annihilation's Waste,
- One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste--
- The Stars are Setting and the Caravan
- Starts for the Dawn of Nothing -- Oh, make haste!
EDWARD FITZGERALD, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
I live in a room and I go to work and I play a game called getting through the day while you wait for the night.
LILLIAN HELLMAN, The Autumn Garden
You're pretending this isn't your life. You think it's going to happen some other time. When you're dead you'll realise you were alive now.
CARYL CHURCHILL, Mad Forest
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.
J.M. BARRIE, The Little Minister
My mistakes are my life.
SAMUEL BECKETT, How It Is
Life don't owe you nothing.
We've been told there's a certain way to live ... that this is living ... and we ... we never really questioned it. We just sort of went along. But what if it's not the best way? What if there's another way that's better? What if there's something more?!
WALTER WYKES, The Profession
The lives of people are like young trees in a forest. They are being choked by climbing vines. The vines are old thoughts and beliefs planted by dead men.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON, "Seeds," The Triumph of the Egg
All of life is a foreign country.
JACK KEROUAC, letter, June 24, 1949
It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.
FRANCIS BACON, Advancement of Learning
Each one of us must live the life God gives him; it cannot be shirked.
- One word
- Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
- That word is love.
SOPHOCLES, Oedipus at Colonus
All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces.
How small a porton of our life it is that we really enjoy. In youth we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age, we are looking backwards to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day, when we have time.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
In the chequered area of human experience the seasons are all mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the green cluster and another treads the wine-press. Nay, in each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until Death himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields.
GEORGE ELIOT, Daniel Deronda
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
HENRY ADAMS, The Education of Henry Adams
Football is a team game. So is life.
- What is this life if, full of care,
- We have no time to stand and stare?
WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES, Leisure
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life — It goes on.
ROBERT FROST, as quoted in William Nichols' A New Treasury of Words to Live By
So it is with all life. A tedium that includes the expectation of nothing but more tedium; a regret, right now, for the regret I'll have tomorrow for having felt regret today.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
Life is one long process of getting tired.
SAMUEL BUTLER, Note Books
The secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously!
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, The Joyful Wisdom
Life is made up of marble and mud.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, The House of the Seven Gables
Life is hard. After all, it kills you!
KATHARINE HEPBURN, Susan Crimp's Katharine Hepburn Once Said...
You should live everyday like it's your birthday.
Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.
JACK LONDON, The Call of the Wild
- Life is a dream in the night, a fear among fears,
- A naked runner lost in a storm of spears.
ARTHUR SYMONS, "In the Wood of Finvara"
You're alive. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change.
NEIL GAIMAN, The Graveyard Book
- To what can one compare our life on earth?
- To a flock of geese
- Waddling about in the snow
- Leaving a faint trace of their passage.
I have not wasted life, but life hath wasted me.
BHARTRHARI, "Against the Desire of Worldly Things"
Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.
The road is life.
JACK KEROUAC, On the Road
Life packed a clever one-two punch: cruelty and absurdity.
- Store well Life's sheaves, the grains of thought--
- Your harvest will be good,
- If sheaves are bound by ties of love,
- And evil you've withstood.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON, "Gathering of the Sheaves"
Life is hard, but it's harder if you're stupid.
- Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
- That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
- And then is heard no more: it is a tale
- Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
- Signifying nothing.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth
Living is a hazardous profession.
TOBSHA LEARNER, The Witch of Cologne
God is found in this Life ... to wait for another is folly.
There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, Where the Blue Begins
You must learn to deal with the odd and even in life, as well as in figures.
The essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things--the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.
Do not take life too seriously--you will never get out of it alive.
ELBERT HUBBARD, The American Bible
Tact is not a small thing; in the battle of life it is more powerful than a bludgeon.
ARTHUR LYNCH, Moods of Life
- Well life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
- When you think everything's okay and everything's going right
- And life has a funny way of helping you out when
- You think everything's gone wrong and everything blows up
- In your face
ALANIS MORISSETTE, "Ironic"
A life is black, whiten it as you will.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Life is a skeleton-land over which are hovering reflections, past and future fulfillments, clinging raiments of old desires, spread in full blaze upon the bones of the dead.
ELISE PUMPELLY CABOT, "Arizona"
- Mortal! that cull'st the flowers of life,
- Think not to escape the thorn.
WILLIAM B. TAPPAN, "The Thorn of Life"
- Life is more sweet than I
- Knew: the shifted scene
- Less wavered, more trimmed with light,
- Than the years before.
- Look down. People pass over the ice
- As a file of thin ghosts creep,
- And fade beyond the hill.
- You, and you, and you--
- Small souls, shrinking away.
MARK TURBYFILL, "Journey"
The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great loves and terrors. As our thought follows close in the slow wake of the dawn, we are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its history--hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and death.
Life is a garden forever in flower.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "Entre-Acte Reveries"
Our lives are waves that come up out of the ocean of eternity, break upon the beach of earth, and lapse back to the ocean of eternity. Some are sunlit, some run in storm and rain; one is a quiet ripple, another is a thunderous breaker; and once in many centuries comes a great tidal wave that sweeps over a continent; but all go back to the sea and lie equally level there.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
Life is a riddle we die in guessing.
CLARA MARCELLE FARRAR GREENE, "Before the Wedding"
Whatever may be our condition in life, it is better to lay hold of its advantages than to count its evils.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
- The fine art of Life is to make
- Another Soul vibrate with a song of joy.
EDWIN LEIBFREED, "The Song of the Soul"
- Stop and consider! life is but a day;
- A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way
- From a tree’s summit.
JOHN KEATS, "Sleep and Poetry"
- Into each life some rain must fall.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, "The Rainy Day"
Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich
There are those who say that life is like a book, with chapters for each event in your life and a limited number of pages on which you can spend your time. But I prefer to think that a book is like a life, particularly a good one, which is well to worth staying up all night to finish.
DANIEL HANDLER (as Lemony Snicket), Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
- And if sometimes, commingled with life's wine,
- We find the wormwood, and rebel and shrink,
- Be sure a wiser hand than yours or mine
- Pours out this potion for our lips to drink.
MAY RILEY SMITH, "Sometime"
- Some there are find joy in life,
- And some that only bear it.
The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.
Inch by inch. Life is a cinch. Yard by yard. Life is hard.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit Redux
Like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life.
VIRGINIA WOOLF, To the Lighthouse
Life is wasted on the living.
DOUGLAS ADAMS, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
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
Life calls the tune, we dance.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, Five Tales
- Life is the root of Eden's loftiest tree
- Whose ripened fruit is immortality.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN, "God's Gift to Man"
Life is but a prelude.
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Browse Life Quotes from movies and tv shows
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