LIFE QUOTES III
quotations about life
The most decisive actions of our life -- I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future -- are, more often than not, unconsidered. Like a train into which one jumps without thinking, and without asking oneself where it is going.
ANDRE GIDE
The Counterfeiters
Calm down, you'll live longer.
RICHARD LAYMON
The Stake
Life is one long process of getting tired.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Note Books
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
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.
BLAISE PASCAL
Pensees
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worrying, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
I seem to have always one little window looking but into life.
EMMA LAZARUS
obituary, Century Magazine, 1887
It is time to stop looking outside yourself for the answers to why you haven't created the life and results you want, for it is you who creates the quality of life you lead and the results you produce. You--no one else! To achieve major success in life--to achieve those things that are most important to you--you must assume 100 percent responsibility for your life. Nothing less will do.
JACK CANFIELD
The Success Principles
Life is not a mixture of matter and energy but energy in matter, bound in such a way that dissociation is impossible so long as the living process continues.
ALEXANDER LOWEN
The Language of the Body
Tact is not a small thing; in the battle of life it is more powerful than a bludgeon.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
Life is a voyage, and we are all sailing under sealed orders. We plan, plot, scheme and arrange, and some fine day Fate steps in and our dreams are tossed into the yeasty deep. We grin and bear it--anyway we bear it: it is the only thing to do.
ELBERT HUBBARD
The American Bible
Life is brutal that way ... the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.
DAN SIMMONS
Endymion
Life is the root of Eden's loftiest tree
Whose ripened fruit is immortality.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"God's Gift to Man"
Looking at your life as a debt may seem the dreariest view of things at a distance; but it cannot really be so. What makes life dreary is the want of motive; but once beginning to act with the penitential, loving purpose you have in your mind, there will be unexpected satisfactions--there will be newly-opening needs--continually coming to carry you on from day to day. You will find your life growing like a plant.
GEORGE ELIOT
Daniel Deronda
A shiftless clerk, I take the days on trust,
Nor strip them of their spoil before they go.
KARLE WILSON BAKER
"The Dusty Way", Blue Smoke
Life is a plant that grows out of death.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
All life is a dream, my children, but you are not the dreamer; the Dreamer rests on a bed of down plucked from the breast of the swan of eternity. He turns in His sleep sometimes, and a world comes to an end; He smiles in His sleep sometimes, and men know the Golden Age; sometimes He is restless, too, and the revolutions come. Will the Dreamer never awake? Who knows! I would hold Him sleeping; For if He should rise from His nest on the down of eternity, He might rub His drowsy eyes -- and I should forget to be.
ELSA BARKER
Songs of a Vagrom Angel
Each one of us must live the life God gives him; it cannot be shirked.
SOPHOCLES
Philoctetes
That's the problem with being alive ... You've got to keep thinking of what to do.
GLEN DUNCAN
Death of an Ordinary Man
Life is a means of extracting fiction.
ROBERT STONE
attributed, Writers at Work