quotations about life
Yes, life is but a waste,
A cheerless pathway, where
No healthy fruit allures the taste,
No flowerets balm the air,
If Love, the wild rose, ne'er luxuriates there.
WILLIAM B. TAPPAN
"Love"
There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
This life ought to be used as a thing lent.
SPANISH PROVERB
With only one example of life -- the stuff we see on Earth -- we don't really have a good, universally accepted definition of life. NASA some years ago defined life as "a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution." Not bad, but technically a single rabbit hopping around your garden is not alive, because by itself it can't reproduce.
JOEL ACHENBACH
"The 4 biggest milestones in the history of life on Earth", Albuquerque Journal, September 1, 2016
Well, you live your life the way you want, I live mine the way I want. We see who makes it farther.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Simple Truth
Our lives teach us who we are.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
London Independent, Feb. 4, 1990
The art of life is the art of avoiding pain; and he is the best pilot, who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it is beset.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Mrs. Cosway, Oct. 12, 1786
Life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
Each life is one short word slowly uttered.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Blue Jay's Dance
Life inspires more dread than death -- it is life which is the great unknown.
EMIL CIORAN
A Short History of Decay
Child, child, have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away.
THOMAS WOLFE
You Can't Go Home Again
O harp of life, so speedily unstrung!
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Two Moods"
Life is a pressure cooker and whether you remain serene or become stressed-out depends on how you handle that pressure.
KEVIN LEMAN
Stopping Stress before It Stops You: A Game Plan for Every Mom
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"
A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Mrs. Dalloway
There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world -- its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles.
ANNE RICE
Servant of the Bones
Life is droll. It has no common sense. It is the game of a mountebank.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol
Life isn't what you think it is. It's like water, and the young let it trickle away between their fingers without even noticing. Cup your hands, keep it safe. Life eventually becomes something else, something hard, something simple, something you can hold in your hand and nibble on contentedly as you sit in the sun.
JEAN ANOUILH
Antigone
What is the meaning of life?... A simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
Life seems so long, and its capacity so great, to one who knows nothing of all the intervals it needs must hold -- intervals between aspirations, between actions, pauses as inevitable as the pauses of sleep. And life looks impossible to the young unfortunate, unaware of the inevitable and unfailing refreshment. It would be for their peace to learn that there is a tide in the affairs of men, in a sense more subtle -- if it is not too audacious to add a meaning to Shakespeare -- than the phrase was meant to contain. Their joy is flying away from them on its way home; their life will wax and wane; and if they would be wise, they must wake and rest in its phases, knowing that they are ruled by the law that commands all things -- a sun's revolutions and the rhythmic pangs of maternity.
ALICE MEYNELL
"The Rhythm of Life", The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays