quotations about life
What fills us is real, sweet, dopey, funny life.
ANNE LAMOTT
"Time Lost and Found", Sunset
Life should be a fruitful garden,
Fair in blossom, and rich in seed;
Conscience, the sharp and faithful warden,
Watchful against the frost and weed.
Study should its labyrinths trace
Where wisdom's pleasant waters flow;
And industry the garden grace
With plants that choicest gifts bestow.
C. B. LANGSTON
"What Should Life Be?"
Life is too short for aught but high endeavor.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Life Is Too Short"
Life is a struggle, and if you should feel really happy, be patient: this will pass.
GARRISON KEILLOR
A Prairie Home Companion, 2006
The life so short, the craft so long to learn.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
"Parliament of Fowls"
Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
There is nothing men are so anxious to keep, and yet are so careless about, as life.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Mankind", Les Caractères
Life is a series of sudden disappearances, leave-takings without the proper goodbyes.
KELLY LINK
Stranger Things Happen
About the time we have subdued the fires of youth that threaten to consume us, we find ourselves battling with the infirmities of age.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Life is much the same when it's going well-- resonant and unremarkable. But who, not under disaster's seal, can understand what life is like when it begins to crumble?
MARY OLIVER
"Storm in Massachusetts, September 1982", Dream Work
Dearly beloved
We are gathered here today
2 get through this thing called life.
PRINCE
"Let's Go Crazy"
Life is a series of obstacles. It's not supposed to be easy. It is how you deal with these obstacles that define you as a person.
RAUL CARRANZA
"UC San Diego grad with muscular dystrophy shows incredible strength to achieve his dreams", University of California, June 16, 2016
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
SAMUEL BUTLER
"How to Make the Best of Life", Essays on Life, Art and Science
Life is being, not having.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The whole world's a bottle,
And life's but a dram,
When the bottle gets empty,
It sure ain't worth a damn.
BOB DYLAN
"Moonshiner"
It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
All the Pretty Horses
Life is an uncertain flower--oft by the tempest o'erthrown.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering; the curtain of cloud seems parted an instant only that we may measure all its horror as it hangs low, black, and imminent, in contrast with the transient brightness; the waterdrops that visit the parched lips in the desert bear with them only the keen imagination of thirst.
GEORGE ELIOT
Janet's Repentance
Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Rest not! Life is sweeping by;
Go and dare before you die.
Something mighty and sublime
Leave behind to conquer time!
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
"Haste Not--Rest Not"