quotations about life
Life is what you put into it and how much you take out of it. You put in more than is expected, and you take out less than you want.
MICHAEL J. FOX
Good Housekeeping, June 2011
Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life, which, though startling to the apprehension, is, in fact, that which the habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguished in us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this scene of things. I confess that I am one of those who are unable to refuse my assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"On Life", Essays and Letters
The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Lila
I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
STEPHEN HAWKING
The Daily News
Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Reveries over Childhood and Youth
There is no normal life. There is only life.
ANNE RICE
The Wolves of Midwinter
To live means to finesse the processes to which one is subjugated.
BERTOLT BRECHT
On Politics and Society
You had to take life as it came. It gave no quarter, spared no feelings. Limited no pain. Put no ceiling on happiness.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Innocent
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
Just because life's meaningless doesn't mean we can't experience it meaningfully.
GLEN DUNCAN
The Last Werewolf
For some reason or the other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured--disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui--in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Cancer
Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides
Into the silent hollow of the past;
What is there that abides
To make the next age better for the last?
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration
Life is as the current spark on the miner's wheel of flints;
While it spinneth, there is light; stop it, all is darkness.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on.
ROBERT BROWNING
In a Balcony
Though I be shut in darkness, and become insentient dust blown idly here and there, I count oblivion a scant price to pay for having once had held against my lip life's brimming cup of hydromel and rue--for having once known woman's holy love and a child's kiss, and for a little space been boon companion to the Day and Night, Fed on the odors of the summer dawn, and folded in the beauty of the stars. Dear Lord, though I be changed to senseless clay, and serve the potter as he turns his wheel, I thank Thee for the gracious gift of tears!
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Two Moods"
Mortal! that cull'st the flowers of life,
Think not to escape the thorn.
WILLIAM B. TAPPAN
"The Thorn of Life"
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
Life is a string of uncooked macaroni on a double strand of sewing thread. Not even spray painted gold. Some people have strings of expensive pearls for lives, but not me ... I have macaroni and sewing thread.
ANN WUEHLER
The Care and Feeding of Baby Birds