quotations about life
Life is a dance. To master it, we must master the rhythm of our lives.
MICHAEL MAMAS
"In the Rhythm of Life, Timing is Everything", Huffington Post, August 19, 2016
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
Our life a harp is, with unnumbered strings,
And tones and symphonies; but our poor skill
Some shallow notes from its great music brings.
JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY
"Dolores"
Desire, both the whispers and the shouts, is the map we have been given to find the only life worth living.
JOHN ELDREDGE
Desire
It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
By the time you learn the rules of life, you're too old to play the game.
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Dictionary of Proverbs
Life is a strange thing. Why this longing for life? It is a game which no man wins. To live is to toil hard and to suffer sore, till old age creeps heavily upon us and we throw down our hands on the cold ashes of dead fires. It is hard to live. In pain the babe sucks his first breath, in pain the old man gasps his last, and all his days are full of trouble and sorrow; yet he goes down to the open arms of death, stumbling, falling, with head turned backward, fighting to the last. And death is kind. It is only life and the things of life that hurt. Yet we love life and we hate death. It is very strange.
JACK LONDON
Tales of the North
You sit
Like a rain puddle in hell
Knitting the socks
Of your life.
CHARLES SIMIC
My Noiseless Entourage
We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing
(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth--
we call it life.
ANNE CARSON
Grief Lessons: Four Plays
Weakest and strongest of the things that God has made, Life is the heir of Death, and yet his conqueror--victim at once and victor. All living things succumb to Death's cradle; Life smiles at his impotence, and makes the grave her cradle.
JAMES HINTON
Life in Nature
In such a porcelain life one likes to be sure that all is well lest one stumble upon one's hopes in a pile of broken crockery.
EMILY DICKINSON
letter to Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Bowles, Aug. 1858?
Who fears death does not enjoy life.
SPANISH PROVERB
Life has possibilities; death has none.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall.
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain
Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
The game of life is good, though all of life may be hurt, and though all lives lose the game in the end.
JACK LONDON
John Barleycorn
Remember that life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.
SUSAN ROSE BLAUNER
How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me
Life is magical. There is something wonderful in being alive, in having within one's self all sorts of possibilities.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"A Psalm of Life"
Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments.
ANAIS NIN
diary, winter, 1931-32