quotations about life
Still all the day the iron wheels go onward,
Grinding life down from its mark.
GERALD MASSEY
"The Cry of the Children"
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.
J.M. BARRIE
The Little Minister
Life is a merciless reflection of your own attitude.
DANIEL ASQUINO
"Asquino tells MWCC grads: 'Life is a merciless reflection of your own attitude'", Worcester Telegram, May 18, 2016
Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed that we should be what we are.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
I believe everything in life is energy. If we're destroying our trees and destroying our environment and hurting animals and hurting one another and all that stuff, there's got to be a very powerful energy to fight that. I think we need more love in the world. We need more kindness, more compassion, more joy, more laughter. I definitely want to contribute to that.
ELLEN DEGENERES
Good Housekeeping, Oct. 2011
Life is a bubble in a lake, that glitters for an instant, bursts, and leaves not even a blur on the water; it is the leap of a minnow, which sends a tiny ripple trembling for a few inches.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
We have come to the wrong star ... That is what makes life at once so splendid and so strange. The true happiness is that we don't fit. We come from somewhere else. We have lost our way.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Orthodoxy
Life, like some cities, is full of blind alleys, leading nowhere. The great art is to get and to keep out of them.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
A life is black, whiten it as you will.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Life isn't all holding four aces. When Old Sister Fate deals you a king, a tenspot, a trey and a couple of miserable deuces, grin and draw three cards. You never know what you'll come up with.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs
Remember when life's path is steep to keep your mind even.
HORACE
attributed, Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing
Life is not lost by dying! Life is lost
Minute by minute, day by dragging day,
In all the thousand, small, uncaring ways,
The smooth appeasing compromises of time.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENET
A Child is Born
Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living. All things fall under this name. The sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and light but the shadow of God.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
Cyrus' Garden
What is the course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth?--
Most men eddy about
Here and there--eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving
Nothing; and, then they die--
Perish; and no one asks
Who or what they have been,
More than he asks what waves
In the moonlit solitudes mild
Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd,
Foam'd for a moment, and gone.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Rugby Chapel
Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
Our life is what we make it. An insignificant game or a noble trial; a dream or a reality; a play of the senses worn out in selfish use, and flying "swifter than a weaver's shuttle," or an ascension of the soul, by daily duties and unfaltering faith, to more spiritual relations and to loftier toils.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
The art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down.
JOE BIDEN
Promises to Keep
"Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules." "Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it." Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right -- I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it? Nothing. No game.
J. D. SALINGER
The Catcher in the Rye
I sat in amazement, the translucence that comes when life hardens into a bead of such cruel perfection you see it with the purest clarity. Everything suddenly there--life as it truly is, enormous, appalling, devastating. You see the great sinkholes it makes in people and the harrowing lengths to which love will go to fill them.
SUE MONK KIDD
The Mermaid Chair
Life has a value only when it has something valuable as its object.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
Lectures on the Philosophy of History