quotations about life
So it is with all life. A tedium that includes the expectation of nothing but more tedium; a regret, right now, for the regret I'll have tomorrow for having felt regret today.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
What would life be if these few years
Of thankless toil and bitter tears
Were all and naught beyond?
An utter failure void of hope,
A sunless maze of narrow scope
Where phantoms of despair would grope
Throughout its narrow bound.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"Life's Fruition"
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
Still all the day the iron wheels go onward,
Grinding life down from its mark.
GERALD MASSEY
"The Cry of the Children"
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
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
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
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 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
A well-developed sense of humor is the pole that adds balance to your steps as you walk the tightrope of life.
WILLIAM ARTHUR WARD
Woman's Day Magazine, Jun. 1, 2007
"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
Life is an echo. What you send out comes back. What you sow, you reap. What you give, you get. What you see in others, exists in you.
ZIG ZIGLAR
See You at the Top
A life is black, whiten it as you will.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Life is full of amusement to an amusing man.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
Though not a participant in the Business of life; I am, like the character of Addison and Steele, an impartial (or more or less impartial) Spectator, who finds not a little recreation in watching the antics of those strange and puny puppets called men.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Kleiner, Cole, and Moe, October 1916
Do not take life too seriously--you will never get out of it alive.
ELBERT HUBBARD
The American Bible
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 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