quotations about life
The life you think you should want ... is always the life that looks safest.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
When I sit down to the feast of life ... I'm so busy planning on how to pick up the check, and wondering what the other people think of me for paying it, and wondering if I have enough money in my pocket to pay the bill, that I don't get around to eating.
FREDERIK POHL
Gateway
Life is wide, limitless. There is no border, no frontier.
BRUCE LEE
Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living
Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
Thunder on the Left
You can buy life only with life.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
All research suggests that life on this Earth is an accident, that if you take a kettle of primordial soup and shake it enough, shock it enough, even freeze it enough, you get organic compounds. Allow these compounds to suffer random accidents long enough and you get life. That's life with a capital L. The fundamentalists are outraged that something as sacred and important as Life could be an accident. They want it to be a result of a command, a plan, a blueprint, a simple, orderly, well-engineered, easily understood project designed by a deity who ... would figure all tolerances and fudge them by a safety factor of five or ten. Well, fuck them. Accidents happen. We're one of them.
DAN SIMMONS
Lovedeath
The only remedy against the malady of life is life itself. The bane is its own antidote.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Glory of Clementina
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
That's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.
FREDERIK POHL
Gateway
Life is a journey we are always travelling; but, unlike most others, seldom care we to reach the end.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
If life is not a continual denial of the past, then it is nothing.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Reasonable Life
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
JOAN DIDION
The Year of Magical Thinking
So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
One brief journey betwixt heaven and earth,
Then, alas! we are the same old dust of ten thousand ages.
LI BAI
"The Old Dust"
If life is a death sentence, then we all have plenty of time to kill.
GREGORY ADAMS
"Review: Life Is a Death Sentence", Exclaim, June 10, 2016
If we look at life in its various stages, has it been worth living at each period? It is rarely doubted as regards the youth. Life is to them a joyous thing--all is fresh and new; and life to their minds seems plastic and pliable; they have the experiment of living their life before them. Putting aside the fact that men do not start in the world with the desire for, or properly trained to make the "best of this life," we will consider if "life lived as it is" by the majority, life as realized in ordinary life, is worth living. And the reply must be, "Yes." Man has a body fitted and adapted for the purposes of life; and although, because of his own disobedience or the faults of his predecessors, he may not enjoy good health, yet the majority have a bodily structure that, if carefully attended to, will enable them successfully to do their work and feel it is a privilege to live, and be able to earn sufficient to live upon; and I think it must be admitted that to the majority, by the use of their brains, by industry, and by thrift, there is the possibility of securing sufficient to supply all with the ways and means of life. Wealth, no doubt, is power; it gives great influence, secures its possessor from many annoyances, gives facilities for attempting and effecting what others might dream of in vain; but it is a mistake to think that "life is more worth living" to the rich man than to the poor. Wealth can only belong to the few, and it would be impossible to imagine that the Creator had done His work so badly that only the "idle rich" were able to enjoy this life. The morning can find you without anxiety; the day may find you equal to the fulfilment of your duties; you may do your work willingly and cheerfully; you may retain the bright cloudlessness of your early days--"the child's heart within the man's"--and, day by day, enjoy life, and retire to rest without its bringing to you sleeplessness or morbid terrors, if you be a machanic, perhaps more so than if you were a Rothschild. Each and every condition of life has its duties and anxieties, its troubles and drawbacks, as well as its pleasures. I have implicit faith in the Creator's law of compensation. My belief is, that God wills, and has so arranged that in all ranks of life, let the difference of condition or capability be what it may, each one has it within him to make his life beautiful and happy. To every living being life is preferable to death; life to each and every one of us "is worth living."
JAMES PLATT
"Is Life Worth Living?", Platt's Essays
Life is the wave's deep whisper on the shore
Of a great sea beyond.
HENRY ABBEY
"The Roman Sentinel"
When life is cheap death is rich.
EDWARD ABBEY
One Life at a Time, Please
A good life keeps off wrinkles.
SPANISH PROVERB
Life is half delicious yogurt, half crap, and your job is to keep the plastic spoon in the yogurt.
SCOTT ADAMS
Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!