LIFE QUOTES XIV

quotations about life

Child, child, have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away.

THOMAS WOLFE

You Can't Go Home Again


In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life -- It goes on.

ROBERT FROST

attributed, A New Treasury of Words to Live By

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Life is short and tedious, and is wholly spent in wishing; we trust to find rest and enjoyment at some future time, often at an age when our best blessings, youth and health, have already left us. When at last I that time has arrived, it surprises us in the midst of fresh desires; we have got no farther when we are attacked by a fever which kills us; if we had been cured, it would only have been to give us more time for other desires.

JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE

"Of Mankind", Les Caractères


Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

letter to Ottoline Morrell, Dec. 17, 1920


Life isn't what you think it is. It's like water, and the young let it trickle away between their fingers without even noticing. Cup your hands, keep it safe. Life eventually becomes something else, something hard, something simple, something you can hold in your hand and nibble on contentedly as you sit in the sun.

JEAN ANOUILH

Antigone

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Like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

To the Lighthouse

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To none is life given in freehold; to all on lease.

LUCRETIUS

De Rerum Natura


Yes! live life with every fibre of one's being, surrender oneself to it, with no thoughts of rebellion, without deluding oneself that one can improve it and render it painless.

EMILE ZOLA

Le Docteur Pascal

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To feed death with her works is here life's doom.

SRI AUROBINDO

Savitri

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The days of life are consumed, one by one, without an object beyond the present moment; ever flying from the ennui of that, yet carrying it with us; eternally in pursuit of happiness, which keeps eternally before us. If death or bankruptcy happen to trip us out of the circle, it is matter for the buzz of the evening, and is completely forgotten by the next morning.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

letter to Mrs. Bingham, Feb. 7, 1787

Tags: Thomas Jefferson


Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

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A nation of unimpressible philosophers would not care at all how the externals of life were managed. Who is the showman is not material unless you care about the show.

WALTER BAGEHOT

The English Constitution

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You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they don't even remember the name and what the scratchers were trying to tell, and it doesn't matter.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

Absalom, Absalom!

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It is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

CHARLES DICKENS

Great Expectations


Life is being, not having.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought


Life was never anything but a perpetual see-saw between gravity and jest.

GEORGE ELIOT

Romola


Life has an--an irony all its own. What you wish for, you get, but you discover that it's not what you want.

JOHN AUSTIN CONNOLLY

The Boys from Siam

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Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.

PHILIP ROTH

American Pastoral


Life was like a batch of biscuits without the baking powder: flat, flat, flat.

KIRBY LARSON

Hattie Big Sky

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Life is too short for aught but high endeavor.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

"Life Is Too Short"