LIFE QUOTES XXVII

quotations about life

In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.

ISAAC ASIMOV

Fantastic Voyage II

Tags: Isaac Asimov


I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And then? I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And what next? I get laid, I take a short holiday, but very soon after I fall upon those same thorns with gratification in pain, or suffering in joy -- who knows what the mixture is! What good, what lasting good is there in me? Is there nothing else between birth and death but what I can get out of this perversity -- only a favorable balance of disorderly emotions? No freedom? Only impulses? And what about all the good I have in my heart -- does it mean anything? Is it simply a joke? A false hope that makes a man feel the illusion of worth? And so he goes on with his struggles. But this good is no phony. I know it isn't. I swear it.

SAUL BELLOW

Herzog


We will never recognize the true value of our own lives until we affirm the value in the life of others.

RONALD REAGAN

"Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation"

Tags: Ronald Reagan


I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Middlesex


Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Middlesex

Tags: Jeffrey Eugenides


Life is a Shylock; always it demands
The fullest userer's interest for each pleasure.
Gifts are not freely scattered by its hands;
We make returns for every borrowed treasure.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

"The Law"


The bright side of life's unpredictability is that it's not over until it's over. As dark as the passages and confusing as the cul-de-sacs that you find yourself in are, progress is nevertheless being made. Something is unfolding. You are becoming.

MARION WINIK

Ladies Home Journal, Dec. 2008


My life is one long blooper reel!

TOM WILSON

Ziggy, Jan. 12, 2000


Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.

DAN SIMMONS

Hyperion

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I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on.

ROBERT BROWNING

In a Balcony

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As long as you were prepared to stay in it life found room for you. Life was like that, helplessly promiscuous, a doorman who let everyone in.

GLEN DUNCAN

Talulla Rising

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To live is to war with trolls.

HENRIK IBSEN

dedicatory lines, Peer Gynt

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Funny. You talk of life as if it were a train you have to catch up with. How long have you been trying, three days? And not got a glimpse of it yet, in spite of caviar and champagne?

VICKI BAUM

Grand Hotel


The understanding of human existence that sees life as having death as its inevitable end presumes that life is lived only in opposition to dying and seeks the conquest of death; that is, immortality, or eternal life. Here, death is always seen as alien to life, something to be overcome. In contrast to this, the understanding of human existence as a continuous living-and-dying does not view life and death as objects in mutual opposition but as two aspects of indivisible reality. Present life is understood as something that undergoes continuous living-and-dying.

MASAO ABE

Zen and the Modern World

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One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.

KOBO ABE

The Woman in the Dunes

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As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

SENECA

Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales

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Anything in life is possible if you make it happen.

JACK LALANNE

Fiscal Fitness: 8 Steps to Wealth & Health from America's Leaders of Fitness

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Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.

WALTER LIPPMANN

Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest

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Into the void of silence, into the empty space of nothing, the joy of life is unfurled.

C. S. LEWIS

The Magician's Nephew

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Life appears in a vast variety and innumerable succession of individual forms, since the most salient character of the universe is just that it ceaselessly gives birth to living individuals.

JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON

Man and the Cosmos: An Introduction to Metaphysics

Tags: Joseph Alexander Leighton