quotations about life
It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.
GARRISON KEILLOR
"Could I have been any more inept?", Salon, Oct. 26, 1999
In such a porcelain life one likes to be sure that all is well lest one stumble upon one's hopes in a pile of broken crockery.
EMILY DICKINSON
letter to Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Bowles, Aug. 1858?
Tell someone you love them because life is short, but shout it in Klingon because life is also terrifying and confusing.
ANONYMOUS
Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.
RICHARD BACH
Illusions
We say that life is sweet, its satisfactions deep. All this we say, as we sleepwalk our time through years of days and nights. We let time cascade over us like a waterfall, believing it to be never-ending. Yet each day that touches us, and every man in the world, is unique; irredeemable; over. And just another Monday.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
Life is short, if we are only said to live when we enjoy ourselves; and if we were merely to count up the hours we spent agreeably, a great number of years would hardly make up a life of a few months.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Affections", Les Caractères
Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon itself? And it is of course overestimated, for it is of necessity prejudiced in its own favour.
JACK LONDON
The Sea Wolf
If we look at life in its small details, how ridiculous it all seems. It is like a drop of water seen through a microscope, a single drop teeming with protozoa. How we laugh as they bustle about so eagerly and struggle with one another. Whether here, or in the little span of human life, this terrible activity produces a comic effect.
IRVIN D. YALOM
The Schopenhauer Cure
Each life creates endless ripples.
FRANK HERBERT
Chapterhouse: Dune
Human life [is] ... a process of filling in time until the arrival of death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of what kind of business one is going to transact during the long wait.
ERIC BERNE
Games People Play
Life is often wasted in a search after unattainable advantages, and generally, through the scruples of pride and vanity, our happiness is delayed from day to day, by a rejection of those pleasures and benefits which are within our reach.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
Living is a disease from the pains of which sleep eases us every sixteen hours; sleep is but a palliative, death alone is the cure.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
Life is magical. There is something wonderful in being alive, in having within one's self all sorts of possibilities.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
He is dead already who doth not feel
Life is worth living still.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"Is Life Worth Living?", Lyrical Poems
Man's life is entirely in his operations, which may all be classed under three heads: he thinks, he feels, and he acts -- these three modes of activity exhaust his powers.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
The Doctrine of Life
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
Remember that life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.
SUSAN ROSE BLAUNER
How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me
Nothing comes at all -- never anything. And I cannot accustom myself to that. It is this monotony, this absolute fixity in life, that is the hardest thing for me to endure. I should like to go away from here. Go away? But where and how? I do not know, and I stay.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid
There was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
NORMAN MAILER
The Deer Park
Life is a mixed bag of success and failure.
NAWAZUDDIN SIDDIQUI
The Times of India, May 25, 2016