quotations about life
Life is the great teacher.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
I remembered my days and nights of sunshine and starshine, where life was all a wild sweet wonder, a spiritual paradise of unselfish adventure and ethical romance. And I saw before me, ever blazing and burning, the Holy Grail.
JACK LONDON
"What Life Means to Me", Revolution and Other Essays
The art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down.
JOE BIDEN
Promises to Keep
Life, like some cities, is full of blind alleys, leading nowhere. The great art is to get and to keep out of them.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Let us pounce
upon this red prey,
let us tear life
that passes throbbing
and lift together
our wild flight.
PABLO NERUDA
"The Condor"
Life isn't all holding four aces. When Old Sister Fate deals you a king, a tenspot, a trey and a couple of miserable deuces, grin and draw three cards. You never know what you'll come up with.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs
I believe that this life is a journey home. Someone is calling us, someone we know as God, and whom others know by different names.
JAMES BEHRENS
Newton Citizen, May 19, 2016
How much more interesting life would be if only more people had the courage and skill to act themselves, instead of abjectly understudying some one else!
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
"The Dramatic Art of Life", Prose Fancies
The heart is like an instrument whose strings
Steal magic music from Life's mystic frets.
GERALD MASSEY
"Wedded Love"
Every life is a march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
Each person designs his own life, freedom gives him the power to carry out his own designs, and power gives the freedom to interfere with the designs of others.
ERIC BERNE
What Do You Say After You Say Hello?
What is the course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth?--
Most men eddy about
Here and there--eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving
Nothing; and, then they die--
Perish; and no one asks
Who or what they have been,
More than he asks what waves
In the moonlit solitudes mild
Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd,
Foam'd for a moment, and gone.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Rugby Chapel
Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.
RUMI
attributed, When the Moon Slips Away: Rejoicing in Everyday Miracles
The whole art of living consists in giving up existence in order to exist.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
The real problem is, people think life is a ladder, and it's really a wheel.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Ivory and the Horn
Life has a value only when it has something valuable as its object.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
Lectures on the Philosophy of History
Let us all so live as we shall wish we had lived when we come to die; for that only is well, that ends well.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Life is not lost by dying! Life is lost
Minute by minute, day by dragging day,
In all the thousand, small, uncaring ways,
The smooth appeasing compromises of time.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENET
A Child is Born
Life is a constant education.
JESSICA REES
"It's vital that we rebuild local jazz...", Bridport & Lyme Regis News, September 1, 2016
Life is too transcendentally humorous for a man not to take it seriously. Compared with it, Death is but a shallow jest.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
Simon the Jester