quotations about life
Life, with the Soul predominant,
Is a noble mosaic, a bewitching arabesque.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Song of the Soul"
To realize life as absolute is to be existentially emancipated from life itself in that very realization, which understands that life is not life. The same applies to death.
MASAO ABE
Zen and the Modern World
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
attributed, The Waking Dream
Life is short, but its ills make it seem long.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus
Life is nothing but a statement of what happens to be.
GLEN DUNCAN
The Last Werewolf
The secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously!
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
The Joyful Wisdom
Life at the greatest is but a froward child, that must be humor'd and coax'd a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Good-Natured Man
Why, what in the world should we care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time?
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
In a dream thou mayst live a lifetime, and all be forgotten in the morning:
Even such is life, and so soon perisheth its memory.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
It's only life. We all get through it.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Hours
If you are good life is good.
ROALD DAHL
Matilda
Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
Our life is but a new form of the way men have lived from the beginning.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
GEORGE ELIOT
Janet's Repentance
The real thing is always going on somewhere else. When you're young you think it will come later. Later on you think it was earlier. When you are here, you think it is there--in India, in America, on Popocatepetl or somewhere. But when you get there, you find that life has doubled back and is quietly waiting here, here in the very place you ran away from.
VICKI BAUM
Grand Hotel
To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
GASTON BACHELARD
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire
Life consists of nothing more than the happiness we can get out of it.
JEAN ANOUILH
Antigone
Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order.
DAVID GERROLD
Alternate Gerrolds
Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
Life divine! O life eternal!
Man cannot translate the thought.
Strong the chain that God hath welded;
Link on link hath chain been wrought.
Fabric new each day is woven,
Woven it on God's own loom.
We the threads can ne'er unravel,
Hidden they in Nature's womb.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Dost Thou Know?"