quotations about life
The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Lila
Life is, alas, one eternal combat.
SARAH BERNHARDT
The Idol of Paris
Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
V. S. NAIPAUL
Half a Life
Life is the thing--the song of life--
The eager plow, the thirsty knife!
CONRAD AIKEN
"Youth Imperturbable"
It's only life. We all get through it.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Hours
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 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
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
The meaning of our lives is revealed through experiences that at first seem at odds with each other--moments we wish would never end and moments we wish had never begun.
JOHN ELDREDGE
Desire
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
Life is what you put into it and how much you take out of it. You put in more than is expected, and you take out less than you want.
MICHAEL J. FOX
Good Housekeeping, June 2011
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
I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on.
ROBERT BROWNING
In a Balcony
The realization that life is absurd and cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.
ALBERT CAMUS
attributed, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd
What unlooked-for things do happen, to be sure, in a long life!
ARISTOPHANES
Lysistrata
Life unshared has scarce a charm.
C. B. LANGSTON
"Solitude"
There is more to life than not dying.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Clockwork Angel
Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
My Day
I know nothing more enjoyable than that happy-go-lucky wandering life, in which you are perfectly free; without shackles of any kind, without care, without preoccupation, without thought even of to-morrow. You go in any direction you please, without any guide save your fancy.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
"Miss Harriet"