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Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
EUGENE O'NEILL, Lazarus Laughed
Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily.
VINCENT VAN GOGH, letter to Theo van Gogh, Oct. 1884
To live is to war with trolls.
Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.
BERTRAND RUSSELL, Philosophical Essays
Life is a game. Money is how we keep score.
Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you can hardly catch it going.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
- Time
- Like a petal in the wind
- Flows softly by
- As old lives are taken
- New ones begin
- A continual chain
- Which lasts throughout eternity
- Every life but a minute in time
- But each of equal importance
CINDY CHENEY, "Time"
Life is too short to blend in.
- One Moment in Annihilation's Waste,
- One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste--
- The Stars are Setting and the Caravan
- Starts for the Dawn of Nothing -- Oh, make haste!
EDWARD FITZGERALD, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
I live in a room and I go to work and I play a game called getting through the day while you wait for the night.
LILLIAN HELLMAN, The Autumn Garden
You're pretending this isn't your life. You think it's going to happen some other time. When you're dead you'll realise you were alive now.
CARYL CHURCHILL, Mad Forest
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.
J.M. BARRIE, The Little Minister
My mistakes are my life.
SAMUEL BECKETT, How It Is
Life don't owe you nothing.
We've been told there's a certain way to live ... that this is living ... and we ... we never really questioned it. We just sort of went along. But what if it's not the best way? What if there's another way that's better? What if there's something more?!
WALTER WYKES, The Profession
The lives of people are like young trees in a forest. They are being choked by climbing vines. The vines are old thoughts and beliefs planted by dead men.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON, "Seeds," The Triumph of the Egg
All of life is a foreign country.
JACK KEROUAC, letter, June 24, 1949
It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.
FRANCIS BACON, Advancement of Learning
Each one of us must live the life God gives him; it cannot be shirked.
- One word
- Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
- That word is love.
SOPHOCLES, Oedipus at Colonus
All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces.
How small a porton of our life it is that we really enjoy. In youth we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age, we are looking backwards to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day, when we have time.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
HENRY ADAMS, The Education of Henry Adams
Football is a team game. So is life.
- What is this life if, full of care,
- We have no time to stand and stare?
WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES, Leisure
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life — It goes on.
ROBERT FROST, as quoted in William Nichols' A New Treasury of Words to Live By
So it is with all life. A tedium that includes the expectation of nothing but more tedium; a regret, right now, for the regret I'll have tomorrow for having felt regret today.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
Life is one long process of getting tired.
SAMUEL BUTLER, Note Books
The secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously!
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, The Joyful Wisdom
Life is made up of marble and mud.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, The House of the Seven Gables
Life is hard. After all, it kills you!
KATHARINE HEPBURN, Susan Crimp's Katharine Hepburn Once Said...
You should live everyday like it's your birthday.
Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.
JACK LONDON, The Call of the Wild
JACK KEROUAC, On the Road
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