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- Life is as the current spark on the miner's wheel of flints;
- While it spinneth, there is light; stop it, all is darkness.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER, Proverbial Philosophy
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
- 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
Life is a movement outward, an unfolding.
ELBERT HUBBARD, The American Bible
It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right.
Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.
I just can't get used to life.
EUGENE IONESCO, Rhinoceros
So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.
Life is a crucible. We are thrown into it, and tried.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
For some reason or the other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured--disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui--in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.
HENRY MILLER, Tropic of Cancer
- Life
- You have been good to me....
- You have not made yourself to dear
- to juggle with.
When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering; the curtain of cloud seems parted an instant only that we may measure all its horror as it hangs low, black, and imminent, in contrast with the transient brightness; the waterdrops that visit the parched lips in the desert bear with them only the keen imagination of thirst.
GEORGE ELIOT, Janet's Repentance
- The rich pearl of life,
- Soon moulders in its blackened urn, the tomb.
ISAAC MCLELLAN, "Musings"
No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted.
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 a voyage, and we are all sailing under sealed orders. We plan, plot, scheme and arrange, and some fine day Fate steps in and our dreams are tossed into the yeasty deep. We grin and bear it--anyway we bear it: it is the only thing to do.
ELBERT HUBBARD, The American Bible
Looking at your life as a debt may seem the dreariest view of things at a distance; but it cannot really be so. What makes life dreary is the want of motive; but once beginning to act with the penitential, loving purpose you have in your mind, there will be unexpected satisfactions--there will be newly-opening needs--continually coming to carry you on from day to day. You will find your life growing like a plant.
GEORGE ELIOT, Daniel Deronda
Life was never anything but a perpetual see-saw between gravity and jest.
Life consists in molting our illusions. We form creeds today only to throw them away tomorrow. The eagle molts a feather because he is growing a better one.
ELBERT HUBBARD, The American Bible
Life is good. It is precious. It is a great blessing. Even on its worst days. And in its deepest valleys you must remember the view from its highest mountains. You must not forget that happiness is a matter of perspective, not circumstance.
BOB LONSBERRY, A Various Language
The zest for life of those unusual men and women who make a great zealous success of living is due more often in good part to the craftiness and pertinacity with which they manage to overlook the misery of others. You can watch them watch life beat the stuffing out of the faces of their friends and acquaintances, although they themselves seem to outwit the dense delalys of social custom, the tedious tick-tock of bureaucratic obfuscation, accepting loss and age and change and disappointment without suffering punctures in their stomach lining.
EDWARD HOAGLAND, Tigers & Ice
Life was not fair. If you wanted something you had to take it. Before someone else took it from you. Neatly dissected down to its essence, life was one long series of lily pad hoppings. The quick and the resourceful were able to adapt and survive; all others were simply crushed as a more nimble creature landed on the lily pad they had occupied for too long.
DAVID BALDACCI, The Winner
What mean the discipline and trial of life? What mean the dark shocks of disappointment, the breaking of hopes, the sundering of human ties, the terrible baptism of suffering and of fire, if there is not something beyond? If in every bath of sweat and tears, every drop of sorrow, every falling wave, there is something by which I am led more near to God, by which my soul is made stronger and purified, then I can understand life. But if I am hurled in the chaos of life--battered by sorrow today, and kicked by misfortune tomorrow--stricken by my fondest hopes, deluded and deceived, and all is to end in nothingness, I must confess that you present a problem I cannot solve.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Life is like our game of whist ... I don't enjoy the game much, but I like to play my cards well, and see what will be the end of it.
Life is a theatre of alarms and contentions.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
Life is a problem. Not merely a premiss from which we start, but a goal towards which we proceed. It is an opportunity for us not merely to get, but to attain; not simply to have, but to be. Its standard of failure or success is not outward fortune, but inward possession.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
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