It is astonishing how much more anxious people are to lengthen life than to improve it; and as misers often lose large sums of money in attempting to make more, so do hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
You can buy life only with life.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
We cross the stream of life at different places. Some wade through the shallows in a drought, others have to swim across deep waters in a storm.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM, The Maxims of Marmaduke
Life is an uncertain flower--oft by the tempest o'erthrown.
As a well spent day affords happy sleep, so does a life profitably employed afford a happy death.
LEONARDO DA VINCI, Thoughts on Art and Life
There is no man that lives who does not need to be drilled, disciplined, and developed into something higher and nobler and better than he is by nature. Life is one prolonged birth.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Our life is what we make it. An insignificant game or a noble trial; a dream or a reality; a play of the senses worn out in selfish use, and flying "swifter than a weaver's shuttle," or an assension of the soul, by daily duties and unfaltering faith, to more spiritual relations and to loftier toils.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Life is a plant that grows out of death.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Life is a bubble in a lake, that glitters for an instant, bursts, and leaves not even a blur on the water; it is the leap of a minnow, which sends a tiny ripple trembling for a few inches.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
A long life is a life well spent.
LEONARDO DA VINCI, Thoughts on Art and Life
Life has possibilities; death has none.
REUEN THOMAS, Thoughts for the Thoughtful
A man's life is like a well, not like a snake--it should be measured by its depth, not by its length.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
Our life is in the loom; it rolls up and is hidden as fast as it is woven. It is to be taken out of the loom only when we leave this world; then only shall we see the pattern.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
About the time we have subdued the fires of youth that threaten to consume us, we find ourselves battling with the infirmities of age.
Life is a charity ball given by the leaders of society. A few dance, get their charity's worth to the last penny; and the poor stand outside the gate and watch with hungry eyes the glint of jewels in the warm air. Then comes the lackey Death, and he says: "Madam and my Master, your carriage waits." So they go away into the dark in the carriage of the black plumes, and the dancing continues.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
Life is a journey we are always travelling; but, unlike most others, seldom care we to reach the end.
How small a portion 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
Life is being, not having.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Life is the jailer of the soul in this filthy prison, and its only deliverer is death.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
The whole art of living consists in giving up existence in order to exist.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
You can swim in life and seawater, but both are hard to swallow.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
Life is often wasted in a search after unattainable advantages, and generally, through the scruples of pride and vanity, our happiness is delayed from day to day, by a rejection of those pleasures and benefits which are within our reach.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY, The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
You have not lost all when you have life.
We look back upon our life only as on a thing of broken pieces, because our misses and failures are always the first to strike us, and outweigh in our imagination what we have done and attained.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Life is a continual march towards the grave.
Life is distressing insomuch as we give exaggerated importance to altogether unimportant matters. Drifting along, I have observed that we men and women disturb ourselves about trifles, overlooking in the needless excitement the innumerable beauties which wait upon the way. Every ripple is not a wave, every wind is not a hurricane. Why worry whilst we are still upon the stream? It will be time enough to trouble when we meet the sea.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM, The Maxims of Marmaduke
Short is life, but endless is the theme.
Life is but a field which we soon travel over, and the vale of eternity presents itself.
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