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Life unshared has scarce a charm.
C. B. LANGSTON, "Solitude"
- Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
- Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
- So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
- Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, "The Theologian's Tale", Tales of a Wayside Inn
Life is too short for aught but high endeavor.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "Life Is Too Short"
When something makes no sense, sometimes you make something of it. A joke. A spiritual practice. A life.
HEATHER SELLERS, Good Housekeeping, Jan. 2011
Some people fake their death, I'm faking my life.
Each day is a branch of the Tree of Life laden heavily with fruit. If we lie down lazily beneath it, we may starve; but if we shake the branches, some of the fruit will fall for us.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, Table-Talk
- What would life be if these few years
- Of thankless toil and bitter tears
- Were all and naught beyond?
- An utter failure void of hope,
- A sunless maze of narrow scope
- Where phantoms of despair would grope
- Throughout its narrow bound.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN, "Life's Fruition"
Life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse.
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, "Ashes of Life"
- Life should be a fruitful garden,
- Fair in blossom, and rich in seed;
- Conscience, the sharp and faithful warden,
- Watchful against the frost and weed.
- Study should its labyrinths trace
- Where wisdom's pleasant waters flow;
- And industry the garden grace
- With plants that choicest gifts bestow.
C. B. LANGSTON, "What Should Life Be?"
- Life is real! Life is earnest!
- And the grave is not its goal;
- Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
- Was not spoken of the soul.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, "A Psalm of Life"
But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause--through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence, doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them; the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick
- This world is a vaporous jest at best,
- Tossed off by the gods in laughter,
- And a cruel attempt at wit were it,
- If nothing better came after.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "A Gray Mood"
- Life in itself
- Is nothing,
- An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, "Spring"
Ah! this beautiful world ... Indeed, I know not what to think of it. Sometimes it is all gladness and sunshine, and heaven itself lies not far off. And then it changes suddenly, and is dark and sorrowful, and clouds shut out the sky. In the lives of the saddest of us, there are bright days like this, when we feel as if we could take the great world in our arms. Then come the gloomy hours, when the fire will neither burn on our hearths nor in our hearts; and all without and within is dismal, cold, and dark.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, Hyperion
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
NEIL GAIMAN, American Gods
- Life is a Shylock; always it demands
- The fullest userer's interest for each pleasure.
- Gifts are not freely scattered by its hands;
- We make returns for every borrowed treasure.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "The Law"
Each new epoch in life seems an encounter. There is a tussle and a cloud of dust, and we come out of it triumphant or crest-fallen, according as we have borne ourselves.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, Table-Talk
The art of life is the art of avoiding pain; and he is the best pilot, who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it is beset.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to Mrs. Cosway, Oct. 12, 1786
Lives are snowflakes -- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.
NEIL GAIMAN, American Gods
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
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worrying, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker.
HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick
- Into each life some rain must fall,
- Some days must be dark and dreary.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, "The Rainy Day"
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