quotations about life
Life is a dream in the night, a fear among fears,
A naked runner lost in a storm of spears.
ARTHUR SYMONS
"In the Wood of Finvara"
Enjoy your own life without comparing it with that of another.
ANONYMOUS
Life is droll. It has no common sense. It is the game of a mountebank.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol
The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.
BRUCE LEE
Jeet Kune Do: Bruce Lee's Commentaries on the Martial Way
We bring into the world a poor, needy, uncertain life, short at the best; all the imaginations of the wise have been busied to find out the ways how to revive it with pleasure, or relieve it with counsel; how to compose it with ease, and settle it with safety; to some of these ends have been employed the instructions of Lawgivers, the reasonings of Philosophers, the inventions of Poets, the pains of labouring, and the extravagancies of the Voluptuous; all the world is at work perpetually about nothing else, but only that our poor mortal lives should pass the easier and the happier that little time we possess them; or else end the better when we lose them.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Treasure the pain; treasure what you have with her, including the fear. Treasure what you may have, including the failure. Treasure it because if we don't live this life, if we don't live it to the fullest year after year and century after century, well, then, we die.
ANNE RICE
The Wolves of Midwinter
Life was like a batch of biscuits without the baking powder: flat, flat, flat.
KIRBY LARSON
Hattie Big Sky
All that is born and destroyed is reborn in the sweep of the ages; Life like a decimal ever recurring repeats the old figure.
SRI AUROBINDO
Gems from Sri Aurobindo
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.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
Life is a wheel, and if you wait long enough, it always comes back around to where it started.
STEPHEN KING
Duma Key
To those who view the voyage of life from the port of departure the bark that has accomplished any considerable distance appears already in close approach to the farther shore.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"The Death of Halpin Frayser"
Child, child, have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away.
THOMAS WOLFE
You Can't Go Home Again
Into each life some rain must fall.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"The Rainy Day"
Life seems so long, and its capacity so great, to one who knows nothing of all the intervals it needs must hold -- intervals between aspirations, between actions, pauses as inevitable as the pauses of sleep. And life looks impossible to the young unfortunate, unaware of the inevitable and unfailing refreshment. It would be for their peace to learn that there is a tide in the affairs of men, in a sense more subtle -- if it is not too audacious to add a meaning to Shakespeare -- than the phrase was meant to contain. Their joy is flying away from them on its way home; their life will wax and wane; and if they would be wise, they must wake and rest in its phases, knowing that they are ruled by the law that commands all things -- a sun's revolutions and the rhythmic pangs of maternity.
ALICE MEYNELL
"The Rhythm of Life", The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays
To none is life given in freehold; to all on lease.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.
EMILY DICKINSON
letter to Louisa and Frances Norcross, Apr. 1873
The whole world's a bottle,
And life's but a dram,
When the bottle gets empty,
It sure ain't worth a damn.
BOB DYLAN
"Moonshiner"
Life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
One's life should be sufficiently interesting to furnish entertainment in the record.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
To feed death with her works is here life's doom.
SRI AUROBINDO
Savitri