quotations about life
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
LIN YUTANG
The Literary Digest, 1938
One's life should be sufficiently interesting to furnish entertainment in the record.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
My Day
Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
The Ghost in My Life
In the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in the earth we tread on, Life is every where. Nature lives: every pore is bursting with Life ; every death is only a new birth, every grave a cradle.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
Studies in Animal Life
Your responsibility is to be an explorer, not a tourist in this adventure that is your life.
MARY ANNE RADMACHER
Honey In Your Heart
Life! we have been long together,
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;
'Tis hard to part when friends are dear;
Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear;-
Then steal away, give little warning,
Choose thine own time;
Say not Good-night, but in some brighter clime
Bid me Good-morning!
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
"Life! I Know Not What Thou Art"
The difficulties of life are intended to make us better--not bitter.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
The Power of Thinking Big
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Coming of Age
Once introduced into this world, life would never leave--there was no end to the explosive, consuming, voracious lust of long chain molecules to link and match and make of themselves yet more and more and again more.
GREGORY BENFORD
Against Infinity
When man would make a rose with tools, he fashions petals and leaves of wax, colors them, manufactures a stalk by the same mechanical process -- and the rose is done. When God makes a rose, he lets a bird or a puff of wind drop a seed into the ground; out of the seed there emerges a stalk; and out of the stalk, branches; and on these branches, buds; and out of these buds roses unfold; and the rose is never done, for it goes on endlessly repeating itself. This is the difference between manufacture and growth. Man's method is the method of manufacture; God's method is the method of growth. What man makes is a finished product -- death. What God makes is an always finishing and never finished product -- life.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
The evil fortune of the living in no way affects the dead.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?
MARY OLIVER
"Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?", West Wind
What is life but a series of inspired follies?
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Pygmalion
Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men.
Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,
now the living timber bursts with the new buds
and spring comes round again. And so with men:
as one generation comes to life, another dies away.
HOMER
The Iliad
I am a true adorer of life, and if I can't reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down. Those who understand will require no further explanation.
SAUL BELLOW
Henderson the Rain King
Life is an illusion to be tailored to our needs.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
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 achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.
JACK LONDON
White Fang
Stop and consider! life is but a day;
A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way
From a tree's summit.
JOHN KEATS
"Sleep and Poetry"