quotations about life
To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
I know that life is a journey I must accept and that pain and confusion are temporary. I know that if I follow my heart, it will lead me where I belong.
JOSH GROBAN
O Magazine, Jan. 2007
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
JOHN LENNON
"Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)", Double Fantasy
Life, in a sense, is living and surviving. And all that makes for living and surviving is good. He who follows the fact cannot go astray, while he who has no reverence for the fact wanders afar.
JACK LONDON
The Kempton-Wace Letters
I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life. Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going.
J. M. COETZEE
In the Heart of the Country
Your life is like a little flute complaining
A long way off, beyond the willow trees:
A long way off, and nothing left remaining
But memory of a music on the breeze.
HILAIRE BELLOC
Sonnets
When we dead awaken ... we see that we have never lived.
HENRIK IBSEN
When We Dead Awaken
Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Sons and Lovers
I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
speech during the Great March on Detroit, Jun. 23, 1963
Our life a harp is, with unnumbered strings,
And tones and symphonies; but our poor skill
Some shallow notes from its great music brings.
JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY
"Dolores"
He lived the life he lived, like anybody, I guess, and he paid his dues, like everybody. Maybe what I mean when I say he made his life so hard was that he always tried to pay his dues in front.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Sounds of life and movement, people getting ready and people giving up, the sound of hope and the sound of hanging on, and behind them all, the quiet, deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks...
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Rum Diary
Life is but a field which we soon travel over, and the vale of eternity presents itself.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Life is magical. There is something wonderful in being alive, in having within one's self all sorts of possibilities.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
Tell someone you love them because life is short, but shout it in Klingon because life is also terrifying and confusing.
ANONYMOUS
Study more how to die than how to live; if you would live till you were old, live as if you were to die when you are young.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Most of life is so dull it is not worth discussing, and it is dull at all ages. When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighborhood, subscribe to a different newspaper, fall in and out of love, we are protesting in ways both frivolous and deep against the not to be diluted dullness of day-to-day living.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
Summer Crossing
Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The World of Yesterday
Life, the river of the Spirit, consenting to anguish and sorrow.
SRI AUROBINDO
Ahana
All our mortal lives are set in danger and perplexity: one day to prosper, and the next -- who knows? When all is well, then look for rocks ahead.
SOPHOCLES
Philoctetes