quotations about life
What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?
UMBERTO ECO
Baudolino
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"
When people say that they are happy with their lives, they do not usually mean that they are literally joyful, or experiencing pleasure, all the time. They mean that, upon reflection on the balance sheet of pleasures and pains, they feel the balance to be reasonably positive over the long term.
DANIEL NETTLE
Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile
It's only life. We all get through it.
DEAN KOONTZ
Dark Rivers of the Heart
The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Jacob's Room
Activity does not necessarily mean life.
PHILIP K. DICK
A Scanner Darkly
Life is an adventure of passion, risk, danger, laughter, beauty, love; a burning curiosity to go with the action to see what it is all about, to go search for a pattern of meaning, to burn one's bridges because you're never going to go back anyway, and to live to the end.
SAUL ALINSKY
Reveille for Radicals
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
But life is not the wax or wick of the candle, it is the burning. It is not the complex nitrates and the carbon compounds in which it sits but their combustion.
BAKER BROWNELL
The New Universe