quotations about life
Each life is one short word slowly uttered.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Blue Jay's Dance
Well, you live your life the way you want, I live mine the way I want. We see who makes it farther.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Simple Truth
Enjoy your own life without comparing it with that of another.
ANONYMOUS
There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
The truth about the world ... is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Blood Meridian
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
Our lives teach us who we are.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
London Independent, Feb. 4, 1990
Life is a lot like math. There's always new stuff to do, always another problem to solve. Work through it one problem at a time.
STEPHANIE SANTILLO
"Sheehan valedictorian: 'Life is a lot like math'", My Record Journal, June 3, 2016
Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Letters to a Young Poet
Into each life some rain must fall.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"The Rainy Day"
Life is droll. It has no common sense. It is the game of a mountebank.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol
O harp of life, so speedily unstrung!
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Two Moods"
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
What is the meaning of life?... A simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
Yes, life is but a waste,
A cheerless pathway, where
No healthy fruit allures the taste,
No flowerets balm the air,
If Love, the wild rose, ne'er luxuriates there.
WILLIAM B. TAPPAN
"Love"
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"
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 must be lived with courage, with climbing and risks, else there is no happiness, no hope, no true success, no future.
JENNETTE LEE
The Ibsen Secret
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
Still, life had a way of adding day to day.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Mrs. Dalloway