quotations about life
A life ill spent makes a sad old age.
SPANISH PROVERB
Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
If life gives you rotten eggs, make a crepe.
ALI MARGO
"Princess: Life is a bowl of cherries -- so throw that into your crepe", Aspen Times, May 19, 2016
Life is a stream
On which we strew
Petal by petal the flower of our heart.
AMY LOWELL
"Petals", A Dome of Many-coloured Glass
Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh ... without destroying that moment.
ANAIS NIN
On Writing
Q: Is life a dream or a meditation? A: Life is a meditation when you know it is a dream.
BABA HARI DASS
Yoga Journal, May 1977
God made life simple. It is man who complicates it.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
Reader's Digest, July 1972
The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Blood Meridian
You had to take life as it came. It gave no quarter, spared no feelings. Limited no pain. Put no ceiling on happiness.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Innocent
Ah! what is human life?
How, like the dial's tardy-moving shade,
Day after day slides from us unperceiv'd!
The cunning fugitive is swift by stealth;
Too subtle is the movement to be seen;
Yet soon the hour is up--and we are gone.
EDWARD YOUNG
Busiris, King of Egypt: A Tragedy
I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.
JACK LONDON
The Turtles of Tasman
And if sometimes, commingled with life's wine,
We find the wormwood, and rebel and shrink,
Be sure a wiser hand than yours or mine
Pours out this potion for our lips to drink.
MAY RILEY SMITH
"Sometime"
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
If I don't have time to live my life well the first time, when am I going to find the time to go back and live it over?
ROBERT FULGHUM
Uh-Oh
You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.
SAUL BELLOW
Herzog
The most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Arrowsmith
Life was a sorrowful throb of this Matter teaching it anguish,
Teaching it hope and desire trod out too soon in the mire,
Life the frail joy that regrets its briefness, life the long sorrow.
SRI AUROBINDO
Gems from Sri Aurobindo
Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Feast of Stephen
How strange a checker-work of Providence is the life of man!
DANIEL DEFOE
Robinson Crusoe
Life doesn't work that way. You can do everything perfectly. Do everything you think you're supposed to be doing. Fulfill every expectation that other people may have. And you still won't get the results you think you deserve. Life is crazy and maddening and often makes no sense.
DAVID BALDACCI
One Summer