quotations about life
One must live as he can.
MAXWELL ANDERSON
Winterset
Real life was messier than fiction, and in it you didn't always have time to do or say the right things.
BENTLEY LITTLE
The Resort
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
There are those who say that life is like a book, with chapters for each event in your life and a limited number of pages on which you can spend your time. But I prefer to think that a book is like a life, particularly a good one, which is well to worth staying up all night to finish.
DANIEL HANDLER
(as Lemony Snicket), Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
Flirting with death is the spice of life.
MARGARET LOCK
Twice Dead
If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Suttree
Like water spilt upon the ground--alas,
Our little lives flow swiftly on and pass;
Yet may they bring rich harvests and green grass!
HENRY VAN DYKE
"Epigrams and Greetings"
The world is a grindstone and life is your nose.
FRED ALLEN
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
We say that life is sweet, its satisfactions deep. All this we say, as we sleepwalk our time through years of days and nights. We let time cascade over us like a waterfall, believing it to be never-ending. Yet each day that touches us, and every man in the world, is unique; irredeemable; over. And just another Monday.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
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
Each life creates endless ripples.
FRANK HERBERT
Chapterhouse: Dune
Is all our Life, then but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?
LEWIS CARROLL
Sylvie and Bruno
The unfairness of life is indicative of trees. I planted twenty trees on the same block. It's so fucking weird. Six became huge. One is giant. And there are some little shitty ones. Same soil. Same water. Same seed. But those little ones just don't grow. I can't explain it.
TIM ALLEN
Esquire, Nov. 2011
As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame that comes after is oblivion.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
In such a porcelain life one likes to be sure that all is well lest one stumble upon one's hopes in a pile of broken crockery.
EMILY DICKINSON
letter to Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Bowles, Aug. 1858?
Life consists in molting our illusions. We form creeds today only to throw them away tomorrow. The eagle molts a feather because he is growing a better one.
ELBERT HUBBARD
The American Bible
Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
EUGENE O'NEILL
Lazarus Laughed
Life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves, when we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves.
IRVIN D. YALOM
The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy
One of my teachers in grammar school, a nun, used to say, "La vie, c'est bien complique." I'm not sure what that meant to me at the time, but it's become the guiding principle of my life, my writing, my interactions with others. Life is very complicated indeed, and that's what makes it both difficult and interesting. Stereotypes, racism, xenophobia -- most negativity in the world comes out of the natural human desire to oversimplify. Life isn't simple.
JEANNETTE ANGELL
"A talk with author Jeannette Angell: From college lecturer to callgirl and back", Souixland, Oct. 8, 2004
The greatest philosophy of life should be to live for the benefit of others as much as one lives for the benefit of self. And that is what philosophers call a footprint on the sands of time.
FEMI ABBAS
"A decade of royalty and faith", The Nation, September 2, 2016