LIFE QUOTES XXXV

quotations about life

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

Tags: Irvin D. Yalom


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


A stream roars downward to a hidden sea
That slumbers moonless, starless, without bound,
Whence comes nor voice, nor form, nor any sound:
The stream is Life, the sea--Eternity.

WILLIAM WILSEY MARTIN

"Life"

Tags: William Wilsey Martin


Desire, both the whispers and the shouts, is the map we have been given to find the only life worth living.

JOHN ELDREDGE

Desire

Tags: John Eldredge


It is astonishing how much more anxious people are to lengthen life than to improve it; and as misers often lose large sums of money in attempting to make more, so do hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Lacon


Life is but a field which we soon travel over, and the vale of eternity presents itself.

EDWARD COUNSEL

Maxims


Life and death have been lacking in my life.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

prologue, Discussion

Tags: Jorge Luis Borges


Life is a strange thing. Why this longing for life? It is a game which no man wins. To live is to toil hard and to suffer sore, till old age creeps heavily upon us and we throw down our hands on the cold ashes of dead fires. It is hard to live. In pain the babe sucks his first breath, in pain the old man gasps his last, and all his days are full of trouble and sorrow; yet he goes down to the open arms of death, stumbling, falling, with head turned backward, fighting to the last. And death is kind. It is only life and the things of life that hurt. Yet we love life and we hate death. It is very strange.

JACK LONDON

Tales of the North

Tags: Jack London


Life consists of nothing but exceptions.

SERGEI LUKYANENKO

Night Watch

Tags: Sergei Lukyanenko


Let me leap naked through life's testing flame,
And bear to lose, and yet endure to win.

KENNETH RAND

"The World-Slave"

Tags: Kenneth Rand


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

Tags: James Baldwin


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

Tags: Josh Groban


Short is life, but endless is the theme.

EDWARD COUNSEL

Maxims


No lifetime is long enough for those ... who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.

DAN SIMMONS

The Rise of Endymion


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"


Ah! this beautiful world ... Indeed, I know not what to think of it. Sometimes it is all gladness and sunshine, and heaven itself lies not far off. And then it changes suddenly, and is dark and sorrowful, and clouds shut out the sky. In the lives of the saddest of us, there are bright days like this, when we feel as if we could take the great world in our arms. Then come the gloomy hours, when the fire will neither burn on our hearths nor in our hearts; and all without and within is dismal, cold, and dark.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Hyperion


Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

"A Psalm of Life"


And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall.

THOMAS MANN

The Magic Mountain

Tags: Thomas Mann


How strange a checker-work of Providence is the life of man!

DANIEL DEFOE

Robinson Crusoe

Tags: Daniel Defoe


Whatever you live is Life.

ROBERT PENN WARREN

All the King's Men