quotations about life
I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life. Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going.
J. M. COETZEE
In the Heart of the Country
Remember that life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.
SUSAN ROSE BLAUNER
How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me
All of life is a foreign country.
JACK KEROUAC
letter, June 24, 1949
Desire, both the whispers and the shouts, is the map we have been given to find the only life worth living.
JOHN ELDREDGE
Desire
Life is magical. There is something wonderful in being alive, in having within one's self all sorts of possibilities.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
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"
We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing
(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth--
we call it life.
ANNE CARSON
Grief Lessons: Four Plays
Weakest and strongest of the things that God has made, Life is the heir of Death, and yet his conqueror--victim at once and victor. All living things succumb to Death's cradle; Life smiles at his impotence, and makes the grave her cradle.
JAMES HINTON
Life in Nature
Life is reduced to a bunch of fights over territory.
KOBO ABE
The Ark Sakura
Life is the flash in black heavens.
HENRI CAZALIS
"Always"
A human life the treasure of the world cannot buy; nor can it redeem one which is misspent; nor can it make full and complete and beautiful a life which is dwarfed and warped and ugly.
JACK LONDON
The Cruise of the Dazzler
Let me leap naked through life's testing flame,
And bear to lose, and yet endure to win.
KENNETH RAND
"The World-Slave"
Everything happens as though I were only one of the particular existences of some great incomprehensible and central being.... Sometimes this great totality of life appears to me so dramatically beautiful that it plunges me into ecstasy. But more often it seems like a monstrous beast that penetrates and surpasses me and which is everywhere, within me and outside me.... And terror grips and envelops me more powerfully from moment to moment.... My only way out is to write, to make others aware of it, so as not to have to feel all of it alone, to get rid of however small a portion of it.
ARTHUR ADAMOV
The Confession
Human life is a pilgrimage from the unknown to the unknown. No one knows whence he emanated or whither he is bound.
FEMI ABBAS
"A decade of royalty and faith", The Nation, September 2, 2016
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
JOHN LENNON
"Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)", Double Fantasy
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 cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
You sit
Like a rain puddle in hell
Knitting the socks
Of your life.
CHARLES SIMIC
My Noiseless Entourage
Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Studies in Classic American Literature
The purpose of life is a life of purpose.
BONG R. OSORIO
"The purpose of life is a life of purpose", The Philippine Star, June 20, 2016