Life
- The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.
-- Henry Adams
- The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings.
-- Henri Frederic Amiel
- Life is a handful of short stories, pretending to be a novel.
-- Anon.
- Life is a one-way street, and we are not coming back.
-- Anon.
- Life, like a mirror, never gives back more than we put into it.
-- Anon.
- Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man--yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (Meditations)
- The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing. The main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unseen attack.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antonius
- Life is a stranger's sojourn, a night at an inn.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antonius
- The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.
-- James Matthew Barrie
- Life is a long lesson in humility.
-- James Matthew Barrie
- The trouble with life is that there are so many beautiful women and so little time.
-- John Barrymore
- Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.
-- Stephen Vincent Benét
- My advice to those who are about to begin, in earnet, the journey of life, is to take their heart in one hand and a club in the other.
-- Josh Billings
- All I want is a little more than I'll ever get.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
- Before I knew the best part of my life had come, it had gone.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
- I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
- The world is made up of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.
-- Jacob Bronowski
- Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.
-- Jean de La Bruyère
- O Life! thou art a galling load,
Along a rough, a weary road,
To wretches such as I.
-- Robert Burns
- Life is the art of drawing sufficent conclusions from insufficient premises.
-- Samuel Butler
- Life is one long process of getting tired.
-- Samuel Butler
- Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
-- Samuel Butler
- He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
-- Albert Camus
- The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
-- Thomas Carlyle
- Man arrives as a novice at each age of his life.
-- Sebastien Chamfort
- There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.
-- Coco Chanel
- A tragey means always a man's struggle with that which is stronger than man.
-- G.K. Chesterton
- Sometimes I wish life had a fast-forward button.
-- Dan Chopin
- Without a measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed.
-- Winston Churchill
- Real life seems to have no plots.
-- Ivy Compton-Burnett
- Life is an incurable disease.
-- Abraham Crowley
- The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.
-- Clarence Darrow
- I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
-- T.S. Eliot
- The whole of what we know is a system of compensations. Each suffering is rewarded; each sacrifice is made up; every debt is paid.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn't half so bad
if it isn't you.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
- Life is a series of little deaths out of which life always returns.
-- Charles Feidelson, Jr.
- Were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults in the first.
-- Benjamin Franklin
- In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on.
-- Robert Frost
- When life life does not find a singer to sing her heat, she produces a philosopher to speak her mind.
-- Khalil Gibran
- Life is made up of interruptions.
-- William S. Gilbert
- The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is the example of the external seductiveness of life.
-- Jean Giraudoux
- Life is the childhood of our immortality.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Man wants but little here below
Nor wants that little long.
-- Oliver Goldsmith
- The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.
-- William Hazlitt
- The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over.
-- Ernest Hemingway
- You live and you learn -- or you don't live long.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
- Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
-- O. Henry
- It's a good thing that life is not as serious as it seems to a waiter.
-- Don herold
- Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
- I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
- And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
-- A.E. Housman
- Clay lies still but blood's a rover;
Breath's a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad; when the journey's over
There'll be time enough for sleep.
-- A.E. Housman
- Do not take life too seriously; you will never get out of it alive.
-- Elbert Hubbard
- I haven't heard of anybody who want's to stop living on account of the cost.
-- Kin Hubbard
- Life isn't all beer and skittles.
-- Thomas Hughes
- Cats and monkeys -- monkeys and cats -- all human life is there.
-- Henry James
- The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
-- William James
- Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.
-- Samuel Johnson
- The joy of life is variety; the tenderest love requires to be renewed by intervals of absence.
-- Samuel Johnson
- Without duty, life is soft and boneless; it cannot hold itself together.
-- Joseph Joubert
- You've got to keep fighting -- you've got to risk your life every six months to stay alive.
-- Elia Kazan
- Oh for a life of sensations rather than thoughts.
-- John Keats
- A proverb is no proverb to you until life has illustrated it.
-- John Keats
- The wine of life keeps oozing drop by drop.
The leaves of life keep falling one by one.
-- Omar Khyyam
- Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
-- Soren Kirkegaard
- Be intent upon the perfection of the present day.
-- William Law
- Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.
-- D.H. Lawrence
- Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.
-- Stephen Butler Leacock
- Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep.
-- Fran Lebowitz
- I like life. It's something to do. Somewhere on this globe every 10 seconds there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.
-- Sam Levinson
- You only live once -- but if you work it right, once is enough.
-- Joe E. Lewis
- 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.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.
-- Thomas la Mance
- Life is a dead-end street.
-- H. L. Mencken
- The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more that you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.
-- Thomas Merton
- It is not true that life is one damn thing after another...It's one damn thing over and over.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay
- My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay
- Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.
-- Henry Miller
- Death and taxes and childbirth. There's never any convenient time for any of them.
-- Margaret Mitchell
- The first hundred years are the hardest.
-- William Mizner
- Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
Throughout the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name.
-- Thomas Osbert Mordaunt
- The great business of life is to be, to do, to do without, and to depart.
-- John Morley
- St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.
-- Malcom Muggeridge
- Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
-- Ogden Nash
- Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will.
-- Jarawala Nehru
- Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
-- Eugene O'Neill
- Growth is the only evidence of life.
-- Cardinal Newman
- He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very sound or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
-- George Orwell
- We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.
-- William Osler
- Basically I am interrested in friendship, sex, and death.
-- Sharon Riis
- The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy -- I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
-- Bertrand Russel
- A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.
-- Carl Sandburg
- There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
-- George Santayana
- Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
-- William Saroyan
- Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
-- William Shakespeare, Macbeth
- The closing years of life are like a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
-- Arthur Schopenauer
- One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum.
-- Sir Walter Scott
- This is the Law of the Yukon, that only the strong shall thrive;
That surely the weak shall perish, and only the fit survive.
-- Robert W. Service
- Simply the thing I am shall make me live.
-- William Shakespeare
- One man in his time plays many parts.
-- William Shakespeare, As You Like It
- Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.
-- Fulton J. Sheen
- Every man's road in life is marked by the graves of his personal likings.
-- Alexander Smith
- Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live;
Not where I love, but where I am, I die.
-- Robert Southwell
- Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.
-- Herbert Spencer
- One must chose in life between boredom and suffering.
-- Mme. de Stael
- It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.
-- Adlai Stevenson
- May you live all the days of your life.
-- Jonathan Swift (Polite Conversation)
- The trouble with the rat race is that, even if you win, you're still a rat.
-- Lily Tomlin
- It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
-- Lionel Trilling
- Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
-- Mark Twain
- Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.
-- Mark Twain
- Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring and because it has fresh peaches in it.
-- Thomas Walker
- Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught Hell for.
-- Earl Warren
- Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanisms of the universe.
-- Alfred North Whitehead
- It is better to wear out than to rust out.
-- George Whitefield
- The longer I live, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us.
-- Oscar Wilde
- The book of life begins with a man and a woman in a garden, and ends with Revelations.
-- Oscar Wilde
- Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.
-- Tennessee Williams
- Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning.
-- Virginia Woolf
- Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
-- William Butler Yeats
- Life is like an onion. Why is life like an onion? Because you peel away layer after layer and when you come to the end you have nothing.
-- Yiddish Proverb
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