quotations about life
Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books -- but it is terrible when one has to live it. It is almost impossible to sleep for more than twelve hours a day, and the remaining twelve hours have to be filled in somehow.
JEAN ANOUILH
The Collected Plays
I compare human life to a large mansion of many apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me.
JOHN KEATS
letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, May 3, 1818
Life is like a cocktail, made up for the most part of sweet things, and tinged with a dash of bitters. We must drain it to the dregs to get at the cherry, just as we must live a full and rounded life to know all its pleasures.
EDGAR GUEST
Home Rhymes
Life should be a fruitful garden,
Fair in blossom, and rich in seed;
Conscience, the sharp and faithful warden,
Watchful against the frost and weed.
Study should its labyrinths trace
Where wisdom's pleasant waters flow;
And industry the garden grace
With plants that choicest gifts bestow.
C. B. LANGSTON
"What Should Life Be?"
Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.
WOODY ALLEN
Husbands and Wives
How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard.
PHILIP ROTH
The Professor of Desire
He or she who has made the best of the life after death has made the best of the life before it.
SAMUEL BUTLER
"How to Make the Best of Life", Essays on Life, Art and Science
Life is a series of obstacles. It's not supposed to be easy. It is how you deal with these obstacles that define you as a person.
RAUL CARRANZA
"UC San Diego grad with muscular dystrophy shows incredible strength to achieve his dreams", University of California, June 16, 2016
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Unquiet Grave
Between a gasp and a sigh, a life can change forever.
TIM LEBBON
Face
Life, with the Soul predominant,
Is a noble mosaic, a bewitching arabesque.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Song of the Soul"
Much too oft we make life gloomy--
When happy we might be,
If we gathered more of sunshine,
And not dark shadows see.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
Thoughts
Life unshared has scarce a charm.
C. B. LANGSTON
"Solitude"
It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
All the Pretty Horses
I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.
RANSOM RIGGS
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Men do not escape from life because life is dull, but life escapes from men because men are little.
THOMAS WOLFE
Look Homeward, Angel
You tasted it. Isn't that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That's all we're given in life, that's all we're given of life. A taste. There is no more.
PHILIP ROTH
The Dying Animal
If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year.
ALICE MEYNELL
"The Rhythm of Life", The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays
Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
Metropolitan Life
Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Beyond the Wall of Sleep"