quotations about life
Life is wasted on the living.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
MARY OLIVER
"Sometimes", Red Bird
All that is born and destroyed is reborn in the sweep of the ages; Life like a decimal ever recurring repeats the old figure.
SRI AUROBINDO
Gems from Sri Aurobindo
To have found meaning in life is thus the only certain antidote to the deliberate seeking of death. But at the same time, in a strange dialectical way, it is death that endows life with its deepest, most unique meaning.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
Surviving the Holocaust
When man would make a rose with tools, he fashions petals and leaves of wax, colors them, manufactures a stalk by the same mechanical process -- and the rose is done. When God makes a rose, he lets a bird or a puff of wind drop a seed into the ground; out of the seed there emerges a stalk; and out of the stalk, branches; and on these branches, buds; and out of these buds roses unfold; and the rose is never done, for it goes on endlessly repeating itself. This is the difference between manufacture and growth. Man's method is the method of manufacture; God's method is the method of growth. What man makes is a finished product -- death. What God makes is an always finishing and never finished product -- life.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
The trouble with life ... is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it's always the same beginning; and the same ending.
MARTIN AMIS
introduction, Experience
In a dream thou mayst live a lifetime, and all be forgotten in the morning:
Even such is life, and so soon perisheth its memory.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.
PHILIP ROTH
American Pastoral
Life should be touched, not strangled.
RAY BRADBURY
Farewell Summer
Life seems like a haunted wood, where we tremble and crouch and cry.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"A Woman's Apology"
One's life should be sufficiently interesting to furnish entertainment in the record.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
As yet we know nothing of what goes to create or evoke the active spark of life.
BRAM STOKER
"The Jewel of the Seven Stars"
Where I come from in the Eastern Region, life is still -- well, things are changing very fast but if one is interested, one can still see signs of what life used to look like.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Conversations with Chinua Achebe
It's your life -- but only if you make it so.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
You Learn by Living
That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet
EMILY DICKINSON
"That it will never come again"
Life was never anything but a perpetual see-saw between gravity and jest.
GEORGE ELIOT
Romola
Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men.
Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,
now the living timber bursts with the new buds
and spring comes round again. And so with men:
as one generation comes to life, another dies away.
HOMER
The Iliad
Life does turn on so many queer things ... ball bearings and banana skins.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Paris Review, fall 2000
Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, there were merely the unburied dead -- clean and noble, like well-preserved mummies, but not alive.
JACK LONDON
"What Life Means to Me", Revolution and Other Essays