quotations about life
Life is a constant series of new and familiar challenges, adversities that wax and wane until the end.
ANDREW PASCHAL
"Singles Going Steady", PopMatters, September 1, 2016
Life is exponential. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague.
PAOLO BACIGALUPI
The Windup Girl
Life is getting what you want, and I'm better at life than you are.
JEFF ABBOTT
Adrenaline
Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
Metropolitan Life
Life, how sweet soever it seems, is a draught mingled with bitter ingredients; some drink deeper than others before they come at them: But, if they do not swim at the top for youth to taste them, it is ten to one but old age will find them thick at the bottom. And it is the employment of faith and patience, and the work of wisdom and virtue, to teach us to drink the sweet part down with pleasure and thankfulness, and to swallow the bitter without reluctance.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Once introduced into this world, life would never leave--there was no end to the explosive, consuming, voracious lust of long chain molecules to link and match and make of themselves yet more and more and again more.
GREGORY BENFORD
Against Infinity
Our daily lives have a kaleidoscopic quality, a feeling of walking down a breakfast buffet and spooning out things onto your plate. And there's a lot to eat at this brunch of experience. Too many pineapple rings, too many sausages, too much syrup.
NICHOLSON BAKER
interview, Interview Magazine, September 16, 2013
Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
The Ghost in My Life
The difficulties of life are intended to make us better--not bitter.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
The Power of Thinking Big
They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Anything in life is possible if you make it happen.
JACK LALANNE
Fiscal Fitness: 8 Steps to Wealth & Health from America's Leaders of Fitness
Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent mutual regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.
FRANK HERBERT
Heretics of Dune
Life is like checkers. When you reach the top, you can move wherever you want.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Life is not life unless we can feel it.
SAMUEL BUTLER
"How to Make the Best of Life", Essays on Life, Art and Science
Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.
ECKHART TOLLE
The Power of Now
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
attributed, The Waking Dream
We are buried when we're born. The world is a place of graves occupied and graves potential. Life is what happens while we wait for our appointment with the mortician.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Apocalypse
Each day is a branch of the Tree of Life laden heavily with fruit. If we lie down lazily beneath it, we may starve; but if we shake the branches, some of the fruit will fall for us.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
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