quotations about life
As long as you live, keep learning how to live.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Men regret their life has been ill-spent, but this does not always induce them to make a better use of the time they have yet to live.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Mankind", Les Caractères
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
Life being full of harsh realities, we seek relief from them in a variety of pleasing delusions.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Though I be shut in darkness, and become insentient dust blown idly here and there, I count oblivion a scant price to pay for having once had held against my lip life's brimming cup of hydromel and rue--for having once known woman's holy love and a child's kiss, and for a little space been boon companion to the Day and Night, Fed on the odors of the summer dawn, and folded in the beauty of the stars. Dear Lord, though I be changed to senseless clay, and serve the potter as he turns his wheel, I thank Thee for the gracious gift of tears!
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Two Moods"
Life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Reveries over Childhood and Youth
To live means to finesse the processes to which one is subjugated.
BERTOLT BRECHT
On Politics and Society
Life is what you put into it and how much you take out of it. You put in more than is expected, and you take out less than you want.
MICHAEL J. FOX
Good Housekeeping, June 2011
When something makes no sense, sometimes you make something of it. A joke. A spiritual practice. A life.
HEATHER SELLERS
Good Housekeeping, Jan. 2011
Life itself suggests a higher good than life itself can yield.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
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
The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
A Free Man's Worship
The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Lila
There is more to life than not dying.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Clockwork Angel
Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.
JULIAN BARNES
The Sense of an Ending
Trifles make the sum of life.
CHARLES DICKENS
David Copperfield
Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides
Into the silent hollow of the past;
What is there that abides
To make the next age better for the last?
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration
The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
GEORGE ELIOT
Janet's Repentance