quotations about life
When life looks like it's falling apart, it may just be falling in place.
BEVERLY SOLOMON
Good Housekeeping, Aug. 2009
Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
EUGENE O'NEILL
Lazarus Laughed
He lived the life he lived, like anybody, I guess, and he paid his dues, like everybody. Maybe what I mean when I say he made his life so hard was that he always tried to pay his dues in front.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Let me leap naked through life's testing flame,
And bear to lose, and yet endure to win.
KENNETH RAND
"The World-Slave"
Life consists of nothing but exceptions.
SERGEI LUKYANENKO
Night Watch
Life is a strange thing. Why this longing for life? It is a game which no man wins. To live is to toil hard and to suffer sore, till old age creeps heavily upon us and we throw down our hands on the cold ashes of dead fires. It is hard to live. In pain the babe sucks his first breath, in pain the old man gasps his last, and all his days are full of trouble and sorrow; yet he goes down to the open arms of death, stumbling, falling, with head turned backward, fighting to the last. And death is kind. It is only life and the things of life that hurt. Yet we love life and we hate death. It is very strange.
JACK LONDON
Tales of the North
Life and death have been lacking in my life.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
prologue, Discussion
Life is but a field which we soon travel over, and the vale of eternity presents itself.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
It is astonishing how much more anxious people are to lengthen life than to improve it; and as misers often lose large sums of money in attempting to make more, so do hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Desire, both the whispers and the shouts, is the map we have been given to find the only life worth living.
JOHN ELDREDGE
Desire
A stream roars downward to a hidden sea
That slumbers moonless, starless, without bound,
Whence comes nor voice, nor form, nor any sound:
The stream is Life, the sea--Eternity.
WILLIAM WILSEY MARTIN
"Life"
A life is a life. The unbearable pain of losing someone you love is identical no matter how differently it is expressed. And yet the varying shades of the global reaction to tragedy based on location, nationality, ethnicity, culture and religion belie our humanity, a harsh reminder that our "global community" is an illusion, despite our seemingly desperate desire to cling to that notion.
ARWA DAMON
"A life is a life, wherever you are", CNN, March 29, 2016
I realized that the ultimate joy in life comes from understanding that life is a process, the tapestry of threads bound together, where some fit in and some fall out of place: people come and go, events do not turn out as we would like to, we plan for the best, yet have to set for the worst. If we try to rush life, control it, get angry about it, it will run away from us. If we embrace life, breathe deeply into it and accept it as a wonder, we will be the richest people in the world in a split second.
MILENA MILICEVIC
"How I Overcame My Biggest Mistake in Life so Far", Huffington Post, June 14, 2016
Man's life is like the morning dew.
JAPANESE PROVERB
Whatever you live is Life.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
How strange a checker-work of Providence is the life of man!
DANIEL DEFOE
Robinson Crusoe
And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall.
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"A Psalm of Life"
Ah! this beautiful world ... Indeed, I know not what to think of it. Sometimes it is all gladness and sunshine, and heaven itself lies not far off. And then it changes suddenly, and is dark and sorrowful, and clouds shut out the sky. In the lives of the saddest of us, there are bright days like this, when we feel as if we could take the great world in our arms. Then come the gloomy hours, when the fire will neither burn on our hearths nor in our hearts; and all without and within is dismal, cold, and dark.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Hyperion
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.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"A Psalm of Life"