quotations about life
The world is a grindstone and life is your nose.
FRED ALLEN
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
The greatest philosophy of life should be to live for the benefit of others as much as one lives for the benefit of self. And that is what philosophers call a footprint on the sands of time.
FEMI ABBAS
"A decade of royalty and faith", The Nation, September 2, 2016
Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments.
ANAIS NIN
diary, winter, 1931-32
Tell someone you love them because life is short, but shout it in Klingon because life is also terrifying and confusing.
ANONYMOUS
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
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
JOHN LENNON
"Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)", Double Fantasy
When life looks like it's falling apart, it may just be falling in place.
BEVERLY SOLOMON
Good Housekeeping, Aug. 2009
There are those who say that life is like a book, with chapters for each event in your life and a limited number of pages on which you can spend your time. But I prefer to think that a book is like a life, particularly a good one, which is well to worth staying up all night to finish.
DANIEL HANDLER
(as Lemony Snicket), Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
Life is like sex. It's not always good, but it's always worth trying.
PAMELA ANDERSON
Star
Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Studies in Classic American Literature
All of life is a foreign country.
JACK KEROUAC
letter, June 24, 1949
Our life a harp is, with unnumbered strings,
And tones and symphonies; but our poor skill
Some shallow notes from its great music brings.
JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY
"Dolores"
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"
He whose daily life has been a rounded whole, is easy in his mind.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
Whatever you live is Life.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
Life is a theatre of alarms and contentions.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
The game of life is good, though all of life may be hurt, and though all lives lose the game in the end.
JACK LONDON
John Barleycorn
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
Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
EUGENE O'NEILL
Lazarus Laughed
Nothing comes at all -- never anything. And I cannot accustom myself to that. It is this monotony, this absolute fixity in life, that is the hardest thing for me to endure. I should like to go away from here. Go away? But where and how? I do not know, and I stay.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid