quotations about life
The evil fortune of the living in no way affects the dead.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
Life is a problem. Not merely a premiss from which we start, but a goal towards which we proceed. It is an opportunity for us not merely to get, but to attain; not simply to have, but to be. Its standard of failure or success is not outward fortune, but inward possession.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering; the curtain of cloud seems parted an instant only that we may measure all its horror as it hangs low, black, and imminent, in contrast with the transient brightness; the waterdrops that visit the parched lips in the desert bear with them only the keen imagination of thirst.
GEORGE ELIOT
Janet's Repentance
Between a gasp and a sigh, a life can change forever.
TIM LEBBON
Face
It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
All the Pretty Horses
It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.
FRANCIS BACON
Advancement of Learning
That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet
EMILY DICKINSON
"That it will never come again"
Weeks passed, a whirl of lights and sound and laughter, a fever dream, vertiginous, roaring, mad, he quit his job, not caring what came after, and struck out blindly; money enough he had, and life, by Christ, would go now as he bade; he got it by the throat, he was its master; sing! went his whip, and life danced on the faster.
CONRAD AIKEN
"Youth"
There are sad times, of course, but then life is a mixture and an authentic life story is the good, the bad, and everything in between.
NIK FARAH
"Recording a life is so precious", The Star, August 12, 2016
Life, like the boring drunk at the office party, keeps seeking you out, leaning on you, killing you with pointless yarns and laughing bad-breathed in your face at its own unfunny jokes.
GLEN DUNCAN
The Last Werewolf
You tasted it. Isn't that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That's all we're given in life, that's all we're given of life. A taste. There is no more.
PHILIP ROTH
The Dying Animal
What fills us is real, sweet, dopey, funny life.
ANNE LAMOTT
"Time Lost and Found", Sunset
Men do not escape from life because life is dull, but life escapes from men because men are little.
THOMAS WOLFE
Look Homeward, Angel
What mean the discipline and trial of life? What mean the dark shocks of disappointment, the breaking of hopes, the sundering of human ties, the terrible baptism of suffering and of fire, if there is not something beyond? If in every bath of sweat and tears, every drop of sorrow, every falling wave, there is something by which I am led more near to God, by which my soul is made stronger and purified, then I can understand life. But if I am hurled in the chaos of life--battered by sorrow today, and kicked by misfortune tomorrow--stricken by my fondest hopes, deluded and deceived, and all is to end in nothingness, I must confess that you present a problem I cannot solve.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Life is being, not having.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Your responsibility is to be an explorer, not a tourist in this adventure that is your life.
MARY ANNE RADMACHER
Honey In Your Heart
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
To keep from dying is not the same as "to live."
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach -- that it makes no sense.
PHILIP ROTH
American Pastoral
If a man knew how to live he would never die.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men