quotations about life
Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
LIN YUTANG
The Literary Digest, 1938
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
Life is nothing but a statement of what happens to be.
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
Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, there were merely the unburied dead -- clean and noble, like well-preserved mummies, but not alive.
JACK LONDON
"What Life Means to Me", Revolution and Other Essays
As you speed along the highway of life ... you might pause and consider. When everything's coming your way, maybe you're driving in the wrong lane.
JOSEPH FINDER
Paranoia
It's only life. We all get through it.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Hours
When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
My Day
So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Mr G: A Novel About the Creation
If you are good life is good.
ROALD DAHL
Matilda
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
If life is often so hard as this, I don't see how we ever shall get through it.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
Our life is but a new form of the way men have lived from the beginning.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Lean forward into your life ... catch the best bits and the finest wind. Just tip your feathers in flight a wee bit and see how dramatically that small lean can change your life.
MARY ANNE RADMACHER
Lean Forward Into Your Life
Your responsibility is to be an explorer, not a tourist in this adventure that is your life.
MARY ANNE RADMACHER
Honey In Your Heart
Between a gasp and a sigh, a life can change forever.
TIM LEBBON
Face
Life unshared has scarce a charm.
C. B. LANGSTON
"Solitude"
Life is a luxury, isn't it? there's no use in it--but how delightful!
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
Life is exponential. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague.
PAOLO BACIGALUPI
The Windup Girl