quotations about life
Life is often wasted in a search after unattainable advantages, and generally, through the scruples of pride and vanity, our happiness is delayed from day to day, by a rejection of those pleasures and benefits which are within our reach.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES
Leisure
Everything is so comfortable; the tea-urn hisses so plainly, the toast is so warm, the breakfast so neat, the food so edible, that one turns away, in excitable moments, a little angrily from anything so quiet, tame, and sober. Have we not always hated this life?
WILLIAM BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.
SAUL BELLOW
Herzog
Life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
The world ... is full of people who never knew what hit 'em, their lives are over before they wake up.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit is Rich
Seek not life's jewels where the poppies grow,
Nor where Desire, all passion-poisoned, rears
Her luring domes, but in the heart of woe,
With shores far washed by sanctifying tears.
EDWARD ROBESON TAYLOR
"Life's Jewels"
How strange a checker-work of Providence is the life of man!
DANIEL DEFOE
Robinson Crusoe
There is no normal life. There is only life.
ANNE RICE
The Wolves of Midwinter
Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh ... without destroying that moment.
ANAIS NIN
On Writing
Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Feast of Stephen
Life is not a mere exterior movement, the movement of the being in its relations to other beings, but it is also, and especially, an internal movement from the visible to the invisible, from the real to the ideal, from the finite to the infinite.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Flirting with death is the spice of life.
MARGARET LOCK
Twice Dead
Our lives fade behind us before we die.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit is Rich
I think you've got to be truthful about the life you have. Otherwise, there's no possibility of achieving the life you want.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Life is the apprenticeship to progressive renunciation, to the steady diminution of our claims, of our hopes, of our powers, of our liberty.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted.
GEORGE ELIOT
Romola
Human life [is] ... a process of filling in time until the arrival of death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of what kind of business one is going to transact during the long wait.
ERIC BERNE
Games People Play
While there's life, there's hope.
ENGLISH PROVERB
Any state of life contents if we know no other.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims