LIFE QUOTES XV

quotations about life

All that is born and destroyed is reborn in the sweep of the ages; Life like a decimal ever recurring repeats the old figure.

SRI AUROBINDO

Gems from Sri Aurobindo


Life is wasted on the living.

DOUGLAS ADAMS

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Tags: Douglas Adams


One Moment in Annihilation's Waste,
One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste--
The Stars are Setting and the Caravan
Starts for the Dawn of Nothing -- Oh, make haste!

EDWARD FITZGERALD

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Tags: Edward Fitzgerald


To have found meaning in life is thus the only certain antidote to the deliberate seeking of death. But at the same time, in a strange dialectical way, it is death that endows life with its deepest, most unique meaning.

BRUNO BETTELHEIM

Surviving the Holocaust

Tags: Bruno Bettelheim


Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: James Baldwin


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

Tags: Martin Amis


In a dream thou mayst live a lifetime, and all be forgotten in the morning:
Even such is life, and so soon perisheth its memory.

MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER

Proverbial Philosophy


Life should be touched, not strangled.

RAY BRADBURY

Farewell Summer

Tags: Ray Bradbury


When man would make a rose with tools, he fashions petals and leaves of wax, colors them, manufactures a stalk by the same mechanical process -- and the rose is done. When God makes a rose, he lets a bird or a puff of wind drop a seed into the ground; out of the seed there emerges a stalk; and out of the stalk, branches; and on these branches, buds; and out of these buds roses unfold; and the rose is never done, for it goes on endlessly repeating itself. This is the difference between manufacture and growth. Man's method is the method of manufacture; God's method is the method of growth. What man makes is a finished product -- death. What God makes is an always finishing and never finished product -- life.

LYMAN ABBOTT

The Theology of an Evolutionist

Tags: Lyman Abbott


Where I come from in the Eastern Region, life is still -- well, things are changing very fast but if one is interested, one can still see signs of what life used to look like.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Conversations with Chinua Achebe

Tags: Chinua Achebe


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

Tags: Jack London


That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet

EMILY DICKINSON

"That it will never come again"


You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they don't even remember the name and what the scratchers were trying to tell, and it doesn't matter.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

Absalom, Absalom!

Tags: William Faulkner


Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men.
Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,
now the living timber bursts with the new buds
and spring comes round again. And so with men:
as one generation comes to life, another dies away.

HOMER

The Iliad

Tags: Homer


The difficulties of life are intended to make us better--not bitter.

JOHN C. MAXWELL

The Power of Thinking Big


Life does turn on so many queer things ... ball bearings and banana skins.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON

The Paris Review, fall 2000


As yet we know nothing of what goes to create or evoke the active spark of life.

BRAM STOKER

"The Jewel of the Seven Stars"

Tags: Bram Stoker


For drinking Life there are two cups:
The No Cup is bitter, the Yes Cup is yummy --
Now, which one would you rather have in your tummy?

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Year of the Flood

Tags: Margaret Atwood


One's life should be sufficiently interesting to furnish entertainment in the record.

AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT

Table Talk

Tags: Amos Bronson Alcott


Rest not! Life is sweeping by;
Go and dare before you die.
Something mighty and sublime
Leave behind to conquer time!

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

"Haste Not--Rest Not"