LIFE QUOTES XXIV

quotations about life

Life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Reveries over Childhood and Youth

Tags: William Butler Yeats


Life is a pilgrimage and if you don't play by the rules you don't find the Road to Damascus, you find the Crown of Thorns.

ANITA BROOKNER

The Paris Review, fall 1987

Tags: Anita Brookner


Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.

V. S. NAIPAUL

Half a Life

Tags: V. S. Naipaul


To keep from dying is not the same as "to live."

BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON

Dune: House Harkonnen

Tags: Brian Herbert


When something makes no sense, sometimes you make something of it. A joke. A spiritual practice. A life.

HEATHER SELLERS

Good Housekeeping, Jan. 2011


You know your life needs more excitement when your greatest challenge all week is removing the lint from your dryer's lint-screen all in one piece!

TOM WILSON

Ziggy, Jan. 16, 1998

Tags: Tom Wilson


Life itself suggests a higher good than life itself can yield.

E. H. CHAPIN

Living Words


Life is life--whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man's own advantage.

SRI AUROBINDO

attributed, Humanimal

Tags: Sri Aurobindo


The meaning of our lives is revealed through experiences that at first seem at odds with each other--moments we wish would never end and moments we wish had never begun.

JOHN ELDREDGE

Desire


Life divine! O life eternal!
Man cannot translate the thought.
Strong the chain that God hath welded;
Link on link hath chain been wrought.
Fabric new each day is woven,
Woven it on God's own loom.
We the threads can ne'er unravel,
Hidden they in Nature's womb.

ARDELIA COTTON BARTON

"Dost Thou Know?"

Tags: Ardelia Cotton Barton


It's over before you know it. It all goes by so fast. Yeah the bad nights take forever, and the good nights don't ever seem to last.

TOM PETTY

The Best of Everything

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Life is like a moustache. It can be wonderful or terrible. But it always tickles.

NORA ROBERTS

From the Heart

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Behind every man's external life, which he leads in company, there is another which he leads alone, and which he carries with him apart. We see but one aspect of our neighbor, as we see but one side of the moon; in either case there is also a dark half, which is unknown to us.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

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What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.

DORIS LESSING

The Golden Notebook

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We are buried when we're born. The world is a place of graves occupied and graves potential. Life is what happens while we wait for our appointment with the mortician.

DEAN KOONTZ

Odd Apocalypse


Though I be shut in darkness, and become insentient dust blown idly here and there, I count oblivion a scant price to pay for having once had held against my lip life's brimming cup of hydromel and rue--for having once known woman's holy love and a child's kiss, and for a little space been boon companion to the Day and Night, Fed on the odors of the summer dawn, and folded in the beauty of the stars. Dear Lord, though I be changed to senseless clay, and serve the potter as he turns his wheel, I thank Thee for the gracious gift of tears!

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

"Two Moods"

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Life ... is only heavy and none else; there is only the one trip, all heavy. Heavy that leads to the grave. For everyone and everything.

PHILIP K. DICK

A Scanner Darkly

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Behold the life at ease; it drifts,
The sharpened life commands its course.

GEORGE MEREDITH

"Hard Weather"

Tags: George Meredith


The realization that life is absurd and cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.

ALBERT CAMUS

attributed, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd


Life doesn't do anything to you. It only reveals your spirit.

JOHN C. MAXWELL

The Power of Thinking Big

Tags: John C. Maxwell