quotations about life
Life can be cruel and uncomfortable at times. That doesn't define you. It's how we survive and create a colorful life with our experiences. Good and bad.
PAMELA ANDERSON
interview, Parade Magazine, January 23, 2015
As long as you live, keep learning how to live.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
GASTON BACHELARD
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire
The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.
JACK LONDON
The Call of the Wild
Life figures itself to me as a festal or funereal procession.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
"The Procession of Life"
Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.
RICHARD BACH
Illusions
If you turned the fabric of our lives over, I imagined the design on the backside would be woven in the bleak grays of doubt and fear.
STEPHENIE MEYER
Breaking Dawn
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
The hearts of all men dwell in the same wilderness.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune Messiah
Trifles make the sum of life.
CHARLES DICKENS
David Copperfield
Life is futile unless it be directed towards a definite goal.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman
Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.
JULIAN BARNES
The Sense of an Ending
Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day that we die.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
"Nephelidia"
Behold the life at ease; it drifts,
The sharpened life commands its course.
GEORGE MEREDITH
"Hard Weather"
He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach -- that it makes no sense.
PHILIP ROTH
American Pastoral
Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
To realize life as absolute is to be existentially emancipated from life itself in that very realization, which understands that life is not life. The same applies to death.
MASAO ABE
Zen and the Modern World
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
Try not to turn your life into a race, least of all an obstacle race.
JOSÉ BERGAMÍN
Head in the Clouds