quotations about life
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
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
This life is only the anteroom of a greater reality to come.
WM. PAUL YOUNG
The Shack
Odd thing about death ... it reaffirms life.
RITA MAE BROWN
Hounded to Death
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
Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck.
FRANK HERBERT
Chapterhouse: Dune
How strange a checker-work of Providence is the life of man!
DANIEL DEFOE
Robinson Crusoe
Just because life's meaningless doesn't mean we can't experience it meaningfully.
GLEN DUNCAN
The Last Werewolf
Though life's tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn.
JOHN BARTH
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor
Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order.
DAVID GERROLD
Alternate Gerrolds
Life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Reveries over Childhood and Youth
The life most of us live are lives we are forced to live by immediate needs, influences, and pressures.
WALTER MOSLEY
Black Genius
Life! Don't talk to me about life.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
How fugitive and brief is mortal life between the budding and the falling leaf.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Two Moods"
Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Feast of Stephen
I accept that life is uncertain--that the goal is not to become more certain about anything but to relax more into the mystery of not knowing what will come next. And then, miracle of miracles, out there in the deep and uncertain water, I come into a peaceful knowing--a faithful wisdom that surpasses control and certainty.
ELIZABETH LESSER
Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
God made life simple. It is man who complicates it.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
Reader's Digest, July 1972
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
Mortal! that cull'st the flowers of life,
Think not to escape the thorn.
WILLIAM B. TAPPAN
"The Thorn of Life"