LIFE QUOTES XXVII

quotations about life

The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a pattern of systems.

BRUCE LEE

Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living

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Trifles make the sum of life.

CHARLES DICKENS

David Copperfield

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A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.

D. H. LAWRENCE

Lady Chatterley's Lover


Life was not fair. If you wanted something you had to take it. Before someone else took it from you. Neatly dissected down to its essence, life was one long series of lily pad hoppings. The quick and the resourceful were able to adapt and survive; all others were simply crushed as a more nimble creature landed on the lily pad they had occupied for too long.

DAVID BALDACCI

The Winner

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Life is a journey that's constantly flowing, regardless of the number of candles that will be on your next birthday cake. For you to stay in the same place forever would mean to resist growth. And that's what we're all here to do anyway -- we're here to grow.

ELISE MOREAU

"How to Change Your Life at Any Age", Care2, September 1, 2016


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

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All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

"The Silver Key"

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To live is to war with trolls.

HENRIK IBSEN

dedicatory lines, Peer Gynt

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Each day is a branch of the Tree of Life laden heavily with fruit. If we lie down lazily beneath it, we may starve; but if we shake the branches, some of the fruit will fall for us.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Table-Talk


In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.

ISAAC ASIMOV

Fantastic Voyage II

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Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon itself? And it is of course overestimated, for it is of necessity prejudiced in its own favour.

JACK LONDON

The Sea Wolf

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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

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Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides
Into the silent hollow of the past;
What is there that abides
To make the next age better for the last?

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration

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Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.

JOHN KEATS

letter to Charles Brown, Sep. 30, 1820


Life is Supercalifragilisticexpialidocius.

JULIE ANDREWS

Star Weekly, Apr. 29, 1965

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One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.

KOBO ABE

The Woman in the Dunes

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Flirting with death is the spice of life.

MARGARET LOCK

Twice Dead

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The bright side of life's unpredictability is that it's not over until it's over. As dark as the passages and confusing as the cul-de-sacs that you find yourself in are, progress is nevertheless being made. Something is unfolding. You are becoming.

MARION WINIK

Ladies Home Journal, Dec. 2008


The understanding of human existence that sees life as having death as its inevitable end presumes that life is lived only in opposition to dying and seeks the conquest of death; that is, immortality, or eternal life. Here, death is always seen as alien to life, something to be overcome. In contrast to this, the understanding of human existence as a continuous living-and-dying does not view life and death as objects in mutual opposition but as two aspects of indivisible reality. Present life is understood as something that undergoes continuous living-and-dying.

MASAO ABE

Zen and the Modern World

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I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And then? I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And what next? I get laid, I take a short holiday, but very soon after I fall upon those same thorns with gratification in pain, or suffering in joy -- who knows what the mixture is! What good, what lasting good is there in me? Is there nothing else between birth and death but what I can get out of this perversity -- only a favorable balance of disorderly emotions? No freedom? Only impulses? And what about all the good I have in my heart -- does it mean anything? Is it simply a joke? A false hope that makes a man feel the illusion of worth? And so he goes on with his struggles. But this good is no phony. I know it isn't. I swear it.

SAUL BELLOW

Herzog