quotations about life
Real life was messier than fiction, and in it you didn't always have time to do or say the right things.
BENTLEY LITTLE
The Resort
There is nothing at all in life, except what we put there.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles", The Writings of Madame Swetchine
This life is only the anteroom of a greater reality to come.
WM. PAUL YOUNG
The Shack
You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.
SAUL BELLOW
Herzog
Any state of life contents if we know no other.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
God made life simple. It is man who complicates it.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
Reader's Digest, July 1972
How strange a checker-work of Providence is the life of man!
DANIEL DEFOE
Robinson Crusoe
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
If life gives you rotten eggs, make a crepe.
ALI MARGO
"Princess: Life is a bowl of cherries -- so throw that into your crepe", Aspen Times, May 19, 2016
If we look at life in its small details, how ridiculous it all seems. It is like a drop of water seen through a microscope, a single drop teeming with protozoa. How we laugh as they bustle about so eagerly and struggle with one another. Whether here, or in the little span of human life, this terrible activity produces a comic effect.
IRVIN D. YALOM
The Schopenhauer Cure
Is all our Life, then but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?
LEWIS CARROLL
Sylvie and Bruno
Life and death have been lacking in my life.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
prologue, Discussion
Life is not a mere exterior movement, the movement of the being in its relations to other beings, but it is also, and especially, an internal movement from the visible to the invisible, from the real to the ideal, from the finite to the infinite.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
My definition of life is a series of experiences, and the more you have the better off you are.
EMILY FEISTRITZER
"Former nun sees life as a series of experiences, including lucrative ones", Washington Post, August 21, 2016
Each life creates endless ripples.
FRANK HERBERT
Chapterhouse: Dune
Every day is the same thing out the door
Feel further away then ever before
Some things in life, it gets too late to learn
Well, I'm lost somewhere
I must have made a few bad turns
BOB DYLAN
"Highlands"
Everything is so comfortable; the tea-urn hisses so plainly, the toast is so warm, the breakfast so neat, the food so edible, that one turns away, in excitable moments, a little angrily from anything so quiet, tame, and sober. Have we not always hated this life?
WILLIAM BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Suttree
Life is like patchwork: every day there is a fresh bit to be put on. We must understand more correctly how to fit in better the bits needed day by day in repairing this patchwork life of ours. As it is, the three-cornered bits too often get put into the square places; but it is essential for man's happiness that he comprehends and unhesitatingly accepts as a truism that it rests with us to make this patchwork to our own liking; that we have the power to shape this life of ours more regularly, harmoniously, and blend it more perfectly; and that our life as it is, or as it might be, depends upon whether this be done in the right spirit.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays