quotations about life
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
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
Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Proud Highway
Nothing comes at all -- never anything. And I cannot accustom myself to that. It is this monotony, this absolute fixity in life, that is the hardest thing for me to endure. I should like to go away from here. Go away? But where and how? I do not know, and I stay.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid
Living is a disease from the pains of which sleep eases us every sixteen hours; sleep is but a palliative, death alone is the cure.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted.
GEORGE ELIOT
Romola
The world ... is full of people who never knew what hit 'em, their lives are over before they wake up.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit is Rich
Every day of your life is a day in which you must weigh the messages that rain down upon you. While many of those signals are simply lost in the informational deluge, there are a great number that reinforce or subtly erode the convictions that drive you and guide you in the choices you make as you navigate life.
THOM MOLLOHAN
"World makes no sense without God", Pomeroy Daily Sentinel, September 1, 2016
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
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
Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is to make a hole in one with you.
FRED ALLEN
Fred Allen's Letters
Death gives a life to some men and women compared with which their so-called existence here is as nothing. Which is the truer life of Shakespeare, Handel, that divine woman who wrote the Odyssey, and of Jane Austen -- the life which palpitated with sensible warm motion within their own bodies, or that in virtue of which they are still palpitating in ours?
SAMUEL BUTLER
"How to Make the Best of Life", Essays on Life, Art and Science
Live life fully while you're here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You're going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process!
ANTHONY ROBBINS
Awaken the Giant Within
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
As long as you live, keep learning how to live.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
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"
One must live as he can.
MAXWELL ANDERSON
Winterset
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
Your life is like a little flute complaining
A long way off, beyond the willow trees:
A long way off, and nothing left remaining
But memory of a music on the breeze.
HILAIRE BELLOC
Sonnets
It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.
GARRISON KEILLOR
"Could I have been any more inept?", Salon, Oct. 26, 1999