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| Quotes about Life |
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. ~H.L. Mencken
Almost everything in life is easier to get into than out of. ~Agnes' Law
Chance is always powerful, let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish. ~Ovid
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work — that goes on, it adds up. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Life is a series of collisions with the future. ~José Ortega y Gasset
To the student I would say, "Life is principally multiple choice, but at the end there's a tough essay question." ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing. ~Marcus Aurelius,Meditations
Life is half spent before we know what it is. ~George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, 1651
When life throws you lemons, make orange juice. It will leave them wondering how the hell you did that. ~Author Unknown
Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust — we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper. ~Albert Einstein, in The Saturday Evening Post, 26 October 1929
After a lifetime of deep thought, I've decided that life is a distraction, but probably not from anything important. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Life is the greatest of blessings and death the worst of evils.... all great, powerful souls love life. ~Heinrich Heine (d.1856), "Ideas: Book Le Grand," 1826, translated from German by Charles Godfrey Leland, Pictures of Travel, 1855
Jack Palance: "Do you know what the secret of life is? One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don't mean shit."
Billy Crystal: "Yeah, but what's that one thing?"
Jack Palance: "That's what you've got to figure out."
~From the movie City Slickers
Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian. ~Dennis Wholey
Life is an endless struggle full of frustrations and challenges, but eventually you find a hair stylist you like. ~Author Unknown
Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? is not life one? ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. ~Crowfoot, 1890, as quoted in Catch the Whisper of the Windcompiled by Cheewa James
Life never tires of testing the proposition that life must go on. ~Robert Brault,rbrault.blogspot.com
Have you noticed that life, real honest-to-goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in the newspapers? ~Jean Anouilh, The Rehearsal, 1950
..."Sloppy, raggedy-assed
old life. I love it. I never
want to die."
~Dennis Trudell, "View," in The Fiddlehead, January 1969
Life is great. Don't let circumstances and society fool you into believing it's not. ~Terri Guillemets
God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny. ~Garrison Keillor
Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive. ~Mel Brooks
Unbeing dead isn't being alive. ~e.e. cummings
The meaning of life is not an unquestionable answer; it is an unanswerable question. ~Terri Guillemets
Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious. ~Brendan Gill
Life is a series of family photos in which eventually you stop showing up. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Life is a series of family photos in which you keep moving to the rear until finally you're a portrait in the background. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
The blanket of life is kind and warm for those who can find its snuggle. ~Terri Guillemets [A few years after writing this, I came across Marion Howard's "Life is like a blanket too short. You pull it up and your toes rebel, you yank it down and shivers meander about your shoulder; but cheerful folks manage to draw their knees up and pass a very comfortable night." —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]
When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash — at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance. ~Thomas Merton
Ever get the feeling that sometime early in life there was a briefing you missed? ~Robert Brault
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| Quotes About Life |
One day can make your life. One day can ruin your life. All life is is four or five big days that change everything. ~Riding in Cars with Boys, Beverly Donofrio (book), Morgan Ward (screenplay)
Life isn't fair, but it's still good. ~Author Unknown
Life is a collection of moments you would have appreciated more if you had only known they were moments. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
When life gives you lemonade, make lemons. Life will be all like, "What?!" ~"Phil's-osophy" by Phil Dunphy (Christopher Lloyd, Steven Levitan, and Dan O'Shannon, Modern Family, "Schooled," original airdate 2012 Oct 10)
Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way around. ~David Lodge, The British Museum Is Falling Down, 1965
If a man in the morning hear the right way, he may die in the evening without regret. ~Confucius
To drink the sunshine and to dream at night.... ~Author Unknown, "The Fall of Man"
Each day of human life contains joy and anger, pain and pleasure, darkness and light, growth and decay. Each moment is etched with nature's grand design — do not try to deny or oppose the cosmic order of things. ~Morihei Ueshiba
The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature. ~Joseph Campbell
I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself. ~François Truffaut
You don't want to get to the end of life's journey and discover you never left the interstate. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
In small proportions we just beauties see,
And in short measures life may perfect be.
~Ben Jonson, To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison, 1640
We should give meaning to life, not wait for life to give us meaning. ~Stacy
Let me ask you, O, you men of the time, who are bent upon pleasure... I beg of you, if by some chance this obscure book falls into your hands, do not smile with noble disdain, do not shrug your shoulders; do not be too sure that I complain of an imaginary evil; do not be too sure that human reason is the most beautiful of faculties, that there is nothing real here below but quotations on the Bourse, gambling in the salon, wine on the table, a healthy body, indifference toward others, and the orgies which come with the night.
For some day, across your stagnant life, a gust of wind will blow. Those beautiful trees that you water with the stream of oblivion, Providence will destroy; you will be reduced to despair.... in short I tell you, all frozen as you are, you are capable of loving something; some fiber of your being will be torn and you will give vent to a cry that will resemble a moan of pain. Some day, wandering about the muddy streets, when daily material joys shall have failed, you will find yourself seated disconsolately on a deserted bench at midnight.
O! men of marble, sublime egoists, inimitable reasoners who have never given way to despair or made a mistake in arithmetic, if this ever happens to you, at the hour of your ruin you will remember Abelard when he lost Heloise....
Believe me, when in your distress you think of Abelard you will not look with the same eye... you will feel that the human reason can cure illusions but not sorrows; that God has use for Reason but He has not made her the sister of Charity.... You will look about you for something like hope, you will shake the doors of churches to see if they still swing, but you will find them walled up... destiny will mock at you and for reply give you a bottle of wine.... ~Alfred de Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century/La Confession d'un enfant du siècle, 1836, translated from French by Kendall Warren
Life is a sexually transmitted disease and there is a 100% mortality rate. ~R.D. Laing
It's just life. Just live it. ~Terri Guillemets
[L]ife is just like a big puzzle but you can't look at it and focus, you've... just got to close your eyes and let it come together. ~Corey Miller, LA Ink, "LA Ink Grand Opening" (season 1, episode 3, original airdate 2007 August 21st)
Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942, translated from French by Lewis Galantière
Live for the roots
Love the green
Dance with the blossoms
~Terri Guillemets
[L]ife is a journey and not a destination... the heart must be set upon those matters of character which are eternal and not upon those matters of sensation which pass away. ~Lynn H. Hough
Life is a process by which a few desperate longings morph into a thousand meaningless wants. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Many of us are equal to life's emergencies who cannot bear its day-after-dayness. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Life is like an onion; you peel off layer after layer and then you find there is nothing in it. ~James Gibbons Huneker
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor. ~Ogden Nash
I do like a little bit of butter to my bread. ~A.A. Milne, When We Were Very Young
I believe in pink. I believe that laughing is the best calorie burner. I believe in kissing, kissing a lot. I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong. I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day and I believe in miracles. ~Audrey Hepburn
No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made silently. ~Agnes de Mille
The way my life goes, I can't tell if there are pits in my cherries or cherries among my pits, philosophically speaking. ~Rhann Morgan
How we long to remove the clutter from our lives not realizing that the clutter is our lives. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Life may be defined to be the power of self-augmentation or assimilation, not of self-nurture; for then a steam-engine over a coal-pit might be made to live. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
My friend asked me the essence of life and I smiled. ~Mike Dolan,@HawaiianLife
It just seems sometimes that you've lived your whole life preparing for an inspection that never happened. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars. ~Henry Van Dyke
People find it hard to be both comic and serious, though life manages it easily enough. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
Shall I redirect my life's journey because down some sideroad might be some trifle I'm entitled to? ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Life is a long lesson in humility. ~James M. Barrie
Life grows beautiful flowers over old scars. ~Terri Guillemets
It has done me good to be somewhat parched by the heat and drenched by the rain of life. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
There is a what-the-hell moment in life when you feel you have been pre-punished for every sin you'll ever commit. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
You fool,
You have been dangling
For such a long time!
When will you seize the opportunity
Or feel the necessity
To untangle the taut knot
Of your bondage-life?
~Sri Chinmoy, Ten Thousand Flower-Flames
In life, as in restaurants, we swallow a lot of indigestible stuff just because it comes with the dinner. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings. ~Richard Dawkins
Sometimes in the poem of Life
we hit a defective verse.
Don't bother trying to rewrite it,
move along, don't make it worse.
~Terri Guillemets
Reason and justice tell me there's more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism. ~Anton Chekhov
To live is like to love — all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it. ~Samuel Butler
Life is easier than you'd think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable. ~Kathleen Norris
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. ~Mark Twain
Our search should not be a flight from life. ~TKV Desikachar
[T]hat blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
~William Wordsworth, 1798
Though the circular round-and-round of routine be the bulk of life's affairs, make an occasional jutting diversion — of fun, love, or something that will outlast you — so the shape and motion of your life shall resemble the round lifegiving sun with bright rays shining forth from all directions. ~Terri Guillemets
Life's a party. Invite yourself. ~Gary Johnson
You can hope for a miracle in your life, or you can realize that your life is the miracle. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
One wanders through life as if wandering through a field in the dark of night, wearing a blindfold and very heavy shoes, with a poisonous toad waiting patiently beneath a clump of weeds, knowing full well that eventually you will step on him. ~Lemony Snicket
Beauty is precious, you see, and the more beautiful something is, the more precious it is; and the more precious something is, the more it hurts us that it will fade away; and the more we are hurt by beauty, the more we love the world; and the more we love it, the more we are saddened that it is like finely powdered salt that runs away through the fingers, or is puffed away by the wind, or is washed away by the rain. ~Louis de Bernières, Birds Without Wings
Though we live amid promiscuous pressures, spiritual clutter and forgetfulness, we probably still value the integrity of life. ~Baker Brownell, The College and the Community, 1952
Life is not like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today might burn your ass tomorrow. ~Author Unknown
There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes. ~José Ortega y Gasset
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe. ~Peter De Vries, Let Me Count the Ways, 1965
Every creatures stalks some other, and catches it, and is caught. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
A great part of life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure. ~Robert Louis Stevenson
I have come one step away from everything. And here I stay, far from everything, one step away. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
Star Trek fans usually know the metaphors of life better than most mainstream poets. ~Terri Guillemets
Life is like a cobweb, not an organization chart. ~H. Ross Perot
A man who has work that suits him and a wife, whom he loves, has squared his accounts with life. ~Friedrich Hegel
Anxiety and distress, interrupted occasionally by pleasure, is the normal course of man's existence. ~Joseph Wood Krutch
Life is one big judgment call. (And a neverending series of little ones.) ~Terri Guillemets
Life is abundance, as in nature when all conditions are right the tree bears fruit. ~Mike Dolan, @HawaiianLife
Lifeless with a heartbeat. ~Daniel, @blindedpoet
There are no extra pieces in the universe. Everyone is here because he or she has a place to fill and every piece must fit itself into the big jigsaw puzzle. Deepak Chopra
I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit, but if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer.... I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me. ~Richard Phillips Feynman
Life is just a series of trying to make up your mind. ~Timothy Fuller
The history of man for the nine months preceding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting and contain events of greater moment than all the three score and ten years that follow it. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Song of Love, the Song of Hate,
the Songs of Praise and of Thanksgiving;
I've learned them all, but there remains
one called the Melody of Living.
~Frederic Ridgely Torrence, The House of a Hundred Lights: A Psalm of Experience After Reading a Couplet of Bidpai, 1899
Perhaps we are looking at this from a wrong perspective; this search for the truth, the meaning of life, the reason of God. We all have this mindset that the answers are so complex and so vast that it is almost impossible to comprehend. I think, on the contrary, that the answers are so simple; so simple that it is staring us straight in the face, screaming its lungs out, and yet we fail to notice it. We're looking through a telescope, searching the stars for the answer, when the answer is actually a speck of dirt on the telescope lens. ~Jason Q., from generationterrorists.com
Life is little more than a loan shark: It exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes. ~Luigi Pirandello
There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last. ~Robert Louis Stevenson
Red life boils in my veins.... Every woman is to me the gift of a world.... I hear a thousand nightingales.... I could eat all the elephants of Hindostan and pick my teeth with the spire of Strasburg Cathedral.... Life is the greatest of blessings, and death the worst of evils... ~Excerpts from Heinrich Heine's Ideen: Das Buch Le Grand, 1826, translated from German and artfully compiled in Israel Zangwill'sDreamers of the Ghetto, "From a Mattress Grave," 1897
I live! Red life boils in my veins, earth yields beneath my feet, in the glow of love I embrace trees and statues, and they live in my embrace. Every woman is to me the gift of a world. I revel in the melody of her countenance, and with a single glance of my eye I can enjoy more than others with their every limb through all their lives. ~Heinrich Heine (d.1856), "Ideas: Book Le Grand," 1826, translated from German by Charles Godfrey Leland, Pictures of Travel, 1855
I think miracles exist in part as gifts and in part as clues that there is something beyond the flat world we see. ~Peggy Noonan
