quotations about life
Life is made up of three kinds of people -- those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.
LOUISE ERDRICH
Love Medicine
What is the meaning of life?... A simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
Still, life had a way of adding day to day.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Mrs. Dalloway
To feed death with her works is here life's doom.
SRI AUROBINDO
Savitri
Our lives teach us who we are.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
London Independent, Feb. 4, 1990
Life is lumpy. And a lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in a breast are not the same lump. One should learn the difference.
ROBERT FULGHUM
Uh-Oh
Each life is one short word slowly uttered.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Blue Jay's Dance
Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books -- but it is terrible when one has to live it. It is almost impossible to sleep for more than twelve hours a day, and the remaining twelve hours have to be filled in somehow.
JEAN ANOUILH
The Collected Plays
The life so short, the craft so long to learn.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
"Parliament of Fowls"
A man's life is like a well, not like a snake--it should be measured by its depth, not by its length.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Yes, life is but a waste,
A cheerless pathway, where
No healthy fruit allures the taste,
No flowerets balm the air,
If Love, the wild rose, ne'er luxuriates there.
WILLIAM B. TAPPAN
"Love"
Life was never anything but a perpetual see-saw between gravity and jest.
GEORGE ELIOT
Romola
Life seems so long, and its capacity so great, to one who knows nothing of all the intervals it needs must hold -- intervals between aspirations, between actions, pauses as inevitable as the pauses of sleep. And life looks impossible to the young unfortunate, unaware of the inevitable and unfailing refreshment. It would be for their peace to learn that there is a tide in the affairs of men, in a sense more subtle -- if it is not too audacious to add a meaning to Shakespeare -- than the phrase was meant to contain. Their joy is flying away from them on its way home; their life will wax and wane; and if they would be wise, they must wake and rest in its phases, knowing that they are ruled by the law that commands all things -- a sun's revolutions and the rhythmic pangs of maternity.
ALICE MEYNELL
"The Rhythm of Life", The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays
O harp of life, so speedily unstrung!
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Two Moods"
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life -- It goes on.
ROBERT FROST
attributed, A New Treasury of Words to Live By
The whole world's a bottle,
And life's but a dram,
When the bottle gets empty,
It sure ain't worth a damn.
BOB DYLAN
"Moonshiner"
A nation of unimpressible philosophers would not care at all how the externals of life were managed. Who is the showman is not material unless you care about the show.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
Life is an uncertain flower--oft by the tempest o'erthrown.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
It is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
CHARLES DICKENS
Great Expectations
Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Philosophical Essays