quotations about life
Life appears in a vast variety and innumerable succession of individual forms, since the most salient character of the universe is just that it ceaselessly gives birth to living individuals.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON
Man and the Cosmos: An Introduction to Metaphysics
Life is one long struggle in the dark.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
And if sometimes, commingled with life's wine,
We find the wormwood, and rebel and shrink,
Be sure a wiser hand than yours or mine
Pours out this potion for our lips to drink.
MAY RILEY SMITH
"Sometime"
Life can be cruel and uncomfortable at times. That doesn't define you. It's how we survive and create a colorful life with our experiences. Good and bad.
PAMELA ANDERSON
interview, Parade Magazine, January 23, 2015
Life ... is only heavy and none else; there is only the one trip, all heavy. Heavy that leads to the grave. For everyone and everything.
PHILIP K. DICK
A Scanner Darkly
Odd thing about death ... it reaffirms life.
RITA MAE BROWN
Hounded to Death
A life ill spent makes a sad old age.
SPANISH PROVERB
Life is futile unless it be directed towards a definite goal.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman
I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
STEPHEN HAWKING
The Daily News
Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Feast of Stephen
Living is a hazardous profession.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
Life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Reveries over Childhood and Youth
I have not wasted life, but life hath wasted me.
BHARTRHARI
"Against the Desire of Worldly Things"
Life is the tamer of the wild beast of humanity.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"Childhood", A Soliloquy of Life
Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck.
FRANK HERBERT
Chapterhouse: Dune
Life is an arrow, therefore you must know
What mark to aim at, how to use the bow--
Then draw it to the head and let it go!
HENRY VAN DYKE
"Epigrams and Greetings"
Whether there is to be another world or not, it seems to me we ought to be deeply thankful for having been permitted to live, even though we see no prospect of living again. It is something to have had this wonderful gift of "life." Yesterday but a little dust, today alive, with life before us, and the powers of speech, observation, and thought--the capacity to understand something of the earth around and the heavens above; with bodily health, a properly trained mind, internal resources adequate to the inevitable difficulties that will have to be overcome; the culture of the understanding and taste, an object in life earnestly sought after; the happy time of courtship; the affection of wife and children, the interest in watching their progress forward up the hill that you are steadily going down--all indicate that we should so live that while we live "life must be worth living," and that it is possible to make life not only endurable, but something unquestionably good, happy, and desirable, by turning to their best uses our capabilities, and using wisely the immense resources in this world, of which we have the benefit, and for which we ought to be thankful.
JAMES PLATT
"Is Life Worth Living?", Platt's Essays
Though life's tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn.
JOHN BARTH
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor
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
Life is no way to treat an animal.
KURT VONNEGUT
A Man Without a Country