Alan Bennett:
Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.
Albert Einstein:
True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness.
Albert Einstein:
Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.
Albert Schweitzer:
There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.
Albert Schweitzer:
Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.
Civilization and Ethics, 1949
Alice Walker:
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Alice Walker:
Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.
Amelia Burr:
Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.
Anais Nin:
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
Anais Nin:
People living deeply have no fear of death.
Anais Nin:
The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
Anais Nin:
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
Annie Dillard:
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Barry Lopez:
How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
Arctic Dreams
Ben Jonson:
A good life is a main argument.
Benjamin Disraeli:
Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
Benjamin Franklin:
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that the stuff life is made of.
Bertrand Russell:
Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].
Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].
I have wished to know why the stars shine.
Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.
This has been my life; I found it worth living.
adapted
Buckminster Fuller:
Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.
Buddha:
If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard:
Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish each moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived.
played by Patrick Stewart, from the film "Star Trek: Generations"
Carl Jung:
There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
Carl Sandburg:
Our lives are like a candle in the wind.
Carl Sandburg:
Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
Charlotte Bronte:
Life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.
Chinese proverb:
When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.
Colette:
I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.
Colette:
Life is nothing but a series of crosses for us mothers.
Corita Kent:
Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed.
Corita Kent:
Life is a succession of moments. To live each one is to succeed.
Dorothy Thompson:
Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.
Dorothy Thompson:
Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.
E. B. White:
You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.
Charlotte, "Charlotte's Web"
Edith Wharton:
Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
Edna St. Vincent Millay:
My candle burns at both its ends;
It will not last the night;
But oh, my foes, and oh, my friends --
It gives a lovely light.
Edna St. Vincent Millay:
Life is a quest and love a quarrel ...
Elbert Hubbard:
Life is just one damned thing after another.
Elbert Hubbard:
Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.
Eleanor Roosevelt:
I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived. Curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.
Elie Wiesel:
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
(Oct. 1986)
Elizabeth Drew:
The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.
Emily Dickinson:
Love—is anterior to Life—
Posterior—to Death—
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth—
Emily Dickinson:
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain.
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
Emily Dickinson:
To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
Ernest Becker:
The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.
Ernest Becker:
[W]e now know that the human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of life and the fear of death... Heidegger brought these fears to the center of his existential philosophy. He argued that the basic anxiety of [humanity] is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world. That is, both fear of death and fear of life, of experience and individuation.
Ernest Becker:
I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?
Ernest Dowson:
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses;
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
F. Forrester Church:
Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.
Franklin P. Jones:
Love doesn't make the world go 'round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.
Frederick Buechner:
The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.
Friedrich Nietzsche:
And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
George Bernard Shaw:
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.
George Sand:
Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.
George Santayana:
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
Germaine Greer:
Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life.
Goethe:
A useless life is an early death.
HH the Dalai Lama:
What is the meaning of life? To be happy and useful.
Helen Keller:
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
Henri Frederick Amiel:
Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.
Henry David Thoreau:
However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
Henry James:
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
Henry Van Dyke:
Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love, to work, to play, and to look up at the stars.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
and things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art; to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Immanuel Kant:
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
Immanuel Kant:
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
Isaac Asimov:
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.
Isadora Duncan:
People do not live nowadays - they get about ten percent out of life.
James F. Bymes:
Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem to be more afraid of life than death
Jean-Paul Sartre:
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
Joan Baez:
You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.
John Dewey:
Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.
John Lennon:
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
Joni Mitchell:
I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all.
Kalidasa:
Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And To-morrow is only a Vision;
But To-day well lived makes
Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness,
And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!
Katharine Hepburn:
Without discipline, there's no life at all.
Leo Buscaglia:
What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.
Madame de Stael:
The mystery of existence is the connection between our faults and our misfortunes.
Marcus Aurelius:
The universe is transformation; our life is what our thoughts make it.
Marcus Aurelius:
Remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses.
Marcus Aurelius:
And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.
Margaret Fuller:
Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.
Maria Mitchell:
Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow.
Marian Wright Edelman:
Service is what life is all about.
Marie Curie:
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
Mark Twain:
What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. Who was it who said, "Blessed is the man who has found his work"? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work--not somebody else's work. The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man's work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.
Mark Twain:
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Mark Twain:
There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy and a tragedy.
Mark Twain:
Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
Mark Twain:
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Martin Luther King, Jr.:
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
Mary Oliver:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver:
To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. Blackwater Woods
Matthew Arnold:
Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy'd the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done...
May Sarton:
A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.
Mohandas K. Gandhi:
Where there is love there is life.
Mortimer Adler:
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
Nadine Stair (attributed, probably erroneously):
If I had my life to live over, I'd dare to make more mistakes next time. I'd relax; I'd limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I'd have fewer imaginary ones.
You see, I'm one of those people who lived sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I had my moments, and if I had to do it over again, I'd have more of them. In fact, I'd try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after the other, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I've been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat, and a parachute. If I had it to do over again, I would travel lighter than I have.
If I had my life to live over again, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dance; I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies.
The story behind this quotation
Norbert Capek:
It is worthwhile to live
and fight courageously
for sacred ideals.
This entry continued ...
Norman MacEwan:
Happiness is not so much in having as sharing. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
Norman Vincent Peale:
Live your life and forget your age.
Oliver Wendell Holmes:
It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.
Oliver Wendell Holmes:
Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.
Oliver Wendell Holmes:
A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
Omar N. Bradley:
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.
Oscar Wilde:
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
Paul Anka:
And now the end is near
And so I face the final curtain,
My friends, I'll say it clear,
I'll state my case of which I'm certain.
I've lived a life that's full, I've travelled each and evr'y highway
And more, much more than this, I did it my way.
Paul Beattie:
When My Mind is Still
When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I remember things too easily forgotten:
The purity of early love,
The maturity of unselfish love that asks --
desires -- nothing but another's good,
The idealism that has persisted through all the tempest of life.
When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I can find a quiet assurance, an inner peace, in the core of my being.
It can face the doubt, the loneliness, the anxiety,
Can accept these harsh realities and can even grow
Because of these challenges to my essential being.
When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I can sense my basic humanity,
And then I know that all men and women are my brothers and sisters.
Nothing but my own fear and distrust can separate me from the love of friends.
If I can trust others, accept them, enjoy them,
Then my life shall surely be richer and more full.
If I can accept others, this will help them to be more truly themselves,
And they will be more able to accept me.
When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I know how much life has given me:
The history of the race, friends and family,
The opportunity to work, the chance to build myself.
Then wells within me the urge to live more abundantly,
With greater trust and joy,
With more profound seriousness and earnest service,
And yet more calmly at the heart of life.
Paul Beattie was a Unitarian Universalist minister, serving in congregations including in Kansas City, Missouri, and last at the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh, PA. He was also president of the Fellowship of Religious Humanists, among his many involvements.
Paul Bowles:
... we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
Pearl S. Buck:
The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.
Pearl S. Buck:
The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
Rabindranath Tagore:
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.
from Gitanjali
Ralph Ellison:
Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
We are always getting ready to live but never living.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Life is a succession of lessons, which must be lived to be understood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Life is a progress, and not a station.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.:
Life is short, but there is always time enough for courtesy.
Ray Bradbury:
Life is "trying things to see if they work."
Raymond Charles Barker:
The principle of life is that life responds by corresponding; your life becomes the thing you have decided it shall be.
Robert Byrne:
The purpose of life is a life of purpose.
Robert Frost:
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
Robert Frost:
What is this talked-of mystery of birth
But being mounted bareback on the earth?
Robert Louis Stevenson:
The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.
Roy H. Williams:
Lives, like money, are spent. What are you buying with yours?
Sarah Ban Breathnach:
An authentic life is the most personal form of worship. Everyday life has become my prayer.
Sarah Bernhardt:
Life begets life. Energy becomes energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.
Sean O'Casey:
I have found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active, and sometime terrifying experience, and I've enjoyed it completely. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other.
Seneca:
Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.
Sophia Lyon Fahs:
Life becomes religious whenever we make it so: when some new light is seen, when some deeper appreciation is felt, when some larger outlook is gained, when some nobler purpose is formed, when some task is well done.
Stephen Covey:
Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power.
Theodore Rubin:
There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.
Thich Nhat Hanh:
Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.
Thomas Jefferson:
It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.
Tom Lehrer:
Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.
Toni Morrison:
Birth, life, and death -- each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.
Unknown:
Life would be much easier if I had the source code.
Ursula K. LeGuin:
If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
Victor Frankl:
If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So, if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life.
Victor Frankl:
A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."
Victor Frankl:
We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by doing a deed; (2) by experiencing a value; and (3) by suffering.
Victor Hugo:
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
Virginia Satir:
Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understand, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not.
Wallace Stegner:
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Will Rogers:
Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
William Blake:
For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.
William James:
Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.
The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902
William James:
These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create that fact.
Is Life Worth Living?
Winston Churchill:
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
Zeno:
The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.
Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower. ~Hans Christian Anderson
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me." ~Erma Bombeck
The purpose of life is a life of purpose. ~Robert Byrne
The miracle is not to fly in the air, or to walk on the water, but to walk on the earth. ~Chinese Proverb
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. ~Elwyn Brooks White
Life is simple, its just not easy. ~Author Unknown
A life without cause is a life without effect. ~Barbarella
Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you're alive, it isn't. ~Richard Bach
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it. ~Jack Handey
Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it. ~Christopher Morley, Thunder on the Left
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee,
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
~Robert Frost, "Cluster of Faith," 1962
In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular. ~Kathy Norris
To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else. ~Emily Dickinson
Yes, I will try to be. Because I believe that not being is arrogant. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
My life has a superb cast but I can't figure out the plot. ~Ashleigh Brilliant
I say, if your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life. ~Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave. ~Quentin Crisp
As we struggle to make sense of things, life looks on in repose. ~Author Unknown
I think I've discovered the secret of life - you just hang around until you get used to it. ~Charles Schulz
Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets. ~Arthur Miller
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. ~Marion Howard
Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while. ~Author Unknown
You can't escape history, or the needs and neuroses you've picked up like layers and layers of tartar on your teeth. ~Charles Johnson
Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can. ~Danny Kaye
I have a simple philosophy: Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. Scratch where it itches. ~Alice Roosevelt Longworth
Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once. ~Lillian Dickson
We are born wet, naked, and hungry. Then things get worse. ~Author Unknown
Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up. ~Author Unknown
Life is a cement trampoline. ~Howard Nordberg
To preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances and hostilities, is as great a miracle as to create him. ~Jeremy Taylor
Life... is like a box of chocolates - a cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that no one ever asks for, unreturnable because all you get back is another box of chocolates. So, you're stuck with mostly undefinable whipped mint crap, mindlessly wolfed down when there's nothing else to eat while you're watching the game. Sure, once is a while you get a peanut butter cup or an English toffee but it's gone too fast and the taste is fleeting. In the end, you are left with nothing but broken bits filled with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts, which, if you are desperate enough to eat, leaves nothing but an empty box of useless brown paper. ~The X-Files
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. ~Friedrich Nietzsche
God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled. ~Author Unknown
Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be. ~Grandma Moses
I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer. ~Jim Carrey
The great business of life is to be, to do, to do without, and to depart. ~John, Viscount Morley, Address on Aphorisms
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies. ~Erich Fromm
My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between, I occupy myself as best I can. ~Cary Grant
To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach. ~Havelock Ellis
Living involves tearing up one rough draft after another. ~Author Unknown
My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn. ~Louis Adamic
No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence. ~Thomas Carlyle, Sir Walter Scott, in London and Westminster Review, 12 November 1838
Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark. ~Samuel Johnson
Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: "I am with you kid. Let's go." ~Maya Angelou
Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Why torture yourself when life'll do it for you? ~Author Unknown
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. ~George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor's Dilemma, 1906
Puritans will never believe it, but life is full of disagreeable things that aren't even good for you. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
'Tis all a chequer board of nights and days,
Where destiny with men for pieces plays;
Hither and thither, and mates, and slays.
~Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, 1859
...the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse. ~Walt Whitman, "O Me! O Life!", Leaves of Grass
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. ~Mark Twain
Life is the game that must be played. ~Edwin Arlington Robinson
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life. ~Albert Camus
There is no wealth but life. ~John Ruskin
I know what things are good: friendship and work and conversation. These I shall have. ~Rupert Brooke
Life will always remain a gamble, with prizes sometimes for the imprudent, and blanks so often to the wise. ~Jerome K. Jerome
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. ~Henry David Thoreau
Life is not a final. It's daily pop quizzes. ~Author Unknown
Eating, loving, singing and digesting are, in truth, the four acts of the comic opera known as life, and they pass like bubbles of a bottle of champagne. Whoever lets them break without having enjoyed them is a complete fool. ~Gioacchino Rossini
We mourn the transitory things and fret under the yoke of the immutable ones. ~Paul Eldridge
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. ~T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Life was a damned muddle - a football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of - everyone claiming the referee would have been on his side. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald
Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out. ~Anton Chekhov
Following straight lines shortens distances, and also life. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation. ~W. Somerset Maugham
I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on.
~Robert Browning
Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove. ~Ashleigh Brilliant
Life is an incurable Disease. ~Abraham Cowley
Human life is purely a matter of deciding what's important to you. ~Anonymous
For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. ~Albert Camus
Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination. ~Christopher Isherwood
The only way to have a life is to commit to it like crazy. ~Angelina Jolie
Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do. ~Bruce Crampton
Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.
~Elinor Hoyt Wylie, Let No Charitable Hope
To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funnybone. ~Reba McEntire
The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss. ~Thomas Carlyle
All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on. ~Havelock Ellis
Sunday clears away the rust of the whole week. ~Joseph Addison
We tear life out of life to use it for looking at itself. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
[Psychoanalysis] is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist. ~Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts, 1945
Give us Lord, a bit o' sun,
A bit o' work and a bit o' fun;
Give us all in the struggle and sputter
Our daily bread and a bit o' butter.
~From an inn in Lancaster, England
The tragedy of life is not that man loses, but that he almost wins. ~Heywood Broun
Life is a long process of getting tired. ~Samuel Butler
He who has nothing to die for has nothing to live for. ~Moroccan Proverb
But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. ~Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not the choice. You must take it. The only question is how. ~Henry Ward Beecher
Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. ~Douglas Adams
Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one? ~George Bernard Shaw
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life. It goes on. ~Robert Frost
Life is like a ten-speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use. ~Charles Schulz
There is no finish line. ~Nike advertisement
It may be life is only worthwhile at moments. Perhaps that is all we ought to expect. ~Sherwood Anderson
I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment. ~Ludwig Wittgenstein
The art of life is the art of avoiding pain. ~Thomas Jefferson
Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man's life. ~Vita Sackville-West
The fear of life is the favorite disease of the 20th century. ~William Lyon Phelps
In the book of life, the answers aren't in the back. ~Charlie Brown
The world is a grindstone and life is your nose. ~Fred Allen
Not unfortunately the universe is wild - game-flavoured as a hawk's wing. ~B.P. Blood
You live and learn. At any rate, you live. ~Douglas Adams
Everything which is properly business we must keep carefully separate from life. Business requires earnestness and method; life must have a freed handling. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers. ~Learned Hand
The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched. ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Life is the sum of all your choices. ~Albert Camus
Out of a hundred years a few minutes were made that stayed with me, not a hundred years. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
If A equals success, then the formula is: A = X + Y + Z, where X is work, Y is play, and Z is keep your mouth shut. ~Albert Einstein
I gave my life to learning how to live.
Now that I have organized it all...
It is just about over.
~Sandra Hochman
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic. ~Anaïs Nin
[P]erhaps nothing 'ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late. It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right. ~George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Adam Bede
Only a few things are really important. ~Marie Dressler
We are like people with short-term leases on summer cottages; we can never seem to make our provisions come out even with our stay. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. ~Henry Miller
Life is like eating artichokes; you have got to go through so much to get so little. ~Thomas Aloysius Dorgan
Life is a ticket to the greatest show on earth. ~Martin H. Fischer
Summing up, it is clear the future holds great opportunities. It also holds pitfalls. The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o'clock. ~Woody Allen, "My Speech to the Graduates," Side Effects, 1980
Situated in some nebulous distance I do what I do so that the universal balance of which I am a part may remain a balance. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
Few of us write great novels; all of us live them. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Life's like a novel with the end ripped out. ~Danny Orton and Blair Daly, "Stand"
If you stop struggling, then you stop life. ~Huey Newton
Sometimes questions are more important than answers. ~Nancy Willard, quoted in The Meaning of Life, compiled by Hugh S. Moorhead
It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you. ~Phillips Brooks
There is a strange reluctance on the part of most people to admit that they enjoy life. ~William Lyon Phelps
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
Life is a sexually transmitted disease and there is a 100% mortality rate. ~R.D. Laing
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
Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942, translated from French by Lewis Galantière
We should give meaning to life, not wait for life to give us meaning. ~Stacy
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
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
Life is a long lesson in humility. ~James M. Barrie
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
Life seems nothing more than a quick succession of busy nothings." ~From the movie Mansfield Park
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
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
Anxiety and distress, interrupted occasionally by pleasure, is the normal course of man's existence. ~Joseph Wood Krutch
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
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
It's just life. Just live it. ~The Quote Garden
Life is little more than a loan shark: It exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes. ~Luigi Pirandello
Life is a **** sandwich. But if you've got enough bread, you don't taste the ****. ~Jonathan Winters
There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last. ~Robert Louis Stevenson
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
Life is one big judgment call. ~The Quote Garden
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
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
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
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 ****."
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
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 Wind compiled by Cheewa James
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
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
The meaning of life is not an unquestionable answer; it is an unanswerable question. ~The Quote Garden
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
Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious. ~Brendan