quotations about life
To withhold from living is to die ... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.
ANAIS NIN
diary, Mar. 6, 1936
The life you think you should want ... is always the life that looks safest.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
That's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.
FREDERIK POHL
Gateway
If life is not a continual denial of the past, then it is nothing.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Reasonable Life
Life is wide, limitless. There is no border, no frontier.
BRUCE LEE
Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living
Our life is nothing, it is true, but our life is divine. A breath of nature annihilates us, but we surpass nature in penetrating far beyond her vast phantasmagoria to the changeless and the eternal.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
One brief journey betwixt heaven and earth,
Then, alas! we are the same old dust of ten thousand ages.
LI BAI
"The Old Dust"
Life is the wave's deep whisper on the shore
Of a great sea beyond.
HENRY ABBEY
"The Roman Sentinel"
I shall not say, our life is all in vain,
For peace may cheer the desolated hearth;
But well I know that, on this weary earth,
Round each joy-island is a sea of pain.
HENRY ABBEY
"While the Days Go By"
Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
Thunder on the Left
The only remedy against the malady of life is life itself. The bane is its own antidote.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Glory of Clementina
If life is a death sentence, then we all have plenty of time to kill.
GREGORY ADAMS
"Review: Life Is a Death Sentence", Exclaim, June 10, 2016
Life is a journey we are always travelling; but, unlike most others, seldom care we to reach the end.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
When life is cheap death is rich.
EDWARD ABBEY
One Life at a Time, Please
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
letter to his son Eduard, Feb. 5, 1930
Life is a muddle. It seems a brilliant muddle, if you are an optimist; a dull one, if you aren't; but in neither case can you deny that it is the muddlers who keep it going.
MAX BEERBOHM
The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
JOAN DIDION
The Year of Magical Thinking
So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
A good life keeps off wrinkles.
SPANISH PROVERB
When life is lived as a living-and-dying in the primordial, nonsubstantial nothingness, one realizes that life is bottomlessly life and death is bottomlessly death. Life does not change into death, and death does not take away life.
MASAO ABE
Zen and the Modern World