quotations about life
A long life is a life well spent.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
We bring into the world a poor, needy, uncertain life, short at the best; all the imaginations of the wise have been busied to find out the ways how to revive it with pleasure, or relieve it with counsel; how to compose it with ease, and settle it with safety; to some of these ends have been employed the instructions of Lawgivers, the reasonings of Philosophers, the inventions of Poets, the pains of labouring, and the extravagancies of the Voluptuous; all the world is at work perpetually about nothing else, but only that our poor mortal lives should pass the easier and the happier that little time we possess them; or else end the better when we lose them.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
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
Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day.
RAY BRADBURY
A Graveyard for Lunatics
It's your life -- but only if you make it so.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
You Learn by Living
If you are good life is good.
ROALD DAHL
Matilda
All that is born and destroyed is reborn in the sweep of the ages; Life like a decimal ever recurring repeats the old figure.
SRI AUROBINDO
Gems from Sri Aurobindo
The difficulties of life are intended to make us better--not bitter.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
The Power of Thinking Big
Life is made up of three kinds of people -- those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.
LOUISE ERDRICH
Love Medicine
Life in itself Is nothing,
An empty cup,
a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
"Spring"
Life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse.
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
"Ashes of Life"
Life does turn on so many queer things ... ball bearings and banana skins.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Paris Review, fall 2000
Into each life some rain must fall.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"The Rainy Day"
Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
When man would make a rose with tools, he fashions petals and leaves of wax, colors them, manufactures a stalk by the same mechanical process -- and the rose is done. When God makes a rose, he lets a bird or a puff of wind drop a seed into the ground; out of the seed there emerges a stalk; and out of the stalk, branches; and on these branches, buds; and out of these buds roses unfold; and the rose is never done, for it goes on endlessly repeating itself. This is the difference between manufacture and growth. Man's method is the method of manufacture; God's method is the method of growth. What man makes is a finished product -- death. What God makes is an always finishing and never finished product -- life.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
A life is a moment in season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door's shadow. A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
To what can one compare our life on earth?
To a flock of geese
Waddling about in the snow
Leaving a faint trace of their passage.
SU SHI
"Remembrance"
In a dream thou mayst live a lifetime, and all be forgotten in the morning:
Even such is life, and so soon perisheth its memory.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Each life is one short word slowly uttered.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Blue Jay's Dance