quotations about life
One must live as he can.
MAXWELL ANDERSON
Winterset
As long as you live, keep learning how to live.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
You had to take life as it came. It gave no quarter, spared no feelings. Limited no pain. Put no ceiling on happiness.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Innocent
The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
Why, what in the world should we care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time?
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
I know nothing more enjoyable than that happy-go-lucky wandering life, in which you are perfectly free; without shackles of any kind, without care, without preoccupation, without thought even of to-morrow. You go in any direction you please, without any guide save your fancy.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
"Miss Harriet"
What mean the discipline and trial of life? What mean the dark shocks of disappointment, the breaking of hopes, the sundering of human ties, the terrible baptism of suffering and of fire, if there is not something beyond? If in every bath of sweat and tears, every drop of sorrow, every falling wave, there is something by which I am led more near to God, by which my soul is made stronger and purified, then I can understand life. But if I am hurled in the chaos of life--battered by sorrow today, and kicked by misfortune tomorrow--stricken by my fondest hopes, deluded and deceived, and all is to end in nothingness, I must confess that you present a problem I cannot solve.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
You can swim in life and seawater, but both are hard to swallow.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
No lifetime is long enough for those ... who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Middlesex
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Coming of Age
Along the road of life are many pleasure resorts, but think not that by tarrying in them you will take more days to the journey. The day of your arrival is already recorded.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
There is more to life than not dying.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Clockwork Angel
What is life but a series of inspired follies?
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Pygmalion
Life is much the same when it's going well-- resonant and unremarkable. But who, not under disaster's seal, can understand what life is like when it begins to crumble?
MARY OLIVER
"Storm in Massachusetts, September 1982", Dream Work
Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life, which, though startling to the apprehension, is, in fact, that which the habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguished in us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this scene of things. I confess that I am one of those who are unable to refuse my assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"On Life", Essays and Letters
While there's life, there's hope.
ENGLISH PROVERB
The secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously!
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
The Joyful Wisdom