quotations about life
How strange a checker-work of Providence is the life of man!
DANIEL DEFOE
Robinson Crusoe
Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Sons and Lovers
Work, whiskey, and cards were life.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
Life, in a sense, is living and surviving. And all that makes for living and surviving is good. He who follows the fact cannot go astray, while he who has no reverence for the fact wanders afar.
JACK LONDON
The Kempton-Wace Letters
Study more how to die than how to live; if you would live till you were old, live as if you were to die when you are young.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
STEVE JOBS
commencement address at Stanford University, Jun. 12, 2005
Who fears death does not enjoy life.
SPANISH PROVERB
He whose daily life has been a rounded whole, is easy in his mind.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
Remember that life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.
SUSAN ROSE BLAUNER
How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me
Life is magical. There is something wonderful in being alive, in having within one's self all sorts of possibilities.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
Most of life is so dull it is not worth discussing, and it is dull at all ages. When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighborhood, subscribe to a different newspaper, fall in and out of love, we are protesting in ways both frivolous and deep against the not to be diluted dullness of day-to-day living.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
Summer Crossing
I don't know why life isn't constructed to be seamless and safe, why we make such glaring mistakes, things fall so short of our expectations, and our hearts get broken and our kids do scary things and our parents get old and don't always remember to put pants on before they go out for a stroll. I don't know why it's not more like it is in the movies, why things don't come out neatly and lessons can't be learned when you're in the mood for learning them, why love and grace often come in such motley packaging.
ANNE LAMOTT
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
Whatever you live is Life.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
Human life when rightly lived is simple ... but it is not rightly lived while it is bound to a complexity of lusts, desires, and wants -- these are not the real life but the burning fever and painful disease which originate in an unenlightened condition of mind.
JAMES ALLEN
Byways of Blessedness
A life is a life. The unbearable pain of losing someone you love is identical no matter how differently it is expressed. And yet the varying shades of the global reaction to tragedy based on location, nationality, ethnicity, culture and religion belie our humanity, a harsh reminder that our "global community" is an illusion, despite our seemingly desperate desire to cling to that notion.
ARWA DAMON
"A life is a life, wherever you are", CNN, March 29, 2016
The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Jacob's Room
Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.
JANE AUSTEN
Mansfield Park
You sit
Like a rain puddle in hell
Knitting the socks
Of your life.
CHARLES SIMIC
My Noiseless Entourage
The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.
DON DELILLO
Point Omega
The greatest philosophy of life should be to live for the benefit of others as much as one lives for the benefit of self. And that is what philosophers call a footprint on the sands of time.
FEMI ABBAS
"A decade of royalty and faith", The Nation, September 2, 2016