LIFE QUOTES VIII
quotations about life
What is the course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth?--
Most men eddy about
Here and there--eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving
Nothing; and, then they die--
Perish; and no one asks
Who or what they have been,
More than he asks what waves
In the moonlit solitudes mild
Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd,
Foam'd for a moment, and gone.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Rugby Chapel
The art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down.
JOE BIDEN
Promises to Keep
Let us all so live as we shall wish we had lived when we come to die; for that only is well, that ends well.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Live to the point of tears.
ALBERT CAMUS
Notebooks
I believe that this life is a journey home. Someone is calling us, someone we know as God, and whom others know by different names.
JAMES BEHRENS
Newton Citizen, May 19, 2016
Let us pounce
upon this red prey,
let us tear life
that passes throbbing
and lift together
our wild flight.
PABLO NERUDA
"The Condor"
Life is more sweet than I
Knew: the shifted scene
Less wavered, more trimmed with light,
Than the years before.
Look down. People pass over the ice
As a file of thin ghosts creep,
And fade beyond the hill.
You, and you, and you--
Small souls, shrinking away.
MARK TURBYFILL
"Journey"
Meeting each other and leaving each other. Leaving and meeting. That's what life is!
AUGUST STRINDBERG
A Dream Play
Store well Life's sheaves, the grains of thought--
Your harvest will be good,
If sheaves are bound by ties of love,
And evil you've withstood.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Gathering of the Sheaves"
The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
We are meant to taste of life ... and drink the cup of it to the dregs, bitter and sweet alike.
JACQUELINE CAREY
Kushiel's Dart
What misery to live in this world! We are like men whose enemies are at the door, who must not lay aside their arms, even while sleeping or eating, and are always in dread lest the foe should enter the fortress by some breach in the walls. O my Lord and my all! How canst thou wish us to prize such a wretched existence?
TERESA OF AVILA
The Interior Castle
Our life is in the loom; it rolls up and is hidden as fast as it is woven. It is to be taken out of the loom only when we leave this world; then only shall we see the pattern.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations.
EMILY DICKINSON
letter to T. W. Higginson, winter 1871
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"The Rainy Day"
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain.
EMIL CIORAN
A Short History of Decay
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?
JOHN GREEN
An Abundance of Katherines
The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great loves and terrors. As our thought follows close in the slow wake of the dawn, we are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its history--hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and death.
GEORGE ELIOT
Romola
Each new epoch in life seems an encounter. There is a tussle and a cloud of dust, and we come out of it triumphant or crest-fallen, according as we have borne ourselves.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
attributed, Lindbergh: Flight's Enigmatic Hero