quotations about life
Life is what you put into it and how much you take out of it. You put in more than is expected, and you take out less than you want.
MICHAEL J. FOX
Good Housekeeping, June 2011
If life is often so hard as this, I don't see how we ever shall get through it.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
LIN YUTANG
The Literary Digest, 1938
Life is getting what you want, and I'm better at life than you are.
JEFF ABBOTT
Adrenaline
Life consists of nothing more than the happiness we can get out of it.
JEAN ANOUILH
Antigone
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 achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.
JACK LONDON
White Fang
Everyday life cannot be cast in heroic mould. No doubt there seems, at any rate at first sight, no room left in this scheme of life for that longing after the infinite which expands the mind and soul. But what is there to prevent me from launching on that boundless sea our familiar craft?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering; the curtain of cloud seems parted an instant only that we may measure all its horror as it hangs low, black, and imminent, in contrast with the transient brightness; the waterdrops that visit the parched lips in the desert bear with them only the keen imagination of thirst.
GEORGE ELIOT
Janet's Repentance
It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.
FRANCIS BACON
Advancement of Learning
Life itself suggests a higher good than life itself can yield.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Real life ... it was an ambiguous world, where actions sometimes had no meaning, where chaos reigned and no one was allowed to see the big picture, only their small portion of it.
BENTLEY LITTLE
The Policy
From whatever point he starts, whatever path he follows, modern man comes to the same conclusion: behind its visible appearances, life hides a meaning that is eternally inaccessible to penetration by the spirit that seeks for its discovery, caught in the dilemma of being aware that it is impossible to find it, and yet also impossible to renounce the hopeless quest.
ARTHUR ADAMOV
"Le refus", L'Heure Nouvelle
So life discloses--
Howe'er the pathway curve or turn--
New hopes that rise, new stars that burn
In changing splendor night or day;
New joys that drive old griefs away.
ANDREW DOWNING
"Among the Roses"
You know your life needs more excitement when your greatest challenge all week is removing the lint from your dryer's lint-screen all in one piece!
TOM WILSON
Ziggy, Jan. 16, 1998
Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach -- that it makes no sense.
PHILIP ROTH
American Pastoral
Life at the greatest is but a froward child, that must be humor'd and coax'd a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Good-Natured Man
Life doesn't do anything to you. It only reveals your spirit.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
The Power of Thinking Big
Life is a process of modification and descent, rather than genesis. There was never a moment when an egg hatched a brand new thing called a chicken, or when a chicken produced, unexpectedly, something bizarre called an egg.
JOEL ACHENBACH
"The 4 biggest milestones in the history of life on Earth", Albuquerque Journal, September 1, 2016