quotations about life
How fugitive and brief is mortal life between the budding and the falling leaf.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Two Moods"
Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
preface, Autobiography
Trifles make the sum of life.
CHARLES DICKENS
David Copperfield
Life is but sighs; and, when they cease, 'tis over.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
Every day is a careful balance fought between the despondency that threatens to swamp me and the incredible joy of living.
CHRIS ABANI
Kalakuta Republic
The bright side of life's unpredictability is that it's not over until it's over. As dark as the passages and confusing as the cul-de-sacs that you find yourself in are, progress is nevertheless being made. Something is unfolding. You are becoming.
MARION WINIK
Ladies Home Journal, Dec. 2008
Life appears in a vast variety and innumerable succession of individual forms, since the most salient character of the universe is just that it ceaselessly gives birth to living individuals.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON
Man and the Cosmos: An Introduction to Metaphysics
Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides
Into the silent hollow of the past;
What is there that abides
To make the next age better for the last?
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration
Whether there is to be another world or not, it seems to me we ought to be deeply thankful for having been permitted to live, even though we see no prospect of living again. It is something to have had this wonderful gift of "life." Yesterday but a little dust, today alive, with life before us, and the powers of speech, observation, and thought--the capacity to understand something of the earth around and the heavens above; with bodily health, a properly trained mind, internal resources adequate to the inevitable difficulties that will have to be overcome; the culture of the understanding and taste, an object in life earnestly sought after; the happy time of courtship; the affection of wife and children, the interest in watching their progress forward up the hill that you are steadily going down--all indicate that we should so live that while we live "life must be worth living," and that it is possible to make life not only endurable, but something unquestionably good, happy, and desirable, by turning to their best uses our capabilities, and using wisely the immense resources in this world, of which we have the benefit, and for which we ought to be thankful.
JAMES PLATT
"Is Life Worth Living?", Platt's Essays
Life is a movement outward, an unfolding.
ELBERT HUBBARD
The American Bible
Life is a string of uncooked macaroni on a double strand of sewing thread. Not even spray painted gold. Some people have strings of expensive pearls for lives, but not me ... I have macaroni and sewing thread.
ANN WUEHLER
The Care and Feeding of Baby Birds
They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Into the void of silence, into the empty space of nothing, the joy of life is unfurled.
C. S. LEWIS
The Magician's Nephew
Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, the will butting its blunt head against the world's wall, suchlike, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. This is a surprising, not to say shocking, realisation. Before, I saw myself as something of a buccaneer, facing all-comers with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I am compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion. To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have ever truly ever wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
The loves and hours of the life of a man,
They are swift and sad, being born of the sea.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
The Triumph of Time
Life was not fair. If you wanted something you had to take it. Before someone else took it from you. Neatly dissected down to its essence, life was one long series of lily pad hoppings. The quick and the resourceful were able to adapt and survive; all others were simply crushed as a more nimble creature landed on the lily pad they had occupied for too long.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Winner
Living is a hazardous profession.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
There is no normal life. There is only life.
ANNE RICE
The Wolves of Midwinter
Life is an incurable disease.
ABRAHAM COWLEY
To Dr. Scarborough
Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses