LIFE QUOTES XXXI

quotations about life

It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.

ANNE LAMOTT

Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith


Funny. You talk of life as if it were a train you have to catch up with. How long have you been trying, three days? And not got a glimpse of it yet, in spite of caviar and champagne?

VICKI BAUM

Grand Hotel


Living is a hazardous profession.

TOBSHA LEARNER

The Witch of Cologne

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Life was a sorrowful throb of this Matter teaching it anguish,
Teaching it hope and desire trod out too soon in the mire,
Life the frail joy that regrets its briefness, life the long sorrow.

SRI AUROBINDO

Gems from Sri Aurobindo

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You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.

SAUL BELLOW

Herzog

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In a life without obstacles he would doubtless have abandoned himself to chance and to the voluptuous sauntering of adolescence. As he could be free only for an hour or two a day, his strength flowed into that space of time like a river between walls of rock. It is a good discipline for art for a man to confine his efforts between unshakable bounds. In that sense it may be said that misery is a master, not only of thought, but of style; it teaches sobriety to the mind as to the body. When time is doled out and thoughts measured, a man says no word too much, and grows accustomed to thinking only what is essential; so he lives at double pressure, having less time for living.

ROMAIN ROLLAND

Jean-Christophe

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Life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.

ROBERT PENN WARREN

All the King's Men


Flirting with death is the spice of life.

MARGARET LOCK

Twice Dead

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Life doesn't do anything to you. It only reveals your spirit.

JOHN C. MAXWELL

The Power of Thinking Big

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Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Middlesex

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One of my teachers in grammar school, a nun, used to say, "La vie, c'est bien complique." I'm not sure what that meant to me at the time, but it's become the guiding principle of my life, my writing, my interactions with others. Life is very complicated indeed, and that's what makes it both difficult and interesting. Stereotypes, racism, xenophobia -- most negativity in the world comes out of the natural human desire to oversimplify. Life isn't simple.

JEANNETTE ANGELL

"A talk with author Jeannette Angell: From college lecturer to callgirl and back", Souixland, Oct. 8, 2004

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Life is an arrow, therefore you must know
What mark to aim at, how to use the bow--
Then draw it to the head and let it go!

HENRY VAN DYKE

"Epigrams and Greetings"

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I am a spectator, so to speak, of the molecular whirlwind which men call individual life; I am conscious of an incessant metamorphosis, an irresistible movement of existence, which is going on within me -- and this phenomenology of myself serves as a window opened upon the mystery of the world.

HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL

introduction, Journal Intime

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Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is to make a hole in one with you.

FRED ALLEN

Fred Allen's Letters

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Life is the tamer of the wild beast of humanity.

EDWIN LEIBFREED

"Childhood", A Soliloquy of Life

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When people say that they are happy with their lives, they do not usually mean that they are literally joyful, or experiencing pleasure, all the time. They mean that, upon reflection on the balance sheet of pleasures and pains, they feel the balance to be reasonably positive over the long term.

DANIEL NETTLE

Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile

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The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

Blood Meridian


My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to William Wordsworth, Mar. 20, 1822

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Every day of your life is a day in which you must weigh the messages that rain down upon you. While many of those signals are simply lost in the informational deluge, there are a great number that reinforce or subtly erode the convictions that drive you and guide you in the choices you make as you navigate life.

THOM MOLLOHAN

"World makes no sense without God", Pomeroy Daily Sentinel, September 1, 2016


In bowling and in life, if a person made the spares, the strikes would take care of themselves.

STEPHEN KING (as Richard Bachman)

Blaze

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