quotations about life
When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
My Day
Yes! live life with every fibre of one's being, surrender oneself to it, with no thoughts of rebellion, without deluding oneself that one can improve it and render it painless.
EMILE ZOLA
Le Docteur Pascal
Your responsibility is to be an explorer, not a tourist in this adventure that is your life.
MARY ANNE RADMACHER
Honey In Your Heart
Between birth and burial, we find ourselves in a comedy of mysteries. If you don't think life is mysterious, if you believe you have it all mapped out, you aren't paying attention or you've anesthetized yourself with booze or drugs, or with a comforting ideology. And if you don't think life's a comedy--well, friend, you might as well hurry along to that burial. The rest of us need people with whom we can laugh.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Apocalypse
Dearly beloved
We are gathered here today
2 get through this thing called life.
PRINCE
"Let's Go Crazy"
Life has an--an irony all its own. What you wish for, you get, but you discover that it's not what you want.
JOHN AUSTIN CONNOLLY
The Boys from Siam
Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
Life is short, but its ills make it seem long.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus
Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?
MARY OLIVER
"Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?", West Wind
Stop and consider! life is but a day;
A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way
From a tree's summit.
JOHN KEATS
"Sleep and Poetry"
The days of life are consumed, one by one, without an object beyond the present moment; ever flying from the ennui of that, yet carrying it with us; eternally in pursuit of happiness, which keeps eternally before us. If death or bankruptcy happen to trip us out of the circle, it is matter for the buzz of the evening, and is completely forgotten by the next morning.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Mrs. Bingham, Feb. 7, 1787
The evil fortune of the living in no way affects the dead.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.
SAUL BELLOW
AGNI interview, 1997
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
If a man knew how to live he would never die.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
It's your life -- but only if you make it so.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
You Learn by Living
Life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.
JACK LONDON
White Fang
Life ain't in holdin' a good hand but in playin' a poor one well.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Life does turn on so many queer things ... ball bearings and banana skins.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Paris Review, fall 2000