quotations about life
In the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in the earth we tread on, Life is every where. Nature lives: every pore is bursting with Life ; every death is only a new birth, every grave a cradle.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
Studies in Animal Life
Once introduced into this world, life would never leave--there was no end to the explosive, consuming, voracious lust of long chain molecules to link and match and make of themselves yet more and more and again more.
GREGORY BENFORD
Against Infinity
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
Life is not life unless we can feel it.
SAMUEL BUTLER
"How to Make the Best of Life", Essays on Life, Art and Science
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Coming of Age
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Ethics of Ambiguity
Life seems like a haunted wood, where we tremble and crouch and cry.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"A Woman's Apology"
This life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Anywhere Out of the World", Le Spleen de Paris
Life is a problem. Not merely a premiss from which we start, but a goal towards which we proceed. It is an opportunity for us not merely to get, but to attain; not simply to have, but to be. Its standard of failure or success is not outward fortune, but inward possession.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Life, like the boring drunk at the office party, keeps seeking you out, leaning on you, killing you with pointless yarns and laughing bad-breathed in your face at its own unfunny jokes.
GLEN DUNCAN
The Last Werewolf
The difficulties of life are intended to make us better--not bitter.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
The Power of Thinking Big
Life calls the tune, we dance.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
Five Tales
Life is my college. May I graduate well, and earn some honors!
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
journal, Mar. 1859
When man would make a rose with tools, he fashions petals and leaves of wax, colors them, manufactures a stalk by the same mechanical process -- and the rose is done. When God makes a rose, he lets a bird or a puff of wind drop a seed into the ground; out of the seed there emerges a stalk; and out of the stalk, branches; and on these branches, buds; and out of these buds roses unfold; and the rose is never done, for it goes on endlessly repeating itself. This is the difference between manufacture and growth. Man's method is the method of manufacture; God's method is the method of growth. What man makes is a finished product -- death. What God makes is an always finishing and never finished product -- life.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
Life, how sweet soever it seems, is a draught mingled with bitter ingredients; some drink deeper than others before they come at them: But, if they do not swim at the top for youth to taste them, it is ten to one but old age will find them thick at the bottom. And it is the employment of faith and patience, and the work of wisdom and virtue, to teach us to drink the sweet part down with pleasure and thankfulness, and to swallow the bitter without reluctance.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Life! we have been long together,
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;
'Tis hard to part when friends are dear;
Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear;-
Then steal away, give little warning,
Choose thine own time;
Say not Good-night, but in some brighter clime
Bid me Good-morning!
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
"Life! I Know Not What Thou Art"
Life is indeed either a rich possession or a poor, according as it is made subservient to noble aims or ignoble pleasures.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet
EMILY DICKINSON
"That it will never come again"
What is life but a series of inspired follies?
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Pygmalion
Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men.
Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,
now the living timber bursts with the new buds
and spring comes round again. And so with men:
as one generation comes to life, another dies away.
HOMER
The Iliad