quotations about life
The evil fortune of the living in no way affects the dead.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
The life that is demanding to be born is limitless. Nature is a spendthrift. Look at the fish and their millions of eggs. For that matter, look at you and me. In our loins are the possibilities of millions of lives. Could we but find time and opportunity and utilize the last bit and every bit of the unborn life that is in us, we could become the fathers of nations and populate continents.
JACK LONDON
The Sea-Wolf
What is life but a series of inspired follies?
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Pygmalion
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
Your responsibility is to be an explorer, not a tourist in this adventure that is your life.
MARY ANNE RADMACHER
Honey In Your Heart
As yet we know nothing of what goes to create or evoke the active spark of life.
BRAM STOKER
"The Jewel of the Seven Stars"
As you speed along the highway of life ... you might pause and consider. When everything's coming your way, maybe you're driving in the wrong lane.
JOSEPH FINDER
Paranoia
How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard.
PHILIP ROTH
The Professor of Desire
How good is man's life, the mere living!
How fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses
Forever in joy!
ROBERT BROWNING
"Saul"
It's only life. We all get through it.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Hours
It's over before you know it. It all goes by so fast. Yeah the bad nights take forever, and the good nights don't ever seem to last.
TOM PETTY
The Best of Everything
Lean forward into your life ... catch the best bits and the finest wind. Just tip your feathers in flight a wee bit and see how dramatically that small lean can change your life.
MARY ANNE RADMACHER
Lean Forward Into Your Life
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 is exponential. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague.
PAOLO BACIGALUPI
The Windup Girl
Life is like a cocktail, made up for the most part of sweet things, and tinged with a dash of bitters. We must drain it to the dregs to get at the cherry, just as we must live a full and rounded life to know all its pleasures.
EDGAR GUEST
Home Rhymes
Life unshared has scarce a charm.
C. B. LANGSTON
"Solitude"
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"
Lives are snowflakes -- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.
SAUL BELLOW
AGNI interview, 1997
Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, there were merely the unburied dead -- clean and noble, like well-preserved mummies, but not alive.
JACK LONDON
"What Life Means to Me", Revolution and Other Essays