quotations about life
Men do not escape from life because life is dull, but life escapes from men because men are little.
THOMAS WOLFE
Look Homeward, Angel
If you always do the easy and comfortable thing, life ends up being difficult and uncomfortable. If you do the difficult and uncomfortable thing, however, life ends up being easy and comfortable.
ERNIE J. ZELINSKI
Look Ma, Life's Easy
I think the serious things really are the things that make for happiness--people and things that are compatible, love.... So many people are content just to sit around and talk about them instead of getting out and attaining them. As if life were a joke of some kind.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Mosquitoes
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
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.
JACK LONDON
The Call of the Wild
Life is a pilgrimage and if you don't play by the rules you don't find the Road to Damascus, you find the Crown of Thorns.
ANITA BROOKNER
The Paris Review, fall 1987
My life is a tree,
Yoke-fellow of the earth;
Pledged,
By roots too deep for remembrance,
To stand hard against the storm,
To fill by Place.
(But high in the branches of my green tree there is a wild bird singing:
Wind-free are the wings of my bird: she hath built no mortal nest.)
KARLE WILSON BAKER
The Tree
Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
WILLIAM JAMES
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Much too oft we make life gloomy--
When happy we might be,
If we gathered more of sunshine,
And not dark shadows see.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
Thoughts
Life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse.
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
"Ashes of Life"
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 is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.
FRANCIS BACON
Advancement of Learning
Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order.
DAVID GERROLD
Alternate Gerrolds
In the chequered area of human experience the seasons are all mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the green cluster and another treads the wine-press. Nay, in each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until Death himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields.
GEORGE ELIOT
Daniel Deronda
Life is like a moustache. It can be wonderful or terrible. But it always tickles.
NORA ROBERTS
From the Heart
Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.
RICHARD BACH
Illusions
When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering; the curtain of cloud seems parted an instant only that we may measure all its horror as it hangs low, black, and imminent, in contrast with the transient brightness; the waterdrops that visit the parched lips in the desert bear with them only the keen imagination of thirst.
GEORGE ELIOT
Janet's Repentance
The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Lila
I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
STEPHEN HAWKING
The Daily News
What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook