quotations about life
All of life is a foreign country.
JACK KEROUAC
letter, June 24, 1949
When life looks like it's falling apart, it may just be falling in place.
BEVERLY SOLOMON
Good Housekeeping, Aug. 2009
There was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
NORMAN MAILER
The Deer Park
The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.
DON DELILLO
Point Omega
Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Sons and Lovers
Seek not life's jewels where the poppies grow,
Nor where Desire, all passion-poisoned, rears
Her luring domes, but in the heart of woe,
With shores far washed by sanctifying tears.
EDWARD ROBESON TAYLOR
"Life's Jewels"
Remember that life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.
SUSAN ROSE BLAUNER
How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me
Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments.
ANAIS NIN
diary, winter, 1931-32
Living is a disease from the pains of which sleep eases us every sixteen hours; sleep is but a palliative, death alone is the cure.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
Life? Bah! It has no value. Of cheap things it is the cheapest. Everywhere it goes begging. Nature spills it out with a lavish hand. Where there is room for one life, she sows a thousand lives, and it's life eats life till the strongest and most piggish life is left.
JACK LONDON
The Sea-Wolf
Life is often wasted in a search after unattainable advantages, and generally, through the scruples of pride and vanity, our happiness is delayed from day to day, by a rejection of those pleasures and benefits which are within our reach.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
Life is magical. There is something wonderful in being alive, in having within one's self all sorts of possibilities.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
Life is a Shylock; always it demands
The fullest userer's interest for each pleasure.
Gifts are not freely scattered by its hands;
We make returns for every borrowed treasure.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"The Law"
Life has possibilities; death has none.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Suttree
Everything is so comfortable; the tea-urn hisses so plainly, the toast is so warm, the breakfast so neat, the food so edible, that one turns away, in excitable moments, a little angrily from anything so quiet, tame, and sober. Have we not always hated this life?
WILLIAM BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon itself? And it is of course overestimated, for it is of necessity prejudiced in its own favour.
JACK LONDON
The Sea Wolf
What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
This world is a vaporous jest at best,
Tossed off by the gods in laughter,
And a cruel attempt at wit were it,
If nothing better came after.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"A Gray Mood"
The world is a grindstone and life is your nose.
FRED ALLEN
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes