quotations about life
One brief journey betwixt heaven and earth,
Then, alas! we are the same old dust of ten thousand ages.
LI BAI
"The Old Dust"
The life you think you should want ... is always the life that looks safest.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Every now and then life sold you an illusion of design. A coincidence, a parallel, a sledgehammer symbol. The goods were always faulty. You forked over the cash only to discover they'd fallen apart by the time you got home. But life kept at it. Life couldn't help it. Life was a compulsive salesman.
GLEN DUNCAN
Talulla Rising
Life thunders on.
LOLA RIDGE
"Frank Little at Calvary"
Life is wide, limitless. There is no border, no frontier.
BRUCE LEE
Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living
When I sit down to the feast of life ... I'm so busy planning on how to pick up the check, and wondering what the other people think of me for paying it, and wondering if I have enough money in my pocket to pay the bill, that I don't get around to eating.
FREDERIK POHL
Gateway
When life is lived as a living-and-dying in the primordial, nonsubstantial nothingness, one realizes that life is bottomlessly life and death is bottomlessly death. Life does not change into death, and death does not take away life.
MASAO ABE
Zen and the Modern World
So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
As a well spent day affords happy sleep, so does a life profitably employed afford a happy death.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
I shall not say, our life is all in vain,
For peace may cheer the desolated hearth;
But well I know that, on this weary earth,
Round each joy-island is a sea of pain.
HENRY ABBEY
"While the Days Go By"
One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found -- and it is found in terrible places.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
JOAN DIDION
The Year of Magical Thinking
The only remedy against the malady of life is life itself. The bane is its own antidote.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Glory of Clementina
If life is a death sentence, then we all have plenty of time to kill.
GREGORY ADAMS
"Review: Life Is a Death Sentence", Exclaim, June 10, 2016
[A] carefully constructed life is a meticulous diversion from living.
J.R. KINNARD
"'Completely Unknown' Deals in Ambiguity and Subtle Charms", PopMatters, September 1, 2016
Life is a muddle. It seems a brilliant muddle, if you are an optimist; a dull one, if you aren't; but in neither case can you deny that it is the muddlers who keep it going.
MAX BEERBOHM
The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm
If life is not a continual denial of the past, then it is nothing.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Reasonable Life
Life is the wave's deep whisper on the shore
Of a great sea beyond.
HENRY ABBEY
"The Roman Sentinel"
We bring into the world a poor, needy, uncertain life, short at the best; all the imaginations of the wise have been busied to find out the ways how to revive it with pleasure, or relieve it with counsel; how to compose it with ease, and settle it with safety; to some of these ends have been employed the instructions of Lawgivers, the reasonings of Philosophers, the inventions of Poets, the pains of labouring, and the extravagancies of the Voluptuous; all the world is at work perpetually about nothing else, but only that our poor mortal lives should pass the easier and the happier that little time we possess them; or else end the better when we lose them.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Each person's life is a continuum of unique experiences.
MITCH ANTHONY
Your Clients for Life