quotations about life
Life is a strange thing. Why this longing for life? It is a game which no man wins. To live is to toil hard and to suffer sore, till old age creeps heavily upon us and we throw down our hands on the cold ashes of dead fires. It is hard to live. In pain the babe sucks his first breath, in pain the old man gasps his last, and all his days are full of trouble and sorrow; yet he goes down to the open arms of death, stumbling, falling, with head turned backward, fighting to the last. And death is kind. It is only life and the things of life that hurt. Yet we love life and we hate death. It is very strange.
JACK LONDON
Tales of the North
Desire, both the whispers and the shouts, is the map we have been given to find the only life worth living.
JOHN ELDREDGE
Desire
When life looks like it's falling apart, it may just be falling in place.
BEVERLY SOLOMON
Good Housekeeping, Aug. 2009
There are those who say that life is like a book, with chapters for each event in your life and a limited number of pages on which you can spend your time. But I prefer to think that a book is like a life, particularly a good one, which is well to worth staying up all night to finish.
DANIEL HANDLER
(as Lemony Snicket), Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
Tell someone you love them because life is short, but shout it in Klingon because life is also terrifying and confusing.
ANONYMOUS
Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments.
ANAIS NIN
diary, winter, 1931-32
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
JOHN LENNON
"Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)", Double Fantasy
Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Studies in Classic American Literature
Life is like sex. It's not always good, but it's always worth trying.
PAMELA ANDERSON
Star
A life is a life. The unbearable pain of losing someone you love is identical no matter how differently it is expressed. And yet the varying shades of the global reaction to tragedy based on location, nationality, ethnicity, culture and religion belie our humanity, a harsh reminder that our "global community" is an illusion, despite our seemingly desperate desire to cling to that notion.
ARWA DAMON
"A life is a life, wherever you are", CNN, March 29, 2016
Whatever you live is Life.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
The game of life is good, though all of life may be hurt, and though all lives lose the game in the end.
JACK LONDON
John Barleycorn
Our life a harp is, with unnumbered strings,
And tones and symphonies; but our poor skill
Some shallow notes from its great music brings.
JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY
"Dolores"
Nothing comes at all -- never anything. And I cannot accustom myself to that. It is this monotony, this absolute fixity in life, that is the hardest thing for me to endure. I should like to go away from here. Go away? But where and how? I do not know, and I stay.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"A Psalm of Life"
Life is the apprenticeship to progressive renunciation, to the steady diminution of our claims, of our hopes, of our powers, of our liberty.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
EUGENE O'NEILL
Lazarus Laughed
Life is a theatre of alarms and contentions.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
It is astonishing how much more anxious people are to lengthen life than to improve it; and as misers often lose large sums of money in attempting to make more, so do hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
He whose daily life has been a rounded whole, is easy in his mind.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales