quotations about life
Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Life is short, but its ills make it seem long.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus
There are sad times, of course, but then life is a mixture and an authentic life story is the good, the bad, and everything in between.
NIK FARAH
"Recording a life is so precious", The Star, August 12, 2016
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
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
attributed, The Waking Dream
Life is exponential. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague.
PAOLO BACIGALUPI
The Windup Girl
About the time we have subdued the fires of youth that threaten to consume us, we find ourselves battling with the infirmities of age.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Life divine! O life eternal!
Man cannot translate the thought.
Strong the chain that God hath welded;
Link on link hath chain been wrought.
Fabric new each day is woven,
Woven it on God's own loom.
We the threads can ne'er unravel,
Hidden they in Nature's womb.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Dost Thou Know?"
Life unshared has scarce a charm.
C. B. LANGSTON
"Solitude"
Life is a process of modification and descent, rather than genesis. There was never a moment when an egg hatched a brand new thing called a chicken, or when a chicken produced, unexpectedly, something bizarre called an egg.
JOEL ACHENBACH
"The 4 biggest milestones in the history of life on Earth", Albuquerque Journal, September 1, 2016
It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
All the Pretty Horses
Life consists of nothing more than the happiness we can get out of it.
JEAN ANOUILH
Antigone
Between a gasp and a sigh, a life can change forever.
TIM LEBBON
Face
To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
GASTON BACHELARD
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire
Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
V. S. NAIPAUL
Half a Life
Why, what in the world should we care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time?
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
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
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
You're alive. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change.
NEIL GAIMAN
The Graveyard Book
So life discloses--
Howe'er the pathway curve or turn--
New hopes that rise, new stars that burn
In changing splendor night or day;
New joys that drive old griefs away.
ANDREW DOWNING
"Among the Roses"