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What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
another version ends with what lies within us
-Anon., variously attributed to Thoreau, Emerson, and Holmes
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My grandpa notes the world's worn cogs
And says we're going to the dogs.
His grandpa in his house of logs
Said things were going to the dogs.
His grandpa in the Flemish bogs
Said things were going to the dogs.
His grandpa in his hairy togs
Said things were going to the dogs.
But this is what I wish to state.
The dogs have had an awful wait.
-Anon., The Hymn of the Pessimist
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Life is a bed of water filling from many springs and we seem not to know when one gushing flow will oe'r flood the banks only to be succeeded by a drought.
letter to Edgar Cayce
-Anon., December 21, 1925
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WHAT IS LIFE?
Life is an Adventure ... Dare it
Life is a Beauty ... Praise it
Life is a Challenge ... Meet it
Life is a Duty ... Perform it
Life is a Love ... Enjoy it
Life is a Tragedy ... Face it
Life is a Struggle ... Fight it
Life is a Promise ... Fulfill it
Life is a Game ... Play it
Life is a Gift ... Accept it
Life is a Journey ... Complete it
Life is a Mystery ... Unfold it
Life is a Goal ... Achieve it
Life is an Opportunity ... Take it
Life is a Puzzle ... Solve it
Life is a Song ... Sing it
Life is a Sorrow ... Overcome it
Life is a Spirit ... Realize it
-Anon.
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Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming
-Anon., various versions of this exist; one version is attributed: Bill McKenna, professional motorcycle racer, Cycle magazine Feb. 1982
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May God bless you to live as long as you want to; and want to as long as you live!
-Scottish Proverb
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Fear less, hope more;
Whine less, breathe more;
Talk less, say more;
Hate less, love more;
And all good things are yours.
-Swedish Proverb
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Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.
-Anon.
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Some people weave burlap into the fabric of our lives, and some weave gold thread. Both contribute to make the whole picture beautiful and unique.
-Anon.
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Enjoy life. There's plenty of time to be dead.
-Anon.
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He who allows his day to pass by without practicing generosity and enjoying life's pleasures is like a blacksmith's bellows. He breathes, but does not live.
-Proverb
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A light heart lives long.
-Proverb
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Live today for tomorrow it will all be history.
-Proverb
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Young people talk of what they are doing; old people of what they have done; and fools of what they have a mind to do.
-Proverb
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Life is an onion and one cries while peeling it.
-Proverb
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In the morning of life, work; in the mid day give council; in the evening, pray.
-Proverb
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Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it.
-Proverb
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There are four things every person has more of than they know; sins, debt, years, and foes.
-Proverb
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To live with the conscious knowledge of the shadow of uncertainty, with the knowledge that disaster or tragedy could strike at any time; to be afraid and to know and acknowledge your fear, and still to live creatively and with unstinting love: that is to live with grace.
-Peter Henry Abrahams, The View From Coyaba, 1985
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I do not want to get to the end of my life and find that I just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
-Diane Ackerman, "quoted in Newsweek", September 22, 1986
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Life...is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy , and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast.
-Douglas Adams
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Come on, insisted Zaphod, I've found a way in.
In? said Arthur in horror.
Into the interior of the planet! An underground passage. The force of the whale's impact cracked it open, and that's where we have to go. Where no man has trod these five million years, into the very depths of time itself ...
Marvin started his ironical humming again.
Zaphod hit him and he shut up.
With little shudders of disgust they all followed Zaphod down the incline into the crater, trying very hard not to look at its unfortunate creator.
Life, said Marvin dolefully, loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it.
-Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (ch. 20)
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Life is wasted on the living.
-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
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We make provisions for this life as if it were never to have an end, and for the other life as though it were never to have a beginning.
-Joseph Addison
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The less routine the more life.
-Amos Bronson Alcott
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Simple, sincere people seldom speak much of their piety. It shows itself in acts rather than in words, and has more influence than homilies or protestations. Beth could not reason upon or explain the faith that gave her courage and patience to give up life, and cheerfully wait for death. Like a confiding child, she asked no questions, but left everything to God and nature, Father and Mother of us all, feeling sure that they, and they only, could teach and strengthen heart and spirit for this life and the life to come. She did not rebuke Jo with saintly speeches, only loved her better for her passionate affection, and clung more closely to the dear human love, from which our Father never means us to be weaned, but through which He draws us closer to Himself. She could not say, I'm glad to go, for life was very sweet for her. She could only sob out, I try to be willing, while she held fast to Jo, as the first bitter wave of this great sorrow broke over them together.
-Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, ch. 36
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Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.
-Sholom Aleichem
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Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is to make a hole in one with you.
-Fred A. Allen
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A man sooner or later discovers that he is the master-gardener of his soul, the director of his life.
-James Allen
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Life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable.
-Woody Allen
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Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.
-Henri Frederic Amiel
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Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.
-Hans Christian Andersen
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I believe people are in our lives for a reason. We're here to learn from each other.
-Gillian Anderson
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Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: I'm with you kid. Let's go.
-Maya Angelou
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Life loves the liver of it.
-Maya Angelou
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There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.
-Maya Angelou
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Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory.
-Susan B. Anthony
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The drama of life begins with a wail and ends with a sigh.
-Minna Antrim
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The energy of the mind is the essence of life.
-Aristotle
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When we speak the word life, it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.
-Antonin Artaud
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The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing; the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unseen attack.
-Marcus Aurelius
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Your life is what your thoughts make it.
-Marcus Aurelius
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And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.
-Marcus Aurelius
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Let men see, let them know, a real man, who lives as he was meant to live.
-Marcus Aurelius
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Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live.
-Marcus Aurelius
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Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't.
-Richard Bach
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To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.
-Francis Bacon
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You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can decide how you're going to live now.
-Joan Baez
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Life is always walking up to us and saying, 'Come on in, the living's fine,' and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.
-Russell Baker
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Life marches by, I suggest you get on with it.
-Joy Baluch
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Life is a long lesson in humility.
-James Barrie
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The life of every person is like a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.
-James Barrie
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The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.
-John M. Barrie, The Little Minister, 1891
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A man must pay the fiddler, in my case it so happened that a whole symphony orchestra often had to be subsidized.
-John Barrymore
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The trouble with life is that there are so many beautiful women and so little time.
-John Barrymore
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The art of living lies not in eliminating but in growing with troubles.
-Bernard Baruch
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You have to do what you love to do, not get stuck in that comfort zone of a regular job. Life is not a dress rehearsal. This is it.
-Lucinda Basset
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Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.
-Mary Catherine Bateson
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In the game of life it's a good idea to have a few early losses, which relieves you of the pressure of trying to maintain an undefeated season.
-Bill Baughan
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Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
-Guy Bellamy
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Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.
-Stephen Vincent Benet
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We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
-Walter Benjamin
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You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the magic tissue of the universe of your life. No one can take it from you. No one receives either more or less than you receive. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt. You can only waste the passing movements. You cannot waste tomorrow. It is kept for you.
-Arnold Bennett
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Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.
-Bernard Berenson
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The world is whole beyond human knowing.
-Wendell Berry
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Life is raw material. We are artisans. We can sculpt our existence into something beautiful, or debase it into ugliness. It's in our hands.
-Cathy Better
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Don't worry about your life; what you shall eat, or drink, or the clothing for your body. Matthew 6:31
-Bible
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For what is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. James 4:14
-Bible
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The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Psalms 90:10
-Bible
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All that man has will he give for his life.
-Bible
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Life. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Threescore years and ten is enough; if a man can't suffer all the misery he wants in that time, he must be numb.
-Josh Billings
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Life is short, but it's long enough to ruin any man who wants to be ruined.
-Josh Billings
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Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well.
-Josh Billings
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Life is an earnest business, and no one every became good or great on a diet of broad grins.
-Professor Blackie
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For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.
-William Blake
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We come into this world head first and go out feet first; in between, it is all a matter of balance.
-Paul Boese
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Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He comet up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.
-Book Of Common Prayer
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It is not how many years we live, but rather what we do with them.
-Evangeline Cory Booth
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There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?
-George Borrow
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The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live.
-Joan Borysenko
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The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.
-Nadia Boulanger
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Youth is too tumultuous for felicity; old age too insecure for happiness. The period most favorable to enjoyment, in a vigorous, fortunate, and generous life, is that between forty and sixty.
-Christian Nevell Bovee
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Life is trying things to see if they work.
-Ray Bradbury
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If you will just start with the idea that this is a hard world,it will all be much simpler.
-Louis D. Brandeis
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Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.
-Bertolt Brecht
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It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.
-Andre Breton
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Life, the way it really is, is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.
-Joseph Brodsky
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What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.
-Joseph Brodsky
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Man does not live by bread alone, even presliced bread.
-D. W. Brogan, on decline of US baking industry
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Life...is not simply a series of exciting new ventures. The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfinished business. One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won't be got rid of.
-Anita Brookner, Lewis Percy, ch. 14, 1989
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Look, I really don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive, you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, you've got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death.
-Mel Brooks
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Be such a man, and live such a life, that if every man were such as you, and every life a life like yours, this earth would be God's Paradise.
-Phillips Brooks
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The tragedy of life is not that a man loses, but that he almost wins.
-Heywood Broun
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I believe that life is a journey, often difficult and sometimes incredibly cruel, but we are well equipped for it if only we tap into our talents and gifts and allow them to blossom.
-Les Brown
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About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won't like you at all.
-Rita Mae Brown
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Life is a glass given to us to fill; a busy life is filling it with as much as it can hold; a hurried life has had more poured into it than it can contain.
-William Adams Brown
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Life is pure flame.
-Sir Thomas Browne
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It is a brave act to despise death; but where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live.
-Sir Thomas Browne
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I count life just a stuff to try the soul's strength on.
-Robert Browning
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All actual life is encounter.
-Martin Buber, I and Thou, 1923
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This life of separateness may be compared to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.
-Buddha
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On life's journey faith is nourishment, virtuous deeds are a shelter, wisdom is the light by day and right mindfulness is the protection by night. If a man lives a pure life, nothing can destroy him.
-Buddha
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Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.
-Frederick Buechner
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I mean, there's little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you're going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning.
-Anthony Burgess, One Hand Clapping, 1961
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I think we're here for each other.
-Carol Burnett
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Real life seems to have no plots.
-Ivy Compton Burnett
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Life's but a day at most.
-George Burns
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Look to the future, because that is where you'll spend the rest of your life.
-George Burns
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Life is a struggle, but not a warfare.
-John Burroughs
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It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.
-John Burroughs
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The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is 'look under foot.' You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.
-John Burroughs
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I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.
-John Burroughs
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Life is uncharted territory. It reveals its story one moment at a time.
-Leo Buscaglia
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Optimism and humor are the grease and glue of life. Without both of them we would never have survived our captivity.
-Philip Butler
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Life is one long process of getting tired.
-Samuel Butler
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Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.
-Samuel Butler
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Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
-Samuel Butler
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The purpose of life is a life of purpose.
-Robert Byrne
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When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning -- how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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It is very certain that the desire of life prolongs it.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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Life's enchanted cup sparkles near the brim.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.
-James Branch Cabell
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Life is full and overflowing with the new. But it is necessary to empty out the old to make room for the new to enter.
-Eileen Caddy
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In between goals is a thing called life, that has to be lived and enjoyed.
-Sid Caesar
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What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction. And the greatest good is trivial; for all life is a dream and all dreams are dreams.
-Pedro Calderon de la Barca
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The surrender of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledgment of inferiority.
-John C. Calhoun
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People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life... I think that what we're really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.
-Joseph Campbell
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It seems to have had an order, to have been composed by someone, and those events that were merely accidental when they happened turn out to be the main elements in a consistent plot. Who composed this plot? Just as your dreams are composed, so your whole life has been composed by the will within you. Just as the people who you met by chance became effective agents in the structuring of your life, so you have been the agent in the structuring of other lives. And the whole thing gears together like one big symphony, everything influencing and structuring everything else. It's as though our lives were the dream of a single dreamer in which all of the dream characters are dreaming too. And so everything links to everything else moved out of the will in nature...It is as though there were an intention behind it yet it is all by chance. None of us lives the life that he had intended.
-Joseph Campbell, source uncertain: apparently in an interview with Bill Moyers,
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It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
-Joseph Campbell
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Live to the point of tears.
-Albert Camus
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In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
-Albert Camus
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Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.
-Albert Camus
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We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.
-Albert Camus
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Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
-Albert Camus
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If, after all, men cannot always make history have meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
-Albert Camus
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Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.
-Albert Camus
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One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.
-Elias Canetti
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Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.
-Truman Capote
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In private life I never knew anyone interfere with other people's disputes but he heartily repented of it.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Life is a little gleam of time between two eternity s.
-Thomas Carlyle
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One of the most appalling comments on our present way of life is that half of all the beds in our hospitals are reserved for patients with nervous and mental troubles, patients who have collapsed under the crushing burden of accumulated yesterdays and fearful tomorrows. Yet a vast majority of those people would be walking the streets today, leading happy, useful lives, if they had only heeded the words of Jesus: Have no anxiety about the morrow; or the words of Sir William Osler; Live in day-tight compartments.
-Dale Carnegie
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One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon--instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
-Dale Carnegie
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Life is very interesting if you make mistakes.
-Georges Carpentier
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If life was fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.
-Johnny Carson
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Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the Earth are never alone or weary of life.
-Rachel Carson
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We should live our lives as though Christ were coming this afternoon.
-Jimmy Carter
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Outer space is no place for a person of breeding.
-Violet Bonham Carter
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Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it's the transparency that counts.
-Louis-Ferdinand Celine
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She fights and vanquishes in me, and I live and breathe in her, and I have life and being.
-Miguel de Cervantes
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Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death.
-Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort
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In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.
-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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But there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.
-G. K. Chesterton
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When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
-G. K. Chesterton
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Life itself is the proper binge.
-Julia Child
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What is life, but the gentle effacement of a tree shedding its leaves?
-Harrison Christian, 1995 newspaper article
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I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainty that just to be alive is a grand thing.
-Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, 1977
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Life is not always not always what one wants it to be., but to make the best of it as it is the only way of being happy.
-Jennie Jerome Churchill
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The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.
-Sir Winston Churchill
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While there's life, there's hope.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
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There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
-E. M. Cioran
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To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being.
-E. M. Cioran
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Everyone is trying to accomplish something big, not realizing that life is made up of little things.
-Frank A. Clark
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In the early days all I hoped was to make a living out of what I did best. But, since there's no real market for masturbation I had to fall back on my bass playing abilities.
-Les Claypool
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Attack life, it's going to kill you anyway.
-Steven Coallier
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The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.
-Jean Cocteau
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Life is a horizontal fall.
-Jean Cocteau
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What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner.
-Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
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Life isn't like a book. Life isn't logical or sensible or orderly. Life is a mess most of the time. And theology must be lived in the midst of that mess.
-Charles Caleb Colton
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Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turn before we have learnt to walk.
-Cyril Connolly
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Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.
-Joseph Conrad
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It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.
-Joseph Conrad
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Life is too short to stuff a mushroom.
-Shirley Conran
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We dribble away our life, little by little, in small packages -- we don't throw it away all at once.
-Robert A. Cook
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Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
-Norman Cousins
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A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.
-William Cowper
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Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
-Quentin Crisp
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The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.
-Aleister Crowley
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If life doesn't offer a game worth playing, then invent a new one.
-Anthony D'Angelo
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The sad souls of those who lived without blame and without praise.
-Dante Alighieri
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Our life is made by the death of others.
-Leonardo DaVinci
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Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness, and small obligations given habitually, are what preserve the heart and secure comfort.
-Sir Humphrey Davy
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It's not how long life is but the quality of our life that is important.
-Roger Dawson
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Life begins when you get out of the grandstand into the game.
-P. L. Debevoise
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If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.
-Eugene Delacroix
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Life is just a journey
-Princess of Wales Diana
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Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.
-Charles Dickens
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Anything for the quick life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse.
-Charles Dickens
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Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.
-Charles Dickens
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This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.
-Charles Dickens
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We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet
-Annie Dillard, Total Eclipse Teaching a Stone to Talk, pg. 99
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Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement.
-Ernest Dimnet
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Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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Let us live while we live.
-Philip Doddridge
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Life is like eating artichokes, you have got to go through so much to get so little.
-Thomas A. Dorgan
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Everything starts with yourself -- with you making up your mind about what you're going to do with your life. I tell kids that it's a cruel world, and that the world will bend them either left or right, and it's up to them to decide which way to bend.
-Tony Dorsett
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Being is a fiction invented by those who suffer from becoming.
-Coleman Dowell
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They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
(the poem
-Ernest Dowson, Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam
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Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really merely commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outer results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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He lives who dies to win a lasting name.
-Henry Drummond
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When I consider life, it is all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, people favor this deceit.
-John Dryden
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People do not live nowadays. They get about 10% out of life.
-Isadora Duncan
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What life means to us is determined, not so much by what life brings to us as by the attitude we bring to life; not so much by what happens to us as by our reaction to what happens.
-Lewis L Dunnington
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This is pretty strange, not poems, poems are pretty good.
-James Dye
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Maxim for life: You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you.
-Wayne Dyer
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He who is not busy being born is busy dying.
-Bob Dylan
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There is no stopping place in this life--nor is there ever one for any person, no matter how far along the way one's gone.
-Meister Eckhart
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The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.
-Thomas Alva Edison
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The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth.
-Albert Einstein
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We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity... what is still lacking here is a grasp of the connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order itself.
-Albert Einstein
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Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.
-Albert Einstein
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How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.
-Albert Einstein
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What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?
-George Eliot
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The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to the brass tacks.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.
-Havelock Ellis
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There is no Gain in the world: so be it: but neither is there any Loss. There is never any failure to this infinite freshness of life, and the ancient novelty is forever renewed. We realize the world better if we imagine it, not as a Progress to Prim Perfection, but as the sustained upleaping of a Fountain, the pillar of a Glorious Flame. For, after all, we cannot go beyond the ancient image of Heraclitus, the Ever-living Flame, kindled in due measure and in the like measure extinguished. That translucent and mysterious Flame shines undyingly before our eyes, never for two moments the same, and always miraculously incalculable, an ever-flowing stream of fire. The world is moving, men tell us, to this, to that, to the other. Do not believe them! Men have never known what the world is moving to. Who foresaw--to say nothing of older and vaster events--the Crucifixion? What Greek or Roman in his most fantastic moments prefigured our thirteenth century? What Christian foresaw the Renaissance? Who ever really expected the French Revolution? We cannot be too bold, for we are ever at the incipient point of some new manifestation far more overwhelming than all our dreams. No one can foresee the next aspect of the Fountain of Life. And all the time the Pillar of that Flame is burning at exactly the same height it has always been burning at! The World is everlasting Novelty, everlasting Monotony. It is just which aspect you prefer. You will always be right.
-Havelock Ellis, Impressions and Comments, November 13, 1913
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The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If we live truly, we shall see truly.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life too near paralyses art.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Live, let live, and help live
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is not length of life, but depth of life.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A ship should not ride on a single anchor, nor life on a single hope.
-Epictetus
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You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.
-Epictetus
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A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs...
-Epicurus
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Life is like a taxi. The meter just keeps a-ticking whether you are getting somewhere or just standing still.
-Lou Erickson
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Life is at its best when it's shaken and stirred.
-F. Paul Facult
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Life is a series of little deaths out of which life always returns.
-Charles Feidelson
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Every lesson is a widening and deepening of consciousness. It is a stretching of the mind beyond its conceptual limits and a stretching of the heart beyond its emotional boundaries. It is a bringing of unconscious material into consciousness, a healing of past wounds, and a discovery of new faith and trust.
-Paul Ferinni
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If life were just, we would be born old and achieve youth about the time we'd saved enough to enjoy it.
-Jim Fiebig
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I used to trouble about what life was for -- now being alive seems sufficient reason.
-Joanna Field
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Remember, a dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream.
-W. C. Fields
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Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself.
-Harvey Fierstein
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There is no UnDo in real-life.
-Marcos Figueira
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In Dog We Trust.
-Marcos Figueira
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Most people are too busy living life to ever put life in their living.
-Doug Firebaugh
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Life forms illogical patterns. It is haphazard and full of beauties which I try to catch as they fly by, for who knows whether any of them will ever return?
-Margot Fonteyn
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My kids idea of a hard life is to live in a house with only one phone.
-George Foreman
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Life -- No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.
-E. M. Forster
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Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.
-Victor Frankl
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Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.
-Victor Frankl
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Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.
-Victor Frankl
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If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So, if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life.
-Victor Frankl
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For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.
-Victor Frankl
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I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.
-Benjamin Franklin
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Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late
-Benjamin Franklin
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Were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults in the first.
-Benjamin Franklin
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Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
-Erich Fromm
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In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
-Robert Frost
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I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- that myth is more potent than history. I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts -- That hope always triumphs over experience -- That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.
-Robert Fulghum
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Be aware of wonder. Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
-Robert Fulghum
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It's not your blue blood, your pedigree or your college degree. It's what you do with your life that counts.
-Millard Fuller
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We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.
-Thomas Fuller
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The only reason they come to see me is that I know that life is great -- and they know I know it.
-Clark Gable
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There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.
-Mahatma Gandhi
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Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
-Mahatma Gandhi
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The old Quaker was right: I expect to pass through life but once. If there is any kindness, or any good thing I can do to my fellow beings, let me do it now. I shall pass this way but once.
-W. C. Gannett
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Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.
-Paul Gauguin
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Life
-Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, The Tangled Skein
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People creep into childhood, bound into youth, sober in adulthood, and soften into old age.
-Henry Giles
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Nine requisites for contented living:
Health enough to make work a pleasure.
Wealth enough to support your needs.
Strength to battle with difficulties and overcome them.
Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them.
Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished.
Charity enough to see some good in your neighbor.
Love enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others.
Faith enough to make real the things of God.
Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.
-Johann von Goethe
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What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.
-Johann von Goethe
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There are nine requisites for contented living: HEALTH enough to make work a pleasure; WEALTH enough to support your needs; STRENGTH enough to battle with difficulties and forsake them; GRACE enough to confess your sins and overcome them; PATIENCE enough to toil until some good is accomplished; CHARITY enough to see some good in your neighbor; LOVE enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others; FAITH enough to make real the things of God; HOPE enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.
-Johann von Goethe
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Plunge boldly into the thick of life, and seize it where you will, it is always interesting.
-Johann von Goethe
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Life is the childhood of our immortality.
-Johann von Goethe
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I want freedom, the right to self expression, everybodys right to beautiful radiant things. Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world – prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.
-Emma Goldman
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The life of man is a journey; a journey that must be traveled, however bad the roads or the accommodation.
-Oliver Goldsmith
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Life at the greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humored and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.
-Oliver Goldsmith
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Life is mostly froth and bubble,
-Adam Lindsay Gordon
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Nothing exists except by virtue of a disequilibrium, an injustice. All existence is a theft paid for by other existences; no life flowers except on a cemetery.
-Remy De Gourmont
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Life is supposed to get tough.
-Kelsey Grammer
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Socrates famously said that the unconsidered life is not worth living. He meant that a life lived without forethought or principle is a life so vulnerable to chance, and so dependent on the choices and actions of others, that it is of little real value to the person living it. He further meant that a life well lived is one which has goals, and integrity, which is chosen and directed by the one who lives it, to the fullest extent possible to a human agent caught in the webs of society and history.
http://www.acgrayling.com/meaningintro.html
-A. C. (Anthony Clifford) Grayling, The Meaning of Things
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Not only is life a bitch, but it is always having puppies.
-Adrienne Gusoff
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Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible - not to have run away.
-Dag Hammarskjold, Markings: Diary of Dag Hammarskjold
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May you live as long as you want and not want as long as you live.
-Tom Hanks
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There is only one way to come into this world; there are too many ways to leave it.
-Donald Harington
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Life flows on within you and without you.
-George Harrison
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Life is made up of marble and mud.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
-S. I. Hayakawa
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The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.
-Helen Hayes
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So in all these little ways we spin a web, a cocoon, around ourselves. The cocoon becomes nice and snug and comfortable because it is very familiar. We know every little corner of our life; we can even write poetry about it. We may also have ideas about the great mystery which religions speak of, which gives our cocoon an especial sense of security: we can worship the great mystery outside of it and feel good about that. The cocoon is safe, bounded, claustrophobic, and a little stale. We settle into it and live our lives.
-Jeremy W. Hayward
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I can't be bitter. No one has a contract on life.
-David M. Heath
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Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around.
-Katharine Hepburn
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I have always lived my life exactly as I wanted. I've tried to please no one but myself...but I'm entirely content. I can sit back in my old age and not regret a single moment, not wish to change a single thing. It's what I wish for you...a life with no regrets.
-Katharine Hepburn, As the character Cornelia Beaumont in One Christmas, writer Duane Poole adding to Truman Capote's original story, 1994
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In soft regions are born soft men.
-Herodotus
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It is a good thing that life is not as serious as it seems to a waiter.
-Don Herold
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The person lives twice who lives the first life well.
-Robert Herrick
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Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.
-Alexander Herzen
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I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?
-Hermann Hesse, Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth, 1919
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The best things in life are never rationed. Friendship, loyalty, and love. They do not require coupons.
-George T. Hewitt
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The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.
-Eric Hoffer
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Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on us.
-Thomas L. Holdcroft
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The person who does not know how to live while they are making a living is a poorer person after their wealth is won than when they started.
-Josiah Gilbert Holland
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I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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To live is to function. That is all there is in living.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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Today, you have 100% of your life left.
-Tom Hopkins
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Refrain from asking what going to happen tomorrow, and everyday that fortune grants you, count as gain.
-Horace
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He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.
-Horace
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Every life is its own excuse for being.
-Elbert Hubbard
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Do not take life too seriously; you will never get out of it alive.
-Elbert Hubbard
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Those who live are those who fight.
-Victor Hugo
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Life is a flower of which love is the honey.
-Victor Hugo
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It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.
-David Hume
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A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.
-Aldous Huxley
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We Japanese enjoy the small pleasures, not extravagance. I believe a man should have a simple lifestyle -- even if he can afford more.
-Massaru Ibuka
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Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud
-Robert G. Ingersoll, from a eulogy Ingersoll wrote for his brother, Ebon, that was delivered in Washington, D.C. on May 31, 1879
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Half my life is an act of revision.
-John Irving
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Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination
-Christopher Isherwood
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Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?
-Henry James
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Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
-Henry James
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Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
-William James
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Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
-William James
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We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
-William James
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Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
-William James
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This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
-William James
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The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
-William James
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Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.
-Thomas Jefferson
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He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many fold in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale.
-Samuel Johnson
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Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.
-David Starr Jordan
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In the midst of excitement, grief, joy, and solitude, I remind myself every moment that the sole mission of my life is to find the ultimate questioner - that unimaginable who has put me in this madness to answer an unanswerable question.
-Kedar Joshi
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Life is a question asked by God about the way he exists.
-Kedar Joshi
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Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.
-James Joyce, Ulysses (p. 273 - Chapter One Episode Nine 'Scylla and Charybdis')
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To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to create life out of life.
-James Joyce
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Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.
-Franz Kafka
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Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.
-Immanuel Kant
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Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.
-Danny Kaye
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The gains in life come slowly and the losses come on suddenly. You work for years to get your life the way you want it and buy the big house and the time share on Antigua and one afternoon you
-Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat, 2004
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Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others
-Helen Keller
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It is vanity to desire a long life and to take no heed of a good life.
-Thomas Kempis
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There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war, and some men are wounded, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or personal life to assure complete equality. Life
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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Life is unfair.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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All of life is a foreign country.
-Jack Kerouac
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'Tis all a Checker-board of Nights and days where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays: Hither and thither moves, and mates and slays, and one by one back in the Closet lays.
-Omar Khayyam
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Living Life Tomorrow's fate, though thou be wise, Thou canst not tell nor yet surmise; Pass, therefore, not today in vain, For it will never come again.
-Omar Khayyam
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Life is short; live it up.
-Nikita Khrushchev
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This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness... they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived --forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause - that it must be lived forward. The more one thinks through this clause, the more one concludes that life in temporality never becomes properly understandable, simply because never at any time does one get perfect repose to take the stance - backward.
-Soren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, vol 1., 1843
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He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate.
-Stephen King
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Life is one of the most important causes of death.
-Gerhard Kocher
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Life is a loss of time.
-Gerhard Kocher
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To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one.
-Jack Kornfield
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You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti
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It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth - and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up, we will then begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.
-Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.
-Milan Kundera
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I would rather think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to come together and make sense.
-Rabbi Harold S. Kushner
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They that have lived a single day have lived an age.
-Jean De La Bruyere
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There are three stages in a person's life, birth, their life and death. They are not conscious of birth submit to death and forget to live.
-Jean De La Bruyere
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If our life is unhappy it is painful to bear; if it is happy it is horrible to lose, So the one is pretty equal to the other.
-Jean De La Bruyere
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To live lightheartedly but not recklessly; to be gay without being boisterous; to be courageous without being bold; to show trust and cheerful resignation without fatalism -- this is the art of living.
-Jean De La Fontaine
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Much as we complain about our condition or feel victimized by fortune or fellow humans, we simply love being alive. We love life in others and in ourselves. We are in love with life. To love life is to love the activities of which it consists and to hope for more.
-John Lachs, In Love With Life: Reflections on the Joy of Living and Why We Hate to Die
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Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies.
-Ann Landers
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Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.
-Philip Larkin
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Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do -- it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.
-Stephen Leacock
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Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five years and you pay it back and then -- one day -- you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then -- one day -- you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.
-Denis Leary
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Life is something you do when you can't get to sleep.
-Fran Lebowitz
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People find life entirely too time-consuming.
-Stanislaw Lec
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Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.
-Tom Lehrer
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Life is what happens to you while you
-John Lennon
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The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand well.
-H. T. Leslie
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You only live once -- but if you work it right, once is enough.
-Joe E. Lewis
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The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.
-W. M. Lewis
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Where there is life there is wishful thinking.
-Gerald F. Lieberman
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And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.
-Abraham Lincoln
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The four stages of life are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence.
-Art Linkletter
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The next chapter of my life is always more interesting than the last one.
-Michael Lipsey
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I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
-Jack London
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Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Life is real! Life is earnest! And death is not its goal. Dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
and things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art; to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than today.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our heats, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead
Act,- act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead.
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
a forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us then be up and doing,
with a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm of Life, 1839
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Every generation enjoys the use of a vast hoard bequeathed to it by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, augmented by fresh acquisitions, to future ages.
-Thomas Babington Macaulay, History of England
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At every crossway on the road that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past. Let us have no fear lest the fair towers of former days be sufficiently defended. The least that the most timid among us can do is not to add to the immense dead weight which nature drags along.Let us not say to ourselves that the best truth always lies in moderation, in the decent average. This would perhaps be so if the majority of men did not think on a much lower plane than is needful. That is why it behooves others to think and hope on a higher plane than seems reasonable. The average, the decent moderation of today, will be the least human of things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the other good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none at all.Let us think of the great invisible ship that carries our human destinies upon eternity. Like the vessels of our confined oceans, she has her sails and her ballast. The fear that she may pitch or roll on leaving the roadstead is no reason for increasing the weight of the ballast by stowing the fair white sails in the depths of the hold. Sails were not woven to molder side by side with cobblestones in the dark. Ballast exists everywhere; all the pebbles of the harbor, all the sand of the beach, will serve for that. But sails are rare and precious things; their place is not in the murk of the well, but amid the light of the tall masts, where they will collect the winds of space.
-Count Maurice Maeterlinck, Our Social Duty
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Live this day as if it will be your last. Remember that you will only find tomorrow on the calendars of fools. Forget yesterday's defeats and ignore the problems of tomorrow. This is it. Doomsday. All you have. Make it the best day of your year. The saddest words you can ever utter are, If I had my life to live over again. Take the baton, now. Run with it! This is your day! Beginning today, treat everyone you meet, friend or foe, loved one or stranger, as if they were going to be dead at midnight. Extend to each person, no matter how trivial the contact, all the care and kindness and understanding and love that you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.
-Og Mandino
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The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.
-Joseph L. Mankiewicz
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Life never becomes a habit to me. It's always a marvel.
-Katherine Mansfield
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Life is not a matter of place, things or comfort; rather, it concerns the basic human rights of family, country, justice and human dignity.
-Imelda Marcos
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The thing that is incredible is life itself. Why should we be here in this sun-illuminated universe? Why should there be green earth under our feet?
-Edwin Markham
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We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.
-Edwin Markham
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It's better to be an authentic loser than a false success, and to die alive than to live dead.
-William Markiewicz
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I am just another insect on the windshield of life.
-Don Mashak
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Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.
-Rollo May
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We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.
-Mary McCarthy
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There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.
-Carson Mccullers
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Can't nothing make your life work if you ain't the architect.
-Terry McMillan
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Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump; you have to get it right the first time.
-Margaret Mead
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We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with others; and along those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.
-Herman Melville
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I count it happiness,
Ere we go quickly thither whence we came,
To gaze ungrieving on these majesties,
The world-wide sun, the stars, water and clouds,
and fire. Live, Parmeno, a hundred years
Or a few months, these you will always see
and never, never, any greater things.
Think of this life-time as a festival
Or visit to a strange city, full of noise,
Buying and selling, thieving, dicing stalls
And joy parks. If you leave it early, friend,
Why, think you have gone to find a better inn:
You have paid your fare and leave no enemies.
-Menander
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We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.
-Menander
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Life is a dead-end street.
-H. L. Mencken
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I don't exist when you don't see me.
-Sisters Of Mercy
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My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light!
-Edna St. Vincent Millay, First Fig (1920)
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It is not true that is one damn thing after another - it's one damn thing over and over again.
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
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Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
-Agnes De Mille
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Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
-Henry Miller
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Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life's ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets.
-Henry Miller
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Don't take life seriously because you can't come out of it alive.
-Warren Miller
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Life is a tough proposition and the first hundred years are the hardest.
-Wilson Mizner
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We are great fools: He has spent his life in idleness. We say, I have done nothing today. Really, have you not lived? This is not only the most fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations
-Michel de Montaigne, Of Experience
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My art and profession is to live.
-Michel de Montaigne
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The finest lives in my opinion are the common model, without miracle and without extravagance.
-Michel de Montaigne
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The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mode of happiness. but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed the change; happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow Up.
-Charles Morgan
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Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.
-Christopher Morley
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Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.
-Grandma Moses
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This tattered life is my only robe; the wind my only refuge.
-Marian Mountain
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Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.
-Lewis Mumford
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Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.
-Lewis Mumford
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Life is given for wisdom, and yet we are not wise; for goodness, and we are not good; for overcoming evil, and evil remains; for patience and sympathy and love, and yet we are fretful and hard and weak and selfish. We are keyed not to attainment, but to the struggle toward it.
-Thornton T. Munger
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The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.
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Books about Life