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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 – "WOW – What a Ride!"
-Anon., [various versions of this exist; one version is attributed: Bill McKenna, professional motorcycle racer, Cycle magazine Feb. 1982]
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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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"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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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 wasted on the living."
-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
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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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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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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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Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.
-Hans Christian Andersen
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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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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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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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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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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 consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well."
-Josh Billings
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"The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live."
-Joan Borysenko
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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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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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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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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 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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All actual life is encounter.
-Martin Buber, "I and Thou", 1923
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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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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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"The purpose of life is a life of purpose."
-Robert Byrne
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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, “The Power of Myth”]
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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 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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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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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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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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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 maze in which we take the wrong turn before we have learnt to walk.
-Cyril Connolly
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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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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’s crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we have forgotten we ever learned it. Yet it is a transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add –until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form people can use.
-Annie Dillard, Total Eclipse [Teaching a Stone to Talk, pg. 99]
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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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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’s title is also a quote from Horace, that means “the brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long”)
-Ernest Dowson, Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam
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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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"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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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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"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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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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"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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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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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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"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
-Robert Frost
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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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"Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
-Mahatma Gandhi
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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’s a pudding full of plums;
Care’s a canker that benumbs,
Wherefore waste our elocution
On impossible solution?
Life’s a pleasant institution,
Let us take it as it comes!
-Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, The Tangled Skein
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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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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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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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"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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"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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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 a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud—and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word.
But in the night of Death
Hope sees a star and listening
Love can hear the rustling of a wing.
-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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"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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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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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’re run down by a garbage truck and lie in the intersection, dazed, bloodied, your leg unnaturally bent, and suddenly life becomes terribly challenging for six months.
-Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat, 2004
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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.
-Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, vol 1., 1843
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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.
-Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
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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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Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
-John Lennon
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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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"Don't take life seriously because you can't come out of it alive."
-Warren Miller
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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… Have you been able to think about and manage your life? You have managed the greatest burden of all… To compose our nature is our responsibility, not to write books. To gain order and tranquility, not to win battles and provinces, is our goal. Our grand and glorious masterpiece is to live suitably.
-Michel de Montaigne, "Of Experience"
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Nay, do not grieve tho' life be full of sadness,
Dawn will not veil her spleandor for your grief,
Nor spring deny their bright, appointed beauty
To lotus blossom and ashoka leaf.
Nay, do not pine, tho' life be dark with trouble,
Time will not pause or tarry on his way;
To-day that seems so long, so strange, so bitter,
Will soon be some forgotten yesterday.
Nay, do not weep; new hopes, new dreams, new faces,
The unspent joy of all the unborn years,
Will prove your heart a traitor to its sorrow,
And make your eyes unfaithful to their tears.
-Sarojini Naidu, Transcience
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We are such spendthrifts with our lives. The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.
-Paul Newman, quoted by author of New York Times obituary , late Sept. 2008
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If one's conscious life is too rigid, too regimented, then the surface may crack at times, and we are unprepared for the strange emotions or sensations we experience.
-Anais Nin, The Novel of the Future
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I have had my dance with Folly, nor do I shirk the blame;
I have sipped the so-called Wine of Life and paid the price of shame;
But I know that I shall find surcease, the rest my spirit craves,
Where the rainbows play in the flying spray,
'Mid the keen salt kiss of the waves.
-Eugene O'Neill, Free
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If a person is to get the meaning of life he must learn to like the facts about himself -- ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity -- before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly.
-Eugene O'Neill
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Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
-O. Henry, Gift of the Magi
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Life is what we make it, and the world is what we make it. The eyes of the cheerful and of the melancholy man are fixed upon the same creation; but very different are the aspects which it bears to them.
-Albert Pike
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Dance like there's nobody watching
Love like you'll never get hurt
Sing like there's nobody listening
Live like it's heaven on earth
And speak from the heart to be heard.
Purkey is the source of this quotation that is attributed to many others: it was made popular in the song "Come From The Heart" written by Susannah Clark and Richard Leigh. Purkey closed his speeches with this poem and it has now made it into the public domain.
-William W. Purkey
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I wanted a perfect ending... Now, I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end.
Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.
-Gilda Radner
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The goal is to live a full, productive life even with all that ambiguity. No matter what happens, whether the cancer never flares up again or whether you die, the important thing is that the days that you have had you will have lived.
-Gilda Radner
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If I'd gotten the job I wanted at Montgomery Ward, I suppose I would never have left Illinois.
I've often wondered at how lives are shaped by what seem like small and inconsequential events, how an apparently random turn in the road can lead you a long way from where you intended to go--and a long way from wherever you expected to go. For me, the first of these turns occurred in the summer of 1932, in the abyss of the Depression.
-Ronald Reagan, An American Life
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Believe in something for another world, but don't be too set on what it is, and then you won't start out that life with a disappontment. Live your life so that whenever you lose you are ahead.
-Will Rogers
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What else is there to make life tolerable? We stand on the shore of an ocean, crying to the night and to emptiness. Sometimes a voice of one drowning, and in a moment the silence returns. The world seems to me quite dreadful, the unhappiness of many people is very great, and I often wonder how they all endure it. It is usually the central thing around which their lives are built, and I suppose if they did not live most of their lives in the things of the moment, they would not be able to go on.
-Bertrand Russell
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"Everything has been figured out, except how to live."
-Jean-Paul Sartre
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"Live every day as if it were your last, because one of these days, it will be."
-Jeremy Schwartz
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I must interpret the life around me as I interpret the life that is my own. My life is full of meaning to me. The life around me must be full of significance to itself. If I am to expect others to respect my life, then I must respect the other life I see, however strange it may be to mine.
-Albert Schweitzer
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"Life becomes harder for us when we live for others, but it also becomes richer and happier."
-Albert Schweitzer
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"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages."
-William Shakespeare, As You Like It
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If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear...
date is its entry into the Stationer's Register
-William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Epilogue, October 8, 1600
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Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
-William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V Scene V
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"Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued."
-Socrates
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Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and can be confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.
-Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
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Breathe deeply, as if each breath might be your last. That way, the one time you’re right, you’ll have a couple of extra seconds to contemplate life’s beauty while you exhale.
-Scott Sorrell
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"... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?"
-Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird, 1976
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In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.
-Robert Louis Stevenson, Old Mortality, Memories and Portrait, 1887
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For some life lasts a short while, but the memories it holds last forever.
-Laura Swenson
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"May you live every day of your life."
-Jonathan Swift
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Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears;
Grief, with a glass that ran;
Pleasure, with pain for leaven;
Summer, with flowers that fell;
Remembrance, fallen from heaven,
And madness risen from hell;
Strength without hands to smite;
Love that endures for a breath;
Night, the shadow of light,
And Life, the shadow of death.
-Algernon Charles Swinburne, "Atalanta in Calydon", 1865
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Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this."
-Henry David Thoreau
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What you refer to as your “life” should more accurately be called your “life situation.” It is psychological time: past and future. Certain things in the past didn’t go the way you wanted them to go. You are still resisting what happened in the past and now you are resisting what is. Hope is what keeps you going, but hope keeps you focused on the future, and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the NOW and therefore your unhappiness.
Forget about your life situation for awhile and pay attention to your life. Your life situation exists in time. Your life is NOW. Your life situation is Mind-Stuff. Your life is REAL.
-Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
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The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
-Lily Tomlin
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A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and struggle; ...they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other; age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; ...those they love are taken from them, and the joy of life is turned to aching grief. It comes at last--the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them--and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence, ...a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever.
-Mark Twain, Chapters from My Autobiography, III Ch. VI, 1906
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Manifest plainness,
Embrace simplicity,
Reduce selfishness,
Have few desires.
-Lao Tzu
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Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to live and to work and to play and to look up at the stars.
-Henry Van Dyke
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Life is not accountable to us. We are accountable to life.
-Denis Waitley
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Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel.
-Horace Walpole, Letter to Sir Horace Mann, 1770
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Life itself is a matter of salesmanship.
-Thomas J. Watson, Men–Minutes–Money, a Collection of Excerpts from Talks
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A mighty monarch in the days of old
Made offer of high honour, wealth and gold,
To one who should produce in form concise
A motto for his guidance, terse yet wise---
A precept, soothing in his hours forlorn,
Yet one that in his prosperous days would warn.
Many the maxims sent the king, men say.
The one he chose: "This too shall pass away."
Oh, jewel sentence from the mine of truth!
What riches it contains for age or youth.
No stately epic, measured and sublime,
So comforts, or so counsels, for all time
As these few words. Go write them on your heart
And make them of your daily life a part.
Has some misfortune fallen to your lot?
This too will pass away--absorb the thought.
And wait; your waiting will not be in vain,
Time gilds with gold the iron links of pain.
The dark to-day leads into light to-morrow;
There is no endless joy, no endless sorrow.
Are you upon earth's heights? No cloud in view?
Go read your motto once again: This too
Shall pass away; fame, glory, place and power,
They are but little baubles of the hour,
Flung by the ruthless years down in the dust.
Take warning and be worthy of God's trust.
Use well your prowess while it lasts; leave bloom,
Not blight, to mark your footprints to the tomb.
The truest greatness lies in being kind,
The truest wisdom in a happy mind.
He who desponds, his Maker's judgment mocks;
The gloomy Christian is a paradox.
Only the sunny soul respects its God.
Since life is short we need to make it broad;
Since life is brief we need to make it bright.
Then keep the old king's motto well in sight,
And let its meaning permeate each day.
Whatever comes, This too shall pass away.
-Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Poems of Power by Ella Wheeler Wilcox; Chicago : W. B. Conkey, 1902.
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The great events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion.
-Oscar Wilde
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Whatever we focus on is bound to expand. Where we see the negative, we call forth more negative. And where we see the positive, we call forth more positive. Having loved and lost, I now love more passionately. Having won and lost, I now win more soberly. Having tasted the bitter, I now savor the sweet.
-Marianne Williamson
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Dr. Miller says we are pessimistic because life seems like a very bad, very screwed-up film. If you ask "What the hell is wrong with the projector?" and go up to the control room, you find it's empty. You are the projectionist, and you should have been up there all the time.
-Colin Wilson
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Seeing a defense is easier than changing it. Only with patience and tenderness might a person surrender his barbed armor for a softer shield. Perhaps in this lies the key to the good life—not rules to follow, nor problems to avoid, but an engaged humility, an earnest acceptance of life’s pains and promises.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/happiness
-Joshua Wolf Shenk, What Makes Us Happy?, "The Atlantic", June, 2009
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So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living.
-Virginia Woolf
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"At thirty, man suspects himself a fool;
Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan".
-Edward Young, Night Thoughts. Night i. Line 417
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"All men think all men mortal but themselves."
-Edward Young, Night Thoughts. Night i. Line 424.
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"Time flies, death urges, knells call, Heaven invites,
Hell threatens."
-Edward Young, Night Thoughts. Night ii. Line 292.
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If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
-Lin Yutang
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Books about Life
