The life of an uneducated man is as useless as the tail of a dog which neither covers its rear end, nor protects it from the bites of insects.

Life’s a rollercoaster. You’re up one minute; you’re down one minute. But who doesn’t like rollercoasters?

There’s no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.

Freedom is never dear at any price. It is the breath of life. What would a man not pay for living?

You can’t imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

In that film, the man and the part met. As far as I’m concerned, that part is Greg’s for life. I’ve had many, many offers to turn it into musicals, into TV or stage plays, but I’ve always refused.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.

This has been my life for many years; one role feeds the other.

When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.

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.

People think, because we’re young, we aren’t complex, but that’s not true. We deal with life and love and broken hearts in the same way a woman a few years older might.

My focus is to forget the pain of life. Forget the pain, mock the pain, reduce it. And laugh.

Old age: the crown of life, our play’s last act.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.

There is nothing permanent except change.

I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times.

Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.

Do you know the only value life has is what life puts on itself?

Life is grim, and we don’t have to be grim all the time.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

Apart from life, a strong constitution, and an abiding connection to the Thembu royal house, the only thing my father bestowed upon me at birth was a name, Rolihlahla.

Bread without flesh is a good diet, as on many botanical excursions I have proved. Tea also may easily be ignored. Just bread and water and delightful toil is all I need – not unreasonably much, yet one ought to be trained and tempered to enjoy life in these brave wilds in full independence of any particular kind of nourishment.

Your joy comes from how you think, the choices that we make in life.

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?

Death is just life’s next big adventure.

I’m not trying to follow a set of rules and stuff. I’m just living my life.

Let man live at a distance from God, and the universe remains neutral or hostile to him. But let man believe in God, and immediately all around him the elements, even the irksome, of the inevitable organize themselves into a friendly whole, ordered to the ultimate success of life.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

Human life is far more important than just getting to the top of a mountain.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

The first thing which I can record concerning myself is, that I was born. These are wonderful words. This life, to which neither time nor eternity can bring diminution – this everlasting living soul, began. My mind loses itself in these depths.

Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.

My whole life is a theater piece.

So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

Getting money is not all a man’s business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.

My only fear is that I may live too long. This would be a subject of dread to me.

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

I have a theory about the human mind. A brain is a lot like a computer. It will only take so many facts, and then it will go on overload and blow up.

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

When it’s your time, it is your time.

Old age is just a record of one’s whole life.

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Nothing on this earth is standing still. It’s either growing or it’s dying. No matter if it’s a tree or a human being.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

And no, we don’t know where it will lead. We just know there’s something much bigger than any of us here.

Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?