The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

Neither should a ship rely on one small anchor, nor should life rest on a single hope.

Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.

I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

Water is life, and clean water means health.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

Step with care and great tact, and remember that Life’s a Great Balancing Act.

There is no wealth but life.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

I think Bible principles are principles for life.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

Waste brings woe, and sorrow hates despair.

Accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open.

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.

I have wondered about time all my life.

The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

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.

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

I have such incredible experiences in my life.

There is more to life than increasing its speed.

It all went wrong with football, the thing I loved most of all, and from there, my life slowly fell apart.

I live in a crazy time.

Life is a dead-end street.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl?

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can’t make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

Life is as tedious as twice-told tale, vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.

Death is a fearful thing.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I’m so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don’t have the guts to take their names out of the book.

Silence is golden when you can’t think of a good answer.

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.

Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

To be renewed is everything. What more could one ask for than to have one’s youth back again?

Nothing in life is promised except death.

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

Of life’s two chief prizes, beauty and truth, I found the first in a loving heart and the second in a laborer’s hand.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

My life is not unlike Truman’s. I can’t go anywhere.

Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.

I never felt settled or calm. You can’t really commit to life when you feel that.

He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember when he is old, that he has once been young.

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

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act on upon them?

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.