life quotes

We do not know what love is. We know the symptoms of it, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the anxiety and so on. We try to solve the symptoms, which becomes a wandering in darkness. We spend our days and nights in this, and it is soon over in death.

The art is long, life is short.

Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.

Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

Life, if well lived, is long enough.

You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.

While there’s life, there’s hope.

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

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.

Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.

Religion was instituted to make us happy in this life and in the other. What must we do to be happy in the life to come? Be just.

The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

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

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Where there is love there is life.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first.

The devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy in life. Either we suffer in health or we suffer in soul or we get fat.

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us – dreamers and indolent… It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich – these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

There is more to life than increasing its speed.

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

Life’s short. Anything could happen, and it usually does, so there is no point in sitting around thinking about all the ifs, ands and buts.

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

Life’s like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be – and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life.

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.

Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.

Health is the soul that animates all the enjoyments of life, which fade and are tasteless without it.

The bird is powered by its own life and by its motivation.

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do.

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

Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.

We should all start to live before we get too old.

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

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

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

Life must be lived as play.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.