quotations about life
Looking at your life as a debt may seem the dreariest view of things at a distance; but it cannot really be so. What makes life dreary is the want of motive; but once beginning to act with the penitential, loving purpose you have in your mind, there will be unexpected satisfactions--there will be newly-opening needs--continually coming to carry you on from day to day. You will find your life growing like a plant.
GEORGE ELIOT
Daniel Deronda
Life is one long process of getting tired.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Note Books
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
attributed, Woman's Day Magazine, Jun. 1, 2007
Life is brutal that way ... the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.
DAN SIMMONS
Endymion
Life is not meant to be hard: if it is, we make it so.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
But all they are all there scraping along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life's robulous rebus.
JAMES JOYCE
Finnegan's Wake
Life is a means of extracting fiction.
ROBERT STONE
attributed, Writers at Work
There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
Where the Blue Begins
Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
A Visit to Funen with Hans Christian Andersen
Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.
MARY MCCARTHY
The Hounds of Summer and Other Stories
How small a porton of our life it is that we really enjoy. In youth we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age, we are looking backwards to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day, when we have time.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
All life is a dream, my children, but you are not the dreamer; the Dreamer rests on a bed of down plucked from the breast of the swan of eternity. He turns in His sleep sometimes, and a world comes to an end; He smiles in His sleep sometimes, and men know the Golden Age; sometimes He is restless, too, and the revolutions come. Will the Dreamer never awake? Who knows! I would hold Him sleeping; For if He should rise from His nest on the down of eternity, He might rub His drowsy eyes -- and I should forget to be.
ELSA BARKER
Songs of a Vagrom Angel
Life is very like a battle or a game of chess; and there ought to be some plan of the campaign.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays
A shiftless clerk, I take the days on trust,
Nor strip them of their spoil before they go.
KARLE WILSON BAKER
"The Dusty Way", Blue Smoke
The zest for life of those unusual men and women who make a great zealous success of living is due more often in good part to the craftiness and pertinacity with which they manage to overlook the misery of others. You can watch them watch life beat the stuffing out of the faces of their friends and acquaintances, although they themselves seem to outwit the dense delays of social custom, the tedious tick-tock of bureaucratic obfuscation, accepting loss and age and change and disappointment without suffering punctures in their stomach lining.
EDWARD HOAGLAND
Tigers & Ice
A somewhat depressing lesson that we learn from life is that there is no guaranteed sure-fire formula for happiness.
MICHAEL W. EYSENCK
Happiness: Facts and Myths
Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit is Rich
You should live everyday like it's your birthday.
PARIS HILTON
attributed, The Ultimate Book of Quotations
The worst of all fears is the fear of living.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography