quotations about life
All research suggests that life on this Earth is an accident, that if you take a kettle of primordial soup and shake it enough, shock it enough, even freeze it enough, you get organic compounds. Allow these compounds to suffer random accidents long enough and you get life. That's life with a capital L. The fundamentalists are outraged that something as sacred and important as Life could be an accident. They want it to be a result of a command, a plan, a blueprint, a simple, orderly, well-engineered, easily understood project designed by a deity who ... would figure all tolerances and fudge them by a safety factor of five or ten. Well, fuck them. Accidents happen. We're one of them.
DAN SIMMONS
Lovedeath
Life is wide, limitless. There is no border, no frontier.
BRUCE LEE
Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living
She seemed to listen to life as though life were the most cunning and charming of confidence men: knowing perfectly well that she was being conned, she, nevertheless, again and again, gave the man the money for the Brooklyn Bridge. She never gained possession of the bridge, of course, but she certainly learned how to laugh. And the tiny lines in her face had been produced as much by laughter as by loss.
JAMES BALDWIN
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
That's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.
FREDERIK POHL
Gateway
If life is not a continual denial of the past, then it is nothing.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Reasonable Life
Life is a journey we are always travelling; but, unlike most others, seldom care we to reach the end.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Each person's life is a continuum of unique experiences.
MITCH ANTHONY
Your Clients for Life
When life is lived as a living-and-dying in the primordial, nonsubstantial nothingness, one realizes that life is bottomlessly life and death is bottomlessly death. Life does not change into death, and death does not take away life.
MASAO ABE
Zen and the Modern World
Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Pere Goriot
Life thunders on.
LOLA RIDGE
"Frank Little at Calvary"
A good life keeps off wrinkles.
SPANISH PROVERB
I shall not say, our life is all in vain,
For peace may cheer the desolated hearth;
But well I know that, on this weary earth,
Round each joy-island is a sea of pain.
HENRY ABBEY
"While the Days Go By"
Our life is nothing, it is true, but our life is divine. A breath of nature annihilates us, but we surpass nature in penetrating far beyond her vast phantasmagoria to the changeless and the eternal.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Every now and then life sold you an illusion of design. A coincidence, a parallel, a sledgehammer symbol. The goods were always faulty. You forked over the cash only to discover they'd fallen apart by the time you got home. But life kept at it. Life couldn't help it. Life was a compulsive salesman.
GLEN DUNCAN
Talulla Rising
One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found -- and it is found in terrible places.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
The real thing, this! and all these endless days, these days of senseless drudgery, it was this that set his soul in fever -- in a craze -- to break away, to feel the crushing bliss of life that wars with life -- the seethe and hiss.
CONRAD AIKEN
"Youth"
As a well spent day affords happy sleep, so does a life profitably employed afford a happy death.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
One brief journey betwixt heaven and earth,
Then, alas! we are the same old dust of ten thousand ages.
LI BAI
"The Old Dust"
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
letter to his son Eduard, Feb. 5, 1930