quotations about life
Life thunders on.
LOLA RIDGE
"Frank Little at Calvary"
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain.
EMIL CIORAN
A Short History of Decay
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
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
One brief journey betwixt heaven and earth,
Then, alas! we are the same old dust of ten thousand ages.
LI BAI
"The Old Dust"
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
Each person's life is a continuum of unique experiences.
MITCH ANTHONY
Your Clients for Life
When I sit down to the feast of life ... I'm so busy planning on how to pick up the check, and wondering what the other people think of me for paying it, and wondering if I have enough money in my pocket to pay the bill, that I don't get around to eating.
FREDERIK POHL
Gateway
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
So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
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
Life is wide, limitless. There is no border, no frontier.
BRUCE LEE
Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
letter to his son Eduard, Feb. 5, 1930
If life is a death sentence, then we all have plenty of time to kill.
GREGORY ADAMS
"Review: Life Is a Death Sentence", Exclaim, June 10, 2016
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"
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
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"
Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
Thunder on the Left
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
JOAN DIDION
The Year of Magical Thinking
Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations