LIFE QUOTES XX

quotations about life

Men do not escape from life because life is dull, but life escapes from men because men are little.

THOMAS WOLFE

Look Homeward, Angel

Tags: Thomas Wolfe


Life was a storm to wander through.

STEPHEN VINCENT BENET

"The Quality of Courage"

Tags: Stephen Vincent Benet


If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.

LIN YUTANG

The Literary Digest, 1938

Tags: Lin Yutang


Life is like a cocktail, made up for the most part of sweet things, and tinged with a dash of bitters. We must drain it to the dregs to get at the cherry, just as we must live a full and rounded life to know all its pleasures.

EDGAR GUEST

Home Rhymes

Tags: Edgar Guest


You can swim in life and seawater, but both are hard to swallow.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought


Life consists of burning up questions.

ANTONIN ARTAUD

Selected Writings

Tags: Antonin Artaud


So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.

ALAN LIGHTMAN

Mr G: A Novel About the Creation

Tags: Alan Lightman


How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard.

PHILIP ROTH

The Professor of Desire

Tags: Philip Roth


Your responsibility is to be an explorer, not a tourist in this adventure that is your life.

MARY ANNE RADMACHER

Honey In Your Heart

Tags: Mary Anne Radmacher


Life is much the same when it's going well-- resonant and unremarkable. But who, not under disaster's seal, can understand what life is like when it begins to crumble?

MARY OLIVER

"Storm in Massachusetts, September 1982", Dream Work


This life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

"Anywhere Out of the World", Le Spleen de Paris

Tags: Charles Baudelaire


Life is nothing but a statement of what happens to be.

GLEN DUNCAN

The Last Werewolf

Tags: Glen Duncan


Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.

WOODY ALLEN

Husbands and Wives

Tags: Woody Allen


Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.

WILLIAM JAMES

The Varieties of Religious Experience

Tags: William James


There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.

SAUL BELLOW

AGNI interview, 1997


When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

My Day

Tags: Eleanor Roosevelt


That life is brief hath seemed a piteous thing
Since the first mortal watched it glide away.
And sad it is that flowers have but one day,
And sad that birds have little time to sing;
That joy is fleeting as the bloom of Spring;
That youth so soon is startled from its play,
And manhood from its labor, to essay
The old vain struggle with the shadowy King.
But sadder far it is that life is long;
Ay, long enough for bliss to turn to bale,
For innocence to lose the dread of wrong,
For hearts to harden, love itself to fail;
And faith be wearied out (O, sad and strange!)
Unless Death save us from the deathly change.

CAROLINE SPENCER

"Life"

Tags: Caroline Spencer


Lives are snowflakes -- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.

NEIL GAIMAN

American Gods


Our life is but a new form of the way men have lived from the beginning.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


In a dream thou mayst live a lifetime, and all be forgotten in the morning:
Even such is life, and so soon perisheth its memory.

MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER

Proverbial Philosophy