LIFE QUOTES XXIX

quotations about life

The unfairness of life is indicative of trees. I planted twenty trees on the same block. It's so fucking weird. Six became huge. One is giant. And there are some little shitty ones. Same soil. Same water. Same seed. But those little ones just don't grow. I can't explain it.

TIM ALLEN

Esquire, Nov. 2011

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Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Feast of Stephen

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You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.

SAUL BELLOW

Herzog

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I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on.

ROBERT BROWNING

In a Balcony

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Men regret their life has been ill-spent, but this does not always induce them to make a better use of the time they have yet to live.

JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE

"Of Mankind", Les Caractères


Weakest and strongest of the things that God has made, Life is the heir of Death, and yet his conqueror--victim at once and victor. All living things succumb to Death's cradle; Life smiles at his impotence, and makes the grave her cradle.

JAMES HINTON

Life in Nature


You sit
Like a rain puddle in hell
Knitting the socks
Of your life.

CHARLES SIMIC

My Noiseless Entourage

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It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.

ANNE LAMOTT

Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith


Life is as the current spark on the miner's wheel of flints;
While it spinneth, there is light; stop it, all is darkness.

MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER

Proverbial Philosophy

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How strange a checker-work of Providence is the life of man!

DANIEL DEFOE

Robinson Crusoe

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The life of man on earth is, as a rule, a dangerous journey, over and through shoals and quicksands, beset on his way outwardly by snares, traps, and insinuating temptations of all sorts, and inwardly, he is besieged by contending emotions of good and evil, perpetually at war with each other; however watchful must he then be to steer clear of all the dangers that beset him, and how necessary for him to keep his eye on the chart and compass God has provided him with for his guidance, and to pray for wisdom to understand it correctly. As on he travels day by day, the scenes he often passes through are varied, strange, and wonderful: first the road may be said to be through a smooth and quiet valley, then there comes a hill to climb; if climbed successfully at once, he often tumbles headlong down again, and next time it is more difficult to get up again; on the other hand, should he continue slowly and gradually on his road, he will find the remainder of his journey for the most part uphill, with now and then level and barren spots to cross, every slip or false step, he takes he finds it harder and harder to regain his lost position, and if weak-minded and faint-hearted, he perishes by the way; but if he has the sterling stuff in him, that will ever make a brave, a great, and a good man, with increasing faith and never-dying hope, head erect and body upright, he calmly but with unyielding determination presses on and on, higher and higher, rarely pausing to look back, but gaining summit after summit and peak after peak, till at the close of his career, he has gained earth's highest pinnacles, and his vision made more bright by the glorified blaze of the setting sun of his life below, he raises his eyes aloft, and there, not far distant, in awe-inspiring and dazzling splendour, he beholds with spell-bound rapture the Land of Beulah, the Plains of Heaven, and the homes prepared from the foundation of the world for the faithful earthly servants of their Heavenly Master.

T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH

"On the Life of Man", Short Essays


Life is Supercalifragilisticexpialidocius.

JULIE ANDREWS

Star Weekly, Apr. 29, 1965

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Every noble life becomes a revelation of the spirit which the love and joy of mankind cannot let perish from remembrance.

AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT

Table Talk


Though life's tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn.

JOHN BARTH

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

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Life was not fair. If you wanted something you had to take it. Before someone else took it from you. Neatly dissected down to its essence, life was one long series of lily pad hoppings. The quick and the resourceful were able to adapt and survive; all others were simply crushed as a more nimble creature landed on the lily pad they had occupied for too long.

DAVID BALDACCI

The Winner

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One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.

KOBO ABE

The Woman in the Dunes

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And life itself spoke this secret to me. "Behold," it said, "I am that which must ever overcome itself."

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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Philosophers wrestling with the big questions of life are no longer alone. Now scientists are struggling to define life as they manipulate it, look for it on other planets, and even create it in test tubes.

SETH BORENSTEIN

USA Today, Aug. 19, 2007

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To realize life as absolute is to be existentially emancipated from life itself in that very realization, which understands that life is not life. The same applies to death.

MASAO ABE

Zen and the Modern World

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That was indeed to live -- at one bold swoop to wrest from darkling death the best that death to life can give.

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

"Shaw Memorial Ode"

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