LIFE QUOTES XXV

quotations about life

The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.

ROBERT M. PIRSIG

Lila

Tags: Robert M. Pirsig


We are buried when we're born. The world is a place of graves occupied and graves potential. Life is what happens while we wait for our appointment with the mortician.

DEAN KOONTZ

Odd Apocalypse


When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering; the curtain of cloud seems parted an instant only that we may measure all its horror as it hangs low, black, and imminent, in contrast with the transient brightness; the waterdrops that visit the parched lips in the desert bear with them only the keen imagination of thirst.

GEORGE ELIOT

Janet's Repentance


A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction breeds many misunderstandings.

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

After the War


Behind every man's external life, which he leads in company, there is another which he leads alone, and which he carries with him apart. We see but one aspect of our neighbor, as we see but one side of the moon; in either case there is also a dark half, which is unknown to us.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: Walter Bagehot


From whatever point he starts, whatever path he follows, modern man comes to the same conclusion: behind its visible appearances, life hides a meaning that is eternally inaccessible to penetration by the spirit that seeks for its discovery, caught in the dilemma of being aware that it is impossible to find it, and yet also impossible to renounce the hopeless quest.

ARTHUR ADAMOV

"Le refus", L'Heure Nouvelle


If you have no wounds, how can you know if you're alive?

EDWARD ALBEE

The Play About the Baby

Tags: Edward Albee


If you turned the fabric of our lives over, I imagined the design on the backside would be woven in the bleak grays of doubt and fear.

STEPHENIE MEYER

Breaking Dawn

Tags: Stephenie Meyer


In the chequered area of human experience the seasons are all mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the green cluster and another treads the wine-press. Nay, in each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until Death himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields.

GEORGE ELIOT

Daniel Deronda


It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

FRANCIS BACON

Advancement of Learning

Tags: Francis Bacon


Life being full of harsh realities, we seek relief from them in a variety of pleasing delusions.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought


Life is but sighs; and, when they cease, 'tis over.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR

Imaginary Conversations

Tags: Walter Savage Landor


Life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Reveries over Childhood and Youth

Tags: William Butler Yeats


Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides
Into the silent hollow of the past;
What is there that abides
To make the next age better for the last?

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration

Tags: James Russell Lowell


Some moments in a life, and they needn't be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of the human connection: if one can live with one's own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.

JAMES BALDWIN

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

Tags: James Baldwin


The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life, which, though startling to the apprehension, is, in fact, that which the habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguished in us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this scene of things. I confess that I am one of those who are unable to refuse my assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

"On Life", Essays and Letters


The realization that life is absurd and cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.

ALBERT CAMUS

attributed, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd


There is no normal life. There is only life.

ANNE RICE

The Wolves of Midwinter


To live means to finesse the processes to which one is subjugated.

BERTOLT BRECHT

On Politics and Society

Tags: Bertolt Brecht


As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

SENECA

Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales

Tags: Seneca