LIFE QUOTES IV
quotations about life
Life is very like a battle or a game of chess; and there ought to be some plan of the campaign.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays
A somewhat depressing lesson that we learn from life is that there is no guaranteed sure-fire formula for happiness.
MICHAEL W. EYSENCK
Happiness: Facts and Myths
How small a porton of our life it is that we really enjoy. In youth we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age, we are looking backwards to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day, when we have time.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Life is laughter amid a rosary of death.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
attributed, Only Mystery: Federico García Lorca's Poetry in Word and Image
A shiftless clerk, I take the days on trust,
Nor strip them of their spoil before they go.
KARLE WILSON BAKER
"The Dusty Way", Blue Smoke
Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.
MARY MCCARTHY
The Hounds of Summer and Other Stories
Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
Success makes life easier. It doesn't make living easier.
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
Q, August, 1992
I seem to have always one little window looking but into life.
EMMA LAZARUS
obituary, Century Magazine, 1887
Life is the root of Eden's loftiest tree
Whose ripened fruit is immortality.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"God's Gift to Man"
This is one of those days which I am obliged to record as almost a blank in my existence.
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS
diary, November 23, 1837
Life is a moment stolen from eternity.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
Where the Blue Begins
Life is a means of extracting fiction.
ROBERT STONE
attributed, Writers at Work
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Macbeth
How small a portion of our life it is that we really enjoy. In youth, we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age, we are looking backwards to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day when we have time.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Life is brutal that way ... the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.
DAN SIMMONS
Endymion
Football is a team game. So is life.
JOE NAMATH
attributed, Where Football Is King
How passionately we love everything that cannot last: the dazzling crystallory of winter, the spring in bloom, the fragile flight of butterflies, crimson sunsets, a kiss, and life.
DEAN KOONTZ
Brother Odd
Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Orthodoxy