quotations about life
Life is a pilgrimage and if you don't play by the rules you don't find the Road to Damascus, you find the Crown of Thorns.
ANITA BROOKNER
The Paris Review, fall 1987
Life divine! O life eternal!
Man cannot translate the thought.
Strong the chain that God hath welded;
Link on link hath chain been wrought.
Fabric new each day is woven,
Woven it on God's own loom.
We the threads can ne'er unravel,
Hidden they in Nature's womb.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Dost Thou Know?"
It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
All the Pretty Horses
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
He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach -- that it makes no sense.
PHILIP ROTH
American Pastoral
Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.
RICHARD BACH
Illusions
Behold the life at ease; it drifts,
The sharpened life commands its course.
GEORGE MEREDITH
"Hard Weather"
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
Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
As long as you live, keep learning how to live.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
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
When something makes no sense, sometimes you make something of it. A joke. A spiritual practice. A life.
HEATHER SELLERS
Good Housekeeping, Jan. 2011
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
Trifles make the sum of life.
CHARLES DICKENS
David Copperfield
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
There is more to life than not dying.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Clockwork Angel
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.
JACK LONDON
The Call of the Wild
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
The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
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