quotations about life
We will never recognize the true value of our own lives until we affirm the value in the life of others.
RONALD REAGAN
"Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation"
Life is sad
Life is a bust
All ya can do is do what you must
BOB DYLAN
"Buckets of Rain"
The world ... is full of people who never knew what hit 'em, their lives are over before they wake up.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit is Rich
Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
By the time you learn the rules of life, you're too old to play the game.
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Dictionary of Proverbs
My life is one long blooper reel!
TOM WILSON
Ziggy, Jan. 12, 2000
No lifetime is long enough for those ... who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
Study more how to die than how to live; if you would live till you were old, live as if you were to die when you are young.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
When people say that they are happy with their lives, they do not usually mean that they are literally joyful, or experiencing pleasure, all the time. They mean that, upon reflection on the balance sheet of pleasures and pains, they feel the balance to be reasonably positive over the long term.
DANIEL NETTLE
Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile
To live is to war with trolls.
HENRIK IBSEN
dedicatory lines, Peer Gynt
Funny. You talk of life as if it were a train you have to catch up with. How long have you been trying, three days? And not got a glimpse of it yet, in spite of caviar and champagne?
VICKI BAUM
Grand Hotel
The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a pattern of systems.
BRUCE LEE
Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living
But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Women in Love
Death gives a life to some men and women compared with which their so-called existence here is as nothing. Which is the truer life of Shakespeare, Handel, that divine woman who wrote the Odyssey, and of Jane Austen -- the life which palpitated with sensible warm motion within their own bodies, or that in virtue of which they are still palpitating in ours?
SAMUEL BUTLER
"How to Make the Best of Life", Essays on Life, Art and Science
How fugitive and brief is mortal life between the budding and the falling leaf.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Two Moods"
You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.
SAUL BELLOW
Herzog
He is dead already who doth not feel
Life is worth living still.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"Is Life Worth Living?", Lyrical Poems
Life is often wasted in a search after unattainable advantages, and generally, through the scruples of pride and vanity, our happiness is delayed from day to day, by a rejection of those pleasures and benefits which are within our reach.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?
JOSEPH HELLER
Catch-22
Life doesn't work that way. You can do everything perfectly. Do everything you think you're supposed to be doing. Fulfill every expectation that other people may have. And you still won't get the results you think you deserve. Life is crazy and maddening and often makes no sense.
DAVID BALDACCI
One Summer