quotations about life
You can't live your life for other people. You've got to do what's right for you, even if it hurts some people you love.
NICHOLAS SPARKS
The Notebook
Life is a long march, an endless column of souls moving forward through surrounding dark. In that crowd nobody knows where they're going, but there is plenty of talk, and the fools, some called philosophers, pretend to understand.
GREGORY BENFORD
Rewrite: Loops in the Timescape
Life is good. It is precious. It is a great blessing. Even on its worst days. And in its deepest valleys you must remember the view from its highest mountains. You must not forget that happiness is a matter of perspective, not circumstance.
BOB LONSBERRY
A Various Language
The essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things--the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.
JACK LONDON
attributed, Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior
Life is a game. Money is how we keep score.
TED TURNER
attributed, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Great Quotes for All Occasions
Whatever may be our condition in life, it is better to lay hold of its advantages than to count its evils.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Any man's life, told truly, is a novel.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Death in the Afternoon
God is found in this Life ... to wait for another is folly.
DAN SIMMONS
Lovedeath
But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause--through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence, doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them; the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit at Rest
There is no man that lives who does not need to be drilled, disciplined, and developed into something higher and nobler and better than he is by nature. Life is one prolonged birth.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Some there are find joy in life,
And some that only bear it.
LOUISE DRISCOLL
"Luck"
Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that movement is God. And while there is life there is joy in consciousness of the divine. To love life is to love God.
LEO TOLSTOY
War and Peace
He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.
MUHAMMAD ALI
Woman's Day, Apr. 1, 2009
Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
attributed, Selected Thoughts from the French: XV Century-XX Century, with English Translations
Life is there ahead of you and either one tests oneself in its challenges or huddles in the valleys of a dreamless day-to-day existence whose only purpose is the preservation of a illusory security and safety. The latter is what the vast majority of people choose to do, fearing the adventure into the known.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
Over the years you get to see what a struggle life is for most people, how tough it is, how easy it is to be judgmental and criticise and stand outside of situations and impart your wisdom and judgment. But over the decades I've got more tolerant of people's flaws and mistakes. Everybody makes a lot of them. When you're younger you feel: "Hey, this person is evil" or "This person is a jerk" or stupid or "What's wrong with them?" Then you go through life and you think: "Well, it's not so easy." There's a lot of mystery and suffering and complication. Everybody's out there trying to do the best they can. And it's not such an easy business.
WOODY ALLEN
The Guardian
You must learn to deal with the odd and even in life, as well as in figures.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
We must rejoice when love is great, and pardon its excess, for love is the staff of life, and life without love is life in vain.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life