quotations about life
Life is sweet.
ENGLISH PROVERB
You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they don't even remember the name and what the scratchers were trying to tell, and it doesn't matter.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
Life is too short to blend in.
PARIS HILTON
Confessions of an Heiress
Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.
WOODY ALLEN
Husbands and Wives
One Moment in Annihilation's Waste,
One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste--
The Stars are Setting and the Caravan
Starts for the Dawn of Nothing -- Oh, make haste!
EDWARD FITZGERALD
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
Life should be a fruitful garden,
Fair in blossom, and rich in seed;
Conscience, the sharp and faithful warden,
Watchful against the frost and weed.
Study should its labyrinths trace
Where wisdom's pleasant waters flow;
And industry the garden grace
With plants that choicest gifts bestow.
C. B. LANGSTON
"What Should Life Be?"
If life is often so hard as this, I don't see how we ever shall get through it.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.
RANSOM RIGGS
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Life is often like that, the best balancing on a knife edge with the worst.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Obsidian Butterfly
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
MARY OLIVER
"Sometimes", Red Bird
Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Unquiet Grave
Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment -- the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz"
Life calls the tune, we dance.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
Five Tales
You have not lost all when you have life.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Philosophical Essays
What is life but a series of inspired follies?
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Pygmalion
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"The Theologian's Tale", Tales of a Wayside Inn
Life has an--an irony all its own. What you wish for, you get, but you discover that it's not what you want.
JOHN AUSTIN CONNOLLY
The Boys from Siam
I compare human life to a large mansion of many apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me.
JOHN KEATS
letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, May 3, 1818