LIFE QUOTES XXIV

quotations about life

I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull, as ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun.

SINCLAIR LEWIS

Babbitt

Tags: Sinclair Lewis


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

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What unlooked-for things do happen, to be sure, in a long life!

ARISTOPHANES

Lysistrata

Tags: Aristophanes


The rich pearl of life,
Soon moulders in its blackened urn, the tomb.

ISAAC MCLELLAN

"Musings"

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The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

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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

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Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

"Beyond the Wall of Sleep"


No man ever sailed over exactly the same route that another sailed over before him; every man who starts on the ocean of life arches his sails to an untried breeze.

WILLIAM MATHEWS

Hints on Success in Life


Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.

MICHEL FOUCAULT

Madness & Civilization

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Life is like a moustache. It can be wonderful or terrible. But it always tickles.

NORA ROBERTS

From the Heart

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Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.

V. S. NAIPAUL

Half a Life

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Life at the greatest is but a froward child, that must be humor'd and coax'd a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH

The Good-Natured Man

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If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year.

ALICE MEYNELL

"The Rhythm of Life", The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays


I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Middlesex


For some reason or the other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured--disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui--in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.

HENRY MILLER

Tropic of Cancer

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Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon itself? And it is of course overestimated, for it is of necessity prejudiced in its own favour.

JACK LONDON

The Sea Wolf

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What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES

Leisure

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To live means to finesse the processes to which one is subjugated.

BERTOLT BRECHT

On Politics and Society

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To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

GASTON BACHELARD

Fragments of a Poetics of Fire

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Though life's tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn.

JOHN BARTH

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

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