Quotes about Life

• Just living is not enough.  One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.
• When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me."
• The purpose of life is a life of purpose.
• I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world.  This makes it hard to plan the day.
• Life is simple, it's just not easy.
• A life without cause is a life without effect.
• Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished.  If you're alive, it isn't.
• Life's not always fair.  Sometimes you can get a splinter even sliding down a rainbow.
• The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. 
• I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it. 
• Life is a foreign language:  all men mispronounce it. 
• Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
• In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular. 
• To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else. 
• Yes, I will try to be.  Because I believe that not being is arrogant. 
• Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit. 
• My life has a superb cast but I can't figure out the plot.
• I say, if your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life. 
• You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
• As we struggle to make sense of things, life looks on in repose. 
• I think I've discovered the secret of life - you just hang around until you get used to it.
• Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets. 
• Life is like a blanket too short.  You pull it up and your toes rebel, you yank it down and shivers meander about your shoulder; but cheerful folks manage to draw their knees up and pass a very comfortable night. 
• Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.
• You can't escape history, or the needs and neuroses you've picked up like layers and layers of tartar on your teeth. 
• Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.
• I have a simple philosophy:  Fill what's empty.  Empty what's full.  Scratch where it itches.
• Life is like a coin.  You can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once.
• We are born wet, naked, and hungry.  Then things get worse.
• Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.
• Life is a cement trampoline.
• To preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances and hostilities, is as great a miracle as to create him. 
• Life... is like a box of chocolates - a cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that no one ever asks for, unreturnable because all you get back is another box of chocolates.  So, you're stuck with mostly undefinable whipped mint crap, mindlessly wolfed down when there's nothing else to eat while you're watching the game.  Sure, once is a while you get a peanut butter cup or an English toffee but it's gone too fast and the taste is fleeting.  In the end, you are left with nothing but broken bits filled with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts, which, if you are desperate enough to eat, leaves nothing but an empty box of useless brown paper.
• He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. 
• God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled.
• Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be. 
• I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.
• The great business of life is to be, to do, to do without, and to depart.
• Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.
• My formula for living is quite simple.  I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night.  In between, I occupy myself as best I can.
• To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach. 
• Living involves tearing up one rough draft after another. 
• My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn. 
• No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence. 
• Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire.  I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl.  Let him come out as I do, and bark.
• Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told:  "I am with you kid.  Let's go."
• Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself. 
• Why torture yourself when life'll do it for you? 
• Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
• Puritans will never believe it, but life is full of disagreeable things that aren't even good for you. 
• 'Tis all a chequer board of nights and days, Where destiny with men for pieces plays; Hither and thither, and mates, and slays.
• Life: It is about the gift not the package it comes in. 
• ...the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.
• Don't go around saying the world owes you a living.  The world owes you nothing.  It was here first. 
• Life is the game that must be played. 
• You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of.  You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life. 
• There is no wealth but life. 
• I know what things are good:  friendship and work and conversation.  These I shall have. 
• Life will always remain a gamble, with prizes sometimes for the imprudent, and blanks so often to the wise. 
• The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. 
• I've learned never to be surprised if what must inevitably happen happens right now. 
• Life is not a final.  It's daily pop quizzes. 
• Eating, loving, singing and digesting are, in truth, the four acts of the comic opera known as life, and they pass like bubbles of a bottle of champagne.  Whoever lets them break without having enjoyed them is a complete fool. 
• We mourn the transitory things and fret under the yoke of the immutable ones. 
• I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. 
• Life was a damned muddle - a football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of - everyone claiming the referee would have been on his side. 
• Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out. 
• Following straight lines shortens distances, and also life. 
• Here is the world.  Beautiful and terrible things will happen.  Don't be afraid. 
• Life is like sailing.  You can use any wind to go in any direction.
• Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation. 
• In life we all have an unspeakable secret, an irreversible regret, an unreachable dream and an unforgettable love. 
• I count life just a stuff To try the soul's strength on.
• Today, fill your cup of life with sunshine and laughter.
• Life may have no meaning.  Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove.
• Life is an incurable Disease.
• The philosophy of mine earth can be summed up as this:  Sunshine creates happiness, and I create myself.  Nights are long and life is predominantly good.  Wind is refreshing.  Tea is wisdom.  Do the best you can, and be good to yourself so that you can above all be good to others.
• Human life is purely a matter of deciding what's important to you.
• For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. 
• Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination.
• The only way to have a life is to commit to it like crazy.
• Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.
• Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix. 
• In masks outrageous and austere, The years go by in single file; But none has merited my fear, And none has quite escaped my smile.
• To succeed in life, you need three things:  a wishbone, a backbone and a funnybone.
• The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
• I say to my child, I will explain to you as much of life as I can, but you must remember that there is a part of life for which you are the explanation.
• All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
• Sunday clears away the rust of the whole week. 
• We tear life out of life to use it for looking at itself. 
• Psychoanalysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts.  Life itself still remains a very effective therapist. 
• Give us Lord, a bit o' sun, A bit o' work and a bit o' fun; Give us all in the struggle and sputter Our daily bread and a bit o' butter.
• The tragedy of life is not that man loses, but that he almost wins.
• Live for the roots, Love the green, Dance with the blossoms.
• Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we're here we should dance.
• When compiling his great dictionary, the young Noah Webster travels to the Himalayas, where he climbs to the cave of the world's wisest man.  "O, great sage," he says, "tell me the meaning of life."  The sage sits Noah at his feet and, with great solemnity, commences to unfold the meaning of life.  When finished, he places a hand on the young man's shoulder and says, "Do you have any other questions, my son?"  Noah flips a page in his notebook and says, "You wouldn't know the meaning of lift, would you?" 
• We're all accidental soldiers in the army of life.
• Life is a long process of getting tired.
• The kaleidoscope of colour which is my life, shows the interesting choices I've made along the way.
• He who has nothing to die for has nothing to live for. 
• But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
• I wish to die knowing that I took a fleeting instant of eternity and fashioned from it a lifetime.
• God asks no man whether he will accept life.  That is not the choice.  You must take it.  The only question is how. 
• Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. 
• Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?
• There is a time early in life when there seem to be countless reasons for happiness, and then you discover your mom is making them up.
• In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life.  It goes on.
• To whoever invented fantasy, redwood trees, and apple pie for breakfast:  well done.
• Sometimes our hearts get tangled And our souls a little off-kilter...
• Life is like a ten-speed bicycle.  Most of us have gears we never use.
• There is no finish line.
• It may be life is only worthwhile at moments.  Perhaps that is all we ought to expect.
• I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse.  I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.
• The art of life is the art of avoiding pain. 
• Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man's life. 
• The fear of life is the favorite disease of the 20th century.
• In the book of life, the answers aren't in the back. 
• The world is a grindstone and life is your nose.
• Not unfortunately the universe is wild - game-flavoured as a hawk's wing. 
• The miracle is not to fly in the air, or to walk on the water, but to walk on the earth.
• People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle.  But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth.  Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize:  a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child - our own two eyes.  All is a miracle.
• You live and learn.  At any rate, you live.
• Life can be easy, it is only question of choosing between solutions and illusions.
• Everything which is properly business we must keep carefully separate from life.  Business requires earnestness and method; life must have a freed handling. 
• Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers. 
• The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.  It is a little star dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
• Life is the sum of all your choices.
• Life is a brief opportunity to do something prehumously. 
• Life is the fire that burns and the sun that gives light.  Life is the wind and the rain and the thunder in the sky.  Life is matter and is earth, what is and what is not, and what beyond is in Eternity.
• Out of a hundred years a few minutes were made that stayed with me, not a hundred years.
• If A equals success, then the formula is:  A = X + Y + Z, where X is work, Y is play, and Z is keep your mouth shut.
• I gave my life to learning how to live. Now that I have organized it all... It is just about over.
• There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination.  Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic. 
• Life is not fair, nor has it ever been, but the morning seems determined to dawn until it is. 
• Life is a horizontal fall.
• [P]erhaps nothing 'ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late.  It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right. 
• Only a few things are really important. 
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• We are like people with short-term leases on summer cottages; we can never seem to make our provisions come out even with our stay. 
• The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
• Everything that occurs in your life is part of God's plan to wake you up.
• Life is like eating artichokes; you have got to go through so much to get so little. 
• Summing up, it is clear the future holds great opportunities.  It also holds pitfalls.  The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o'clock.
• There is a lesson we learn early and harmlessly, or late and traumatically - that there are things we can break that our parents can't fix. 
• Life is a ticket to the greatest show on earth. 
• Life has no auto-settings.  No batteries.  You gots to wind it up!
• Situated in some nebulous distance I do what I do so that the universal balance of which I am a part may remain a balance.
• Few of us write great novels; all of us live them. 
• Life's like a novel with the end ripped out.
• If you stop struggling, then you stop life. 
• Sometimes questions are more important than answers. 
• It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you.
• My quest for cosmic understanding is a book I have picked up and put down many times, always forgetting to insert a bookmark.
• There is a strange reluctance on the part of most people to admit that they enjoy life.
• Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way around.
• If a man in the morning hear the right way, he may die in the evening without regret.
• The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature. 
• You don't want to get to the end of life's journey and discover you never left the interstate. 
• In small proportions we just beauties see, And in short measures life may perfect be.
• We should give meaning to life, not wait for life to give us meaning.
• Life is a sexually transmitted disease and there is a 100% mortality rate.
• Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas. 
• Many of us are equal to life's emergencies who cannot bear its day-after-dayness. 
• Life is like an onion; you peel off layer after layer and then you find there is nothing in it.
• Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
• I do like a little bit of butter to my bread.
• Life may be defined to be the power of self-augmentation or assimilation, not of self-nurture; for then a steam-engine over a coal-pit might be made to live. 
• Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars. 
• People find it hard to be both comic and serious, though life manages it easily enough.
• Shall I redirect my life's journey because down some sideroad might be some trifle I'm entitled to?
• Life is a long lesson in humility.
• In life, as in restaurants, we swallow a lot of indigestible stuff just because it comes with the dinner. 
• Life seems nothing more than a quick succession of busy nothings."
• Reason and justice tell me there's more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism. 
• To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.
• Life is easier than you'd think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable. 
• When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
• One wanders through life as if wandering through a field in the dark of night, wearing a blindfold and very heavy shoes, with a poisonous toad waiting patiently beneath a clump of weeds, knowing full well that eventually you will step on him. 
• Life is not like a box of chocolates.  It's more like a jar of jalapenos.  What you do today might burn your ass tomorrow.
• There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
• The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination.  But the combination is locked up in the safe. 
• Every creatures stalks some other, and catches it, and is caught.
• A great part of life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure.
• I have come one step away from everything.  And here I stay, far from everything, one step away.
• Anxiety and distress, interrupted occasionally by pleasure, is the normal course of man's existence. 
• There are no extra pieces in the universe.  Everyone is here because he or she has a place to fill and every piece must fit itself into the big jigsaw puzzle.
• I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean.  I might think about it a little bit, but if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else.  But I don't have to know an answer....  I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly.  It doesn't frighten me.
• Life is just a series of trying to make up your mind. 
• The history of man for the nine months preceding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting and contain events of greater moment than all the three score and ten years that follow it.
• Perhaps we are looking at this from a wrong perspective; this search for the truth, the meaning of life, the reason of God.  We all have this mindset that the answers are so complex and so vast that it is almost impossible to comprehend.  I think, on the contrary, that the answers are so simple; so simple that it is staring us straight in the face, screaming its lungs out, and yet we fail to notice it.  We're looking through a telescope, searching the stars for the answer, when the answer is actually a speck of dirt on the telescope lens.
• Life is little more than a loan shark:  It exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes. 
• Life is a shit sandwich.  But if you've got enough bread, you don't taste the shit.
• There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner:  that, in the dinner, the sweets come last. 
• Life never tires of testing the proposition that life must go on.
• The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.  It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
• Almost everything in life is easier to get into than out of.
• Chance is always powerful, let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.
• Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run.  The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
• Life is a series of collisions with the future.
• To the student I would say, "Life is principally multiple choice, but at the end there's a tough essay question." 
• The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing. 
• Life is half spent before we know what it is.
• Why does a person even get up in the morning?  You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die.  Life is so stupid I can't stand it. 
• Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust - we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper. 
• Jack Palance:  "Do you know what the secret of life is?  One thing.  Just one thing.  You stick to that and everything else don't mean shit." Billy Crystal:  "Yeah, but what's that one thing?" 
• Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.
• Life is an endless struggle full of frustrations and challenges, but eventually you find a hair stylist you like.
• Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? is not life one?
• What is life?  It is the flash of a firefly in the night.  It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.  It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
• Have you noticed that life, real honest-to-goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in the newspapers?
• God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny. 
• Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive.
• Unbeing dead isn't being alive.
• Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.
• When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.