Quotes about life
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“Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.”

Paul Theroux (1941) American travel writer and novelist

New York Times (July 28, 1976).

Chance

“They're ugly, but those are the facts of life.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

“The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.”

Alexander McCall Smith book The Miracle at Speedy Motors

Source: The Miracle at Speedy Motors

Tea

“When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.

--from WHEN DEATH COMES”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Variant: When it’s over, I want to say: All my life I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
Source: New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1

Death

“There are no classes in life for beginners: right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

“I just want to say to the kids out there watching: You can do anything you want in life. Unless Jay Leno wants to do it too.”

Conan O'Brien (1963) American television show host and comedian

“I'll be all right in a minute, I'm just bewildered - by life…”

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Source: The Glass Menagerie

“One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.”

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) British writer and philosopher

Happiness, Secret

“Life takes us by surprise and orders us to move toward the unknown — even when we don't want to and when we think we don't need to.”

Paulo Coelho book By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994)
Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Thinking

“~ I've made the most important discovery of my life. It's only in the mysterious equation of love that any logical reasons can be found. I'm only here tonight because of you. You're the only reason I am… you're all my reasons.~”

John Nash (1928–2015) American mathematician and Nobel Prize laureate

Love

“We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Attributed from posthumous publications

Dreams

“I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Cecily, Act II
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

Hope, Time

“Love is energy of life.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

As quoted in Love's Way (1918) by Orison Swett Marden, p. 175; no earlier citation of this to Browning has been located.
Disputed
Variant: Love is energy of life.

Love

“life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one”

Stella Adler (1901–1992) American actress and teaching coach

Art, Soul

“The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

The universe is flux, life is opinion.
The universe is transformation: life is opinion. (Long translation)
ὁ κόσμος ἀλλοίωσις, ὁ βίος ὑπόληψις.
IV, 3
Variant: Our life is what our thoughts make it.
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IV

Universe, Change, Cute

“Was that life? Well then, once more!”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“If you do the work you get rewarded. There are no shortcuts in life.”

Michael Jordan (1963) American retired professional basketball player and businessman

“Believe in life! Always human beings will progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.”

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) American sociologist, historian, activist and writer

Last message to the world (written 1957); read at his funeral (1963)

“There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Source: Human, All Too Human

Death

“Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Source: The Gay Science

Death, Dead

“A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.”

Viktor E. Frankl book Man's Search for Meaning

Source: Man's Search for Meaning

Disease, Despair

“It's a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you're ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.”

Hugh Laurie (1959) British actor, comedian, writer, musician and director

Context: (Answering "What made you step up to making your own record?") I felt like I may not get opportunities to do this ever again, so it’s about time—it’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There’s almost no such thing as ready. There’s only now. And you may as well do it now. I mean, I say that confidently as if I’m about to go bungee jumping or something—I’m not. I’m not a crazed risk taker. But I do think that, generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.

Feeling, Thinking, Time, Waiting

“Yes, very sensible… People die of common sense, Dorian, one lost moment at a time. Life is a moment. There is no hereafter. So make it burn always with the hardest flame.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

People, Sense, Time

“There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

Stupidity, Universe

“Give me some more wine, because life is nothing.”

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher

Source: Poems of Fernando Pessoa

Wine

“It's your life-but only if you make it so.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

Source: You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life

Heart Touching

“Art is the proper task of life.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Art

“I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Variant: I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.

“Two people have been living in you all your life. One is the ego, garrulous, demanding, hysterical, calculating; the other is the hidden spiritual being, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to.”

Sogyal Rinpoche (1947–2019) Tibetan Dzogchen lama of the Nyingma tradition

Wisdom, People

“Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Sect. 38
Source: Twilight of the Idols (1888)

Men, Freedom, Indifference

“One mistake does not have to rule a person's entire life.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

Source: Any Minute

Personality

“Forget Regret, or life is yours to miss”

Jonathan Larson (1960–1996) American composer and playwright

Source: Rent

Forgetting

“I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

Dreams

“Move out or grow in any dimension and pain as well as joy will be your reward. A full life will be full of pain.”

M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) American psychiatrist

Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth

Pain, Joy

“So early in my life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

Source: The Autobiography Of Malcolm X

Learning

“It’s strange,” Moominmamma thought. “Strange that people can be sad, and even angry because life is too easy. But that’s the way it is, I suppose. The only thing to do is to start life afresh.”

Tove Jansson book Moominpappa at Sea

Source: Moominpappa at Sea

People, Sadness, Way

“A man should live his life a certain way not because of some divine authority, but because of a personal moral obligation to himself and others.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Way, Personality

“I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.”

Jeannette Walls book The Glass Castle

Source: The Glass Castle

People, Secret, World, Perfection

“Others see their possibility in the reality of you. Your message is your life lived.”

Neale Donald Walsch (1943) American writer

Reality

“I believe in the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.

I believe that the law was made for man and not man for the law; that government is the servant of the people and not their master.

I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.

I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living and that economy is a prime requisite of a sound financial structure, whether in government, business or personal affairs.

I believe that truth and justice are fundamental to an enduring social order.

I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man's word should be as good as his bond, that character—not wealth or power or position—is of supreme worth.

I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free.

I believe in an all-wise and all-loving God, named by whatever name, and that the individual's highest fulfillment, greatest happiness and widest usefulness are to be found in living in harmony with His will.

I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might.”

John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) American business magnate and philanthropist

Love, God, Hate, Happiness

“The life of faith is not a life of mounting up with wings, but a life of walking and not fainting.”

Oswald Chambers (1874–1917) British missionary

Source: My Utmost for His Highest: Selections for the Year

Faith

“We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“Arizona and New Mexico: Thinking Like a Mountain”, p. 133. <br class="br">This is a paraphrase of Thoreau: see explanation by the Walden Woods project http://www.walden.org/Library/Quotations/The_Henry_D._Thoreau_Mis-Quotation_Page). <br class="br">Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Arizona and New Mexico: On Top," & "Arizona and New Mexico: Thinking Like a Mountain"

Men, World, Peace, Mountain

“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

"Sometimes", § 4
Red Bird (2008)
Variant: Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

“The secret of the creative life is to feel at ease with your own embarrassment.”

Paul Schrader (1946) American film director

Secret, Feeling

“Just as a well-filled day brings blessed sleep, so a well-employed life brings a blessed death.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Death, Sleep

“No man needs sympathy because he has to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Chance, Back To Work

“Why take life seriously? No one gets out alive anyways.”

Kevin Smith (1970) American screenwriter, actor, film producer, public speaker and director

Source: Degrassi Generations: The Official 411

“All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no longer hesitate to shorten our woes. A day will come when it will dare and act with certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour, knowing that it has reached its term.”

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist

Our Eternity, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Death, Pain, Error, Knowledge

“You don't know what can happen tomorrow. Life is like a novel, isn't it? It's filled with suspense. You never know what's going to happen until you turn the page.”

Sidney Sheldon (1917–2007) American writer

Variant: Life is like a novel. It's filled with suspense. You have no idea what is going to happen until you turn the page.

“There are moments in life that you wish with all your heart you could take back. Like, just erase from existence. Like, if you could, you'd erase yourself right out of existence too, just to make that moment not exist.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: It's Not Summer Without You

Heart

“Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

“The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

Interview in Playboy magazine (November 1975)

World

“Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different.”

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) New Zealand author

Quoted in A. R. Orage, "Talks with Katherine Mansfield at Fontainebleau," http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XAR4yD3zcOIJ:www.gurdjieff-bibliography.com/Current/KM_07_2006_02_ORAGE_Talks_with_KM.doc The Century Magazine (November 1924) <br class="br">Context: Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different. Life would undergo a change of appearance because we ourselves had undergone a change of attitude.

Change

“Home wasn't a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together. Not a place, but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a solid shelter that you take with you for your entire life, wherever you may go.”

Sarah Dessen book What Happened to Goodbye

What Happened To Goodbye (2011)
Source: What Happened to Goodbye

Love, People, Home, Housing

“Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

“My only point, the only point that I'm making, is life has got to be allowed to continue even after theof life is--all--over….”

Tennessee Williams Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Source: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“Your life might be easier if you were. A fool for love is happier than a Dog with a heart that's all leather.”

Tamora Pierce book Bloodhound

Source: Bloodhound

Love, Dogs, Fools, Heart

“The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well.”

Horace Walpole (1717–1797) English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician

As quoted in The Christian Leader, Vol. 37, Issue 7 (17 February 1934)

Secret

“Life has more imagination than we do.”

Francois Truffaut (1932–1984) film director

Imagination

“The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Silence

“I've loved you for as long as I can remember, and I'm going to love you for the rest of my life.”

P. C. Cast book Tempted

Source: Tempted

Love

“I think it's so foolish for people to want to be happy. Happy is so momentary--you're happy for an instant and then you start thinking again. Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

Happiness, People, Thinking

“If anyone were to ask me what I want out of life I would say- the opportunity for doing something useful, for in no other way, I am convinced, can true happiness be attained.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

Happiness, Way

“If I want a long boring story with no point to it, I have my life.”

Jerry Seinfeld (1954) American comedian and actor

“I have no objection to anyone’s sex life as long as they don’t practice it in the street and frighten the horses.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Sex, Horse

“Well-meaning, helpful, good-natured attitudes of mind have not come to be honored on account of their usefulness, but because they are states of richer souls that are capable of bestowing and have their value in the feeling of the plenitude of life.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Will to Power

Source: The Will to Power

Feeling, Soul, Nature, Help

“I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you'll miss them when they're gone from your life.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Parent, Learning

“As a woman you are better off in life earning your own money. You couldn't prevent your husband from leaving you or taking another wife, but you could have some of your dignity if you didn't have to beg him for financial support.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Source: Infidel

Money, Support

“The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Imagination

“Throwing yourself into a job you enjoy is one of the life's greatest pleasures!”

Richard Branson (1950) English business magnate, investor and philanthropist

Source: Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur

Pleasure

“Life is short. People are not easy to know. They're not easy to know, so if you don't tell them how you feel, you're not going to get anywhere, I feel.”

Nina Simone (1933–2003) American singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger, and civil rights activist

People, Feeling

“Nothing in his life became him like leaving it.”

William Shakespeare Macbeth

Source: Macbeth

“Experience is a question of instinct about life.”

Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere's Fan

Source: Lady Windermere's Fan

Question

“It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.”

Max Frisch (1911–1991) Swiss playwright and novelist

Disappointment

“It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

“And the cost of a thing it will be remembered as the amount of life it requires to be exchanged for it.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

After December 6, 1845
Journals (1838-1859)
Source: Walden

“There is only one success … to be able to spend your life in your own way.”

Christopher Morley Where the Blue Begins

Where the Blue Begins (1922)

Way, Success, Success, Cute

“It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative--which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Despair

“I never considered disobeying an order or even a request from Daddy. I loved and admired him, and one of my preeminent goals in life was to earn his approbation. I learned to expect his criticisms, always constructive, but his accolades were rare. My”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Source: A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety

Love, Learning

“To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest

Family

“Avoid roasted cabbage, do not eat earwax, and look on the bright side of life!”

Christopher Paolini book Eldest

Source: Eldest

“Reading can be a road to freedom or a key to a secret garden, which, if tended, will transform all of life.”

Katherine Paterson (1932) American children's writer born and mainly raised in China

Secret, Freedom, Reading

“It is easy enough to be pleasant,
When life flows by like a song,
But the man worth while is one who will smile,
When everything goes dead wrong.”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) American author and poet

Smile, Dead, For Men

“The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.”

Alain de Botton book Status Anxiety

Source: Status Anxiety

“Belief in God and a future life makes it possible to go through life with less of stoic courage than is needed by skeptics.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: Education and the Social Order

God, Courage, Future

“If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Source: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

Parting

“There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1 March 1838); published in The Letters of Margaret Fuller vol. I, p. 327, , edited by Robert N. Hudspeth (1983).
Context: There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes. And I see no divine person. I myself am more divine than any I see — I think that is enough to say about them...

Books

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”

Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie (1997)

Death, Relationship, Goodbye, For Father

“Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Art, Music

“Every person has a right to risk their own life for the preservation of it.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Personality

“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Variant: Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life
Source: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment