Quotes about life
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“Life is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think.”

Molière (1622–1673) French playwright and actor

“Life is change. If you aren't growing and evolving, you're standing still, and the rest of the world is surging ahead.”

Louise Penny book Still Life

Source: Still Life

World, Change

“you are not too old
and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out
it's own secret”

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

Secret

“There comes a time in every woman's life when the only thing that helps is a glass of champagne.”

Bette Davis (1908–1989) film and television actress from the United States

Time, Help

“the only escape from the miseries of life are music and cats…”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Music, Cats

“Life (as you call it) is an opportunity for you to know experientially what you already know conceptually. You need learn nothing to do this. You need merely remember what you already know, and act on it.”

Neale Donald Walsch (1943) American writer

Source: Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1

Learning

“Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game

Source: The Angel's Game

War, Art, Knowledge

“I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.”

Clarice Lispector book A Breath of Life

Source: A Breath of Life

Death, Madness, Dead

“We're all victims of what life deals out. It's how we handle it that's important.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

“With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything…”

Saul Bellow book Herzog

Source: Herzog

Sadness, Cry

“Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.”

Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) American playwright

“While you're working, you don't have to look life in the eye.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

“The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Love, Heart Touching

“Let life be short, else shame will be too long.”

William Shakespeare Henry V

Source: Henry V

“He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

Source: Faithless

“Take the adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment passes! 'Tis but a banging of the door behind you, a blithesome step forward, and you are out of your old life and into the new!”

Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932) British novelist

“I've never wanted a quiet life.”

Lydia Cacho (1963) Mexican journalist

“When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really truly gone?”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: It's Not Summer Without You

Love, Feeling, Personality

“Death is a fiction created by people who live their lives in total unawareness. There is only life, life and life alone, moving from one dimension to another, another dimension to another.”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Source: Life and Death in One Breath

Death, People

“Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Dreams, Question, Passion

“And life changes. Maybe just a little, maybe a lot. And at some point, it just isn't worth the fight to fix it.”

Jeffery Deaver (1950) novelist, journalist, lawyer

Change, Fight

“There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

Source: The Portrait of a Lady

Tea

“I stopped hating and started just being. My whole life, I had been the most defensive person you'd meet, unable to tolerate any criticism. But now I started listening and being.”

Anthony Kiedis book Scar Tissue

Source: Scar Tissue

Hate, Personality

“Our life is made by the death of others.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIV Anatomy, Zoology and Physiology

Death

“The deeper we look into nature, the more we recognize that it is full of life, and the more profoundly we know that all life is a secret and that we are united with all life that is in nature. Man can no longer live for himself alone. We realize that all life is valuable, and that we are united to all this life. From this knowledge comes our spiritual relationship to the universe.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 248

Secret, Nature

“Thought can never capture the movement of life, it is much too slow.”

U.G. Krishnamurti book Mind is a Myth

Source: Mind is a Myth (1987), Ch. 3: Not Knowing Is Your Natural State
Context: Thought can never capture the movement of life, it is much too slow. It is like lightning and thunder. They occur simultaneously, but sound, travelling slower than light, reaches you later, creating the illusion of two separate events.

“In our life there is a single color, as on an artist palette which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

Love, Art, Color

“I am a true adorer of life, and if I can't reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down. Those who understand will require no further explanation.”

Saul Bellow book Henderson the Rain King

Source: Henderson the Rain King

Understanding, Kiss

“I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

Source: The Theater and Its Double

Art

“Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.”

Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) American playwright

Question

“The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

“The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

World, Way

“She was seventeen, her entire life shining on her lips.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

“How small life is here
and how big nothingness.
The sky, tired of light,
has given everything to the snow.

The two trees bow
their heads to each other.
Clouds cross the world’s
silence in a circle dance”

Robert Walser (1878–1956) Swiss writer

Source: Oppressive Light: Selected Poems by Robert Walser

World, Tree, Light, Silence

“To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Suffering

“Life cheats us with shadows.
We ask it for pleasure.
It gives it to us with bitterness
and disappointment in its train.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Pleasure, Disappointment, Cheating, Training

“I don't do regrets. Regrets are pointless. It's too late for regrets. You've already done it, haven't you? You've lived your life. No point wishing you could change it.”

Lemmy Kilmister (1945–2015) British singer-songwriter

Change

“Still, life had a way of adding day to day”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Variant: Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.
Source: Mrs. Dalloway

Way

“I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! —and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning book Sonnets from the Portuguese

No. LXIII
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
Context: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! —and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Love, Death, God, Smile

“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.”

Aristotle book Politics

Source: Politics

God, Nature, Animals

“How long could you love a woman who didn't love you, Cecil?
A woman who didn't love me? Oh, all my life!”

Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere's Fan

Source: Lady Windermere's Fan

Love

“Life… is a paradise to what we fear of death.”

William Shakespeare Measure for Measure

Source: Measure for Measure

Death, Fear

“Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant?… We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.”

Diane Ackerman (1948) Author, poet, naturalist

“You don't write because someone sets assignments! You write because you need to write, or because you hope someone will listen or because writing will mend something broken inside you or bring something back to life.”

Joanne Harris book Blackberry Wine

Source: Blackberry Wine

Hope

“But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Source: Wisdom of the Heart

God, World, Singing

“The Answer to the Great Question… Of Life, the Universe and Everything… Is… Forty-two,' said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Question, Universe

“Death belongs to life as birth does. The walk is in the raising of the foot as in the laying of it down.”

Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds

268
Source: Stray Birds (1916)

Death, Birth

“There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I'd like to know. I wish someone could tell me.”

Raymond Carver book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Source: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)

Love, Hate, Time

“Most people fail in life not because they aim too high and miss, but because they aim too low and hit.”

Les Brown (1945) American politician

People

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

No source in Hemingway's works has been found. May have originated in a 2000 post to the Usenet group alt.support.depression. link https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/alt.support.depression/wYH4aCNHyp4/_d50yuXTeHsJ <br class="br">Disputed

Love, Sleep

“I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Problem

“Without music and dance, life is a journey through a desert.”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

Music, Dance

“This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around.”

Terry Pratchett book Wyrd Sisters

Source: Wyrd Sisters

Art, Way

“My darling," she said at last, are you sure you don't mind being a mouse for the rest of your life?"
"I don't mind at all" I said.
It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.”

Roald Dahl book The Witches

Source: The Witches

Love

“Life is an adventure in forgiveness.”

Norman Cousins (1915–1990) American journalist

15 April 1978.
Saturday Review

Forgiveness, Happy, Valentine's Day

“There are three intolerable things in life - cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women…”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Women, Coffee

“This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.”

George V. Higgins book The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Source: The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Stupidity, Funny

“The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Victor Frankenstein in Ch. 5

Health, Beauty, Dreams, Feeling

“I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know--or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same.”

H.P. Lovecraft book Old Bugs

Source: Old Bugs

“Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?”

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

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

World, Hell

“Life is the dancer and you are the dance.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

A New Earth (2005)
Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Dance, Happy

“There are moments that define a person's whole life. MOMENTS in which everything they are and everything they may possibly become hinge on a single decision.”

Jonathan Maberry book Rot & Ruin

Source: Rot & Ruin

Decision, Personality

“An orange on the table
Your robe on the carpet
And you in my bed
Sweet present of the present
Coolness of the night
Warmth of my life.”

Jacques Prevért (1900–1977) French poet, screenwriter

Alicante

Night

“Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

“Good taste is the excuse I've always given for leading such a bad life”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

“You have to understand that in a person's life there are a few precious moments in which decisions, choices that you make now, will affect you for the rest of your life.”

Dave Pelzer book The Lost Boy

Source: The Lost Boy

Understanding, Decision, Personality

“Life will not break your heart. It'll crush it.”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

Heart

“And what of Nature itself, you say – that callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang? Well, it is not so much of an engine as you think. As for "red in tooth and fang," whenever I hear the phrase or its intellectual echoes I know that some passer-by has been getting life from books.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

Books, Nature, Thinking

“The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.”

Bertrand Russell The Problems of Philosophy

Source: The Problems of Philosophy

Nature

“Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.”

Jane Austen book Mansfield Park

Dinner was soon followed by tea and coffee, a ten miles' drive home allowed no waste of hours; and from the time of their sitting down to table, it was a quick succession of busy nothings till the carriage came to the door, and Mrs. Norris, having fidgeted about, and obtained a few pheasants' eggs and a cream cheese from the housekeeper, and made abundance of civil speeches to Mrs. Rushworth, was ready to lead the way.
Misattributed
Source: Said by Fanny Price in a 1999 adaptation of Mansfield Park. Actual quote:

Business, Success, Sad

“In a brutal country like ours, where human life is 'cheap', it's stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs? High ideas? Only people in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

People, Stupidity, Idea, Country

“Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today— when it meant so little.”

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) German novelist

Source: Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

Kiss

“I am so far from being a pessimist… on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life.”

Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953) American playwright, and Nobel laureate in Literature

Death

“My life-my whole life- take it, and do with it what you will. I love you-love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly, madly!

You didn't know it then-you know it now.”

Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere's Fan

Source: Lady Windermere's Fan

Love

“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then Success is sure.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Mark Twain's Notebook, 1887 <br class="br">Letter to Cordelia Welsh Foote (Cincinnati), 2 December 1887. Letter reprinted http://www.twainquotes.com/Success.html in Benjamin De Casseres's When Huck Finn Went Highbrow https://www.worldcat.org/title/when-huck-finn-went-highbrow/oclc/2514292 (1934)

Confidence, Success, Wise, Deep

“I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up….

You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Source: I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections

Search, Question, Forgetting

“I have found that-- just as in real life--imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.”

Steve Martin (1945) American actor, comedian, musician, author, playwright, and producer

Source: An Object Of Beauty

Imagination

“The point of power is always in the present moment.”

Louise L. Hay (1926–2017) American writer

“We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Source: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Feeling, Question, Problem

“I don't want to be a passenger in my own life.”

Diane Ackerman (1948) Author, poet, naturalist

On Extended Wings (1985)

“I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts. I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian.”

Steve Martin (1945) American actor, comedian, musician, author, playwright, and producer

Source: Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

Art, Childhood

“What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside of me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life--me, so calm and peaceful?”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

Peace, Hell

“They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they'd been dealt or to the way they had played them.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Way, Boy, Parting

“As a day well spent procures a happy sleep, so a life well employed procures a happy death.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.

Death, Happiness, Sleep

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Not by Twain, but from Edward Abbey's A Voice Crying In The Wilderness (1989).
Misattributed

Death, Fear, Time, Depressing

“Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Sense, Joy, For women

“It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors.”

Oscar Wilde Salome

Source: Salome

“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”

Frédéric Bastiat book The Law

Source: The Law (1850)
Context: Life, faculties, production — in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

Men, Law

“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 (1890–1937) American author

"Beyond the Wall of Sleep" in Pine Cones, Vol. 1, No. 6 (October 1919)
Fiction