Quotes about life

page 22

“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”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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…”

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

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

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

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

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

“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!”

“I've never wanted a quiet life.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Life is an adventure in forgiveness.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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).”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Life is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.”

“I pray every single moment of my life; not on my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me.”

“I know it's not thematically in tune with my new job and all, but I find it effective. Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day," I say. "But set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life. Tao of Pratchett. I live by it.”

“The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.”

“My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.”

“Men know life too early. Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.”

“Explaining that I'm faced with a choice between being with the love of my life, or saving four lives that were never meant to end.”

“She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood: that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.”

“There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.”

“The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but it is precisely for this reason that they honor life, because it brings against them its most formidable weapons.”

“Life is like crossing a river. If you take a huge step-aim for too bigger dreams-then the current will knock you off your feet and carry you away.
The way to do it is small steps, you will take hold of life. You will get there in the end.”