Quotes about life
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“I'm an observer. I read about life. I research life. I find a corner in a room and melt into it. I can become invisible. It's an art, and I am a wonderful practitioner.”

Christine Feehan American writer

Source: The Twilight Before Christmas

Art, Reading

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”

Guy Debord (1931–1994) French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker and founding member of the Situationist International (SI)

Source: Society of the Spectacle (1967), Ch. 1, sct. 1.

“It is all connected Dominick," she said. "Life is not a series of isolated ponds & puddles; life is this river you see below, before you. It flows from the past through the present on it's way to the future.”

Wally Lamb book I Know This Much Is True

Source: I Know This Much Is True

Way, Past, Future

“Only those who have never known fear are allowed to think less of others for being afraid. Frankly, I think anyone who has never been afraid of anything in their entire life is either a liar or lacks imagination.”

Laurell K. Hamilton (1963) Novelist

Fear, Imagination, Thinking

“Don’t leave your relationships to chance. Pray for godly people to come into your life with whom you can connect. Don’t force relationships to happen. Pray for them to happen. Then when they do, nurture them with prayer.”

Stormie Omartian (1942) American writer

Source: The Power of a Praying® Woman

People, Chance

“One day can bend your life.”

Mitch Albom For One More Day

Source: For One More Day

“Dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life?”

H. Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) British physician, writer, and social reformer

Dreams

“The early morning belongs to the Church of the risen Christ. At the break of light it remembers the morning on which death and sin lay prostrate in defeat and new life and salvation were given to mankind”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

Death, Light, Christ

“It was not despair, but it seemed to her as if life were passing by, leaving its promises broken and unfulfilled. Yet there were other days when she listened, was led on and deceived by fresh promises which her youth had held out to her.”

Kate Chopin book The Awakening

Source: The Awakening

Youth, Despair

“Life is one long process of getting tired.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Attributed to Emerson in Life’s Instructions for Wisdom, Success, and Happiness (2000) by H. Jackson Brown Jr., as well as numerous on-line sources since, the article "The Purpose of Life Is Not To Be Happy But To Matter" at the Quote Investigator https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/29/purpose/ indicates that this quote is probably derived from various statements first made by Leo Rosten, including the following words delivered at the National Book Awards held in New York in 1962: "The purpose of life is not to be happy — but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all." <br class="br">Misattributed

Happiness, Wise

“Life's one great lesson was: Do not care. Not caring was a person's real protection.”

Francine Pascal Fearless

Source: Fearless

Personality

“I feel like a big faker because I've been putting my life back together, and nobody knows.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Feeling

“… quality of life lies in knowledge, in culture. Values are what constitute true quality of life, the supreme quality of life, even above food, shelter and clothing.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

Source: My Life: A Spoken Autobiography

Food, Knowledge, Clothes

“You're spending your life without renewing it. You've got to be amused, properly healthily amused. You're spending your vitality without making any. Can't go on you know. Depression! Avoid depression!”

D.H. Lawrence book Lady Chatterley's Lover

Source: Lady Chatterley's Lover

“We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet; and amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog has made an alliance with us.”

Max DePree (1924–2017) American businessman and writer

Dogs, Chance

“There are two types of people in life - those who get it and those who don't.”

Paul Reiser (1957) American actor and comedian

People

“Your life is inescapable. Unless you decide to escape it.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Every You, Every Me

“I saw something even more beautiful than a sense of humor: an appreciation for life’s essential absurdity.”

Stephen King book 11/22/63

Source: 11/22/63

Beauty, Sense

“Never separate the life you lead from the words you speak.”

Paul Wellstone (1944–2002) American politician

“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.”

Jack London book Call of the Wild

Source: The Call of the Wild

Forgetting

“Of all the judgments we pass in life, none is more important than the judgment we pass on ourselves.”

Nathaniel Branden (1930–2014) Canadian–American psychotherapist and writer

“Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation.
Use it!”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

“Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.”

Don DeLillo (1936) American novelist, playwright and essayist

Source: Don DeLillo's White Noise

“Sometimes something catastrophic can occur in a split second that changes a person's life forever; other times one minor incident can lead to another and then another and another, eventually setting off just as big a change in a body's life.”

Jeannette Walls book Half Broke Horses

Source: Half Broke Horses

Change, Time, Personality

“Because it is so hard, in any life, to believe in what you can’t fully understand.”

Sarah Dessen book Keeping the Moon

Source: Keeping the Moon

Understanding

“He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Way

“First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

Parent, For Parents

“For it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

Source: Leviathan

War, Peace

“Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

Pain, Birth, Effort

“One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

Secret, Laughter

“We don't go to the ocean for anything as simple as happiness, do we? We
go there to feel alive. Like life, the ocean holds chance and change, grief and terror and beauty. It promises mortality, not peace.”

Eileen Wilks Tempting Danger

Source: Tempting Danger

Happiness, Peace, Beauty, Feeling

“Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Source: Essays

Way

“The last good time always comes, and when you see the darkness creeping toward you, you hold on to what was bright and good. You hold on for dear life.”

Stephen King book Joyland

Source: Joyland

Time

“It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in a while exhilarating.”

Stephen King Insomnia

Source: Insomnia

Beauty

“An ability to look into the confusing mess of life and see things for what they are.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Variant: Look into the confusing mess of life and see things for what they really are.
Source: Mockingjay

“All your life people will tell you things. And most of the time, probably ninety-five percent of the time, what they'll tell you will be wrong.”

Michael Crichton book The Lost World

Source: The Lost World

People, Time

“if only my whole life could be words and music, if only everything else could slip away.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

Music

“She is brave and strong and broken all at once. As she speaks it is as if her existence is no longer real to her in itself, more like a living epitaph to a life that was.”

Anna Funder (1966) Australian writer

Source: Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

Strong

“It kind of makes me wish that the worst thing that will ever happen to me would just hurry up and happen already. That way I could live the rest of my life in bliss, if only because I know how much worse things could be.”

Megan McCafferty (1973) American novelist

Source: Sloppy Firsts

Way

“A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934) Hungarian American psychologist

“You live your life as if it's real……. a thousand kisses deep”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

Kiss

“Why am I always looking at life through a window?”

Daniel Keyes book Flowers for Algernon

Source: Flowers for Algernon

“I am the son of the road, my country is a caravan and my life is the most unexpected of voyages. i belong to earth and to the god and it is to them that I will one day soon return”

Amin Maalouf (1949) Francophone Lebanese writer based in France

God, Country

“Even chance meetings are the result of karma… Things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there’s no such thing as coincidence.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

Fate, Chance

“No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

Source: Leviathan

Death, Fear, Art

“Usually life’s greatest gifts come wrapped in adversity.”

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

Source: Finding Noel

“Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes, by dozens and hundreds. Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers, and sisters, aunts and cousins, but only one mother in the whole world.”

Kate Douglas Wiggin (1856–1923) American writer

World, Beauty, Star, Sister

“Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

I searched for keywords of that text in his books online and on an electronic copy of Muir of the Mountains, and was unable to find it. On rare occasions we find something in Muir's unpublished journals that is new and which can be verified. So I also did a search of the John Muir Papers at the University of the Pacific, and once again came up empty:
Misattributed

“She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life's little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Crooked Little Heart

Way

“God has privileged us in Christ Jesus to live above the ordinary human plane of life. Those who want to be ordinary and live on a lower plane can do so, but as for me, I will not.”

Smith Wigglesworth (1859–1947) British evangelist

God, Christ

“I understood finally that the thing I
should have feared most was not loss, but
never loving. The price for safety was the regret
I felt at this moment. And yet I would
have to live with it for the rest of my life”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Smooth Talking Stranger

Love, Fear, Loss

“All my life I've thought I needed someone to complete me, now I know I need to belong to myself.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Mermaid Chair

Source: The Mermaid Chair

“And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees

Love

“Isn’t it only through laughter that we become one with the gods and thus can endure life and can overcome all the horror and waste and suffering here on earth? …Isn’t it only through laughter we can stay human?”

James Clavell book Shōgun

Source: Shōgun

God, Laughter, Suffering

“I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.”

Anne Fadiman (1953) American essayist, journalist and magazine editor

Source: Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

Fate, Imagination

“…I said everything that matters… Don't take my advice. Or anyone's advice. Trust yourself. For good or for bad, happy or unhappy, it's your life, and what you do with it has always been entirely up to you.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Best of Me

Evelyn Collier, Chapter 15, p. 223
Source: 2009, The Best of Me (2011)

Happiness

“Ryle Hira: Life is what it is”

Elizabeth Haydon book Rhapsody: Child of Blood

Source: Rhapsody: Child of Blood

“live your life as if you may lose everything.”

Mary Higgins Clark book All Through the Night

Source: All Through the Night

“A couple of times in your life, it happens like that. You meet a stranger, and all you know is that you need to know everything about him.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Sugar Daddy

Time

“If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.”

Barbara Kingsolver (1955) American author, poet and essayist

“The aims of life are the best defense against death.”

Primo Levi book The Drowned and the Saved

The Drowned and the Saved (1986)

Death

“I've come to believe that in everyone's life, there's one undeniable moment of change, a set of circumstances that suddenly alters everything.”

Nicholas Sparks book Safe Haven

Source: Safe Haven

Change

“[I]f you believe in God omnipresent, then you must believe everything that comes into your life, person or event, must have something of God in it to be experienced and loved; not hated.”

Elizabeth Goudge book Green Dolphin Street

Source: Green Dolphin Street

Love, God, Hate, Personality

“Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care… -Wintergirls”

Laurie Halse Anderson (1961) American children's writer

Pain, Family, Thinking, Hurt

“Life's got to be lived, no matter how long or short. You got to take what comes.”

Natalie Babbitt book Tuck Everlasting

Source: Tuck Everlasting

“The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.”

Hilary Mantel Bring Up the Bodies

Source: Bring Up the Bodies

Thinking

“I think it's possible to realize you love someone as deeply as you know how to love and not end up spending the rest of your life with him.”

Robin Jones Gunn (1955) American writer

Source: As You Wish

Love, Thinking

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Tree, Summer

“Life was good, one had only to live it.”

Jorge Amado (1912–2001) Brazilian writer

Source: Gabriela, Clavo y Canela

“A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully. That was the only happiness in life: to choose the best unhappiness. An unwise move, good God, you could squander everything.”

Lorrie Moore (1957) American writer

Source: Bark: Stories

God, Happiness

“You feel a little bit lost right now about what to do with your life, a bit rudderless and oarless and aimless but that’s okay… That’s alright because we’re all meant to be like that at twenty-four.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Feeling

“Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 119
Context: In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia. He did not speak until they asked him for his last request.

Death, Fear, Feeling, Decision