Quotes about life
page 90

“Sometimes I think there are only two instructions we need to follow to develop and deepen our spiritual life: slow down and let go.”

Oriah Mountain Dreamer (1954) Canadian author

Source: The Dance: Moving To the Rhythms of Your True Self

Thinking

“It's all life is. Just going 'round kissing people.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Source: Gatsby Girls

People, Kiss

“Maybe the truth is, there's a little bit of loser in all of us. Being happy isn't having everything in your life be perfect. Maybe it's about stringing together all the little things.”

Ann Brashares The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Happiness, Truth, Perfection

“What are clouds, but an excuse for the sky? What is life, but an escape from death?”

James Clavell book Shōgun

Yabu-san's death poem after being ordered to commit seppuku.
Shōgun (1975)

Death

“Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.”

Barbara Kingsolver book Prodigal Summer

Source: Prodigal Summer

Thinking

“And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness…”

Borís Pasternak book Doctor Zhivago

И вот оказалось, что только жизнь, похожая на жизнь окружающих и среди нее бесследно тонущая, есть жизнь настоящая, что счастье обособленное не есть счастье...
As quoted in The Reporter, Volume 19, 1958
Doctor Zhivago (1957)

Happiness

“Remember, purpose is about giving… All you can do with your life is to give it away in the service of others.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

“They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived—bound, in other words, for life.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

“Poor you, you have two cute girls vying for your love. Your life is hard.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

Love, Girl

“The choice of life is not between fame and fortune, nor wealth and poverty, but between good and evil.”

Boyd K. Packer (1924–2015) American Mormon leader

Evil, Wealth

“Chiron insisted that we talk about the Labyrinth in the morning which is like 'Hey, your life's in mortal danger. Sleep tight!”

Rick Riordan book The Battle of the Labyrinth

Source: The Battle of the Labyrinth

Sleep

“Life's simplest answers are often the easiest to overlook.”

Stephen King book 11/22/63

Source: 11/22/63

“I don't know any more about the future than you do. I hope that it will be full of work, because I have come to know by experience that work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find… I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Dust Tracks on a Road

Source: Dust Tracks on a Road

Death, Happiness, Hope, Business

“But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and prophyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.”

Edna Ferber (1885–1968) Novelist, playwright

“Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes.”

Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) French writer and dramatist, father of the homonym writer and dramatist

For Men

“I mean she's Cleopatra… shouldn't she and Antony have known better? They were so different…"
"Variety is the spice of life"
"And from a thousand miles apart"
"Absence makes the heart grow fonder”

Ally Carter (1974) American writer

Source: Uncommon Criminals

Heart

“If life gives you lemons lets be honest you probably just found lemons”

Kevin Donovan

“Life begins on the other side of despair.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

Despair

“Such is the life of a man. Moments of joy, obliterated by unforgettable sorrow.”

Marcel Pagnol (1895–1974) novelist, playwright and filmmaker from France

Joy

“The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.”

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) Czech author of Czech and French literature

Source: Farewell Waltz

Death, Time

“To be able to talk to your heart’s content about a book you like with someone who feels the same way about it is one of the greatest joys that life can offer.”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Books, Way, Feeling, Heart

“Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.”

Barbara Kingsolver book Prodigal Summer

Source: Prodigal Summer

Bird

“Oh if life were made of moments
Even now and then a bad one--!
But if life were only moments,
Then you'd never know you had one.”

Stephen Sondheim (1930) American composer and lyricist

Source: Into the Woods

“What, what am I to do with all of this life?”

Gwendolyn Brooks book Maud Martha

Source: Maud Martha

“Sometimes I’ve even wished there was a human pause button, where you could choose some point in your life where you could stay always.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: The Story of Us

“For the rest of my life I would be thinking about her. She would always be my biggest WHAT IF.”

Rick Riordan book The Battle of the Labyrinth

Source: The Battle of the Labyrinth

Thinking

“There's more to life then living, so hold on.”

Todd Strasser (1950) American author of young-adult and middle grade novels

“those who do not know how to see the precious things in life will never be happy.”

Alex Flinn book Beastly

Source: Beastly

Happiness

“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Source: Walden & Civil Disobedience

Men, Country

“I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Feeling, Suicide, Time

“Sometime, somewhere, life always comes to a fight, and peace always comes to an end.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Lord of Misrule

Peace, Fight

“Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.”

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Source: Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

Death, Birth

“How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it's so slow and sweet and everlasting.”

Graham Swift Tomorrow

Source: Tomorrow

Time

“There is for a man two things in life that are very important, head and shoulders above everything else. Find work you like, and find someone to live with you like. Very few people get both.”

Cormac McCarthy (1933) American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter

People

“Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destory?”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

Death

“Life was what happened when all the what-if’s didn’t, when what you dreamed or hoped or – in this case – feared might come to pass passed by instead.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Fear, Dreams, Hope

“Life is sacred, that is to say, it is the supreme value, to which all other values are subordinate.”

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

“Don’t waste another day of your life grieving over something that you cannot do anything about. Let God give you a new beginning. Your mistakes are not enough to stop God if you don’t let them.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

God

“I've never worked so hard for anything in my life as I have for you.”

Sylvia Day (1973) American writer

Source: Reflected in You

“When I was young, I was so interested in baseball that my family was afraid I'd waste my life and be a pitcher. Later they were afraid I'd waste my life and be a poet. They were right.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Family

“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Soul, Reality, Time

“You weaseled your way into my life, Simon Lewis, and I don’t know how or why or even when but it happened, and I kind of hate it but I can’t change it, and here it is”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Hate, Way, Change

“The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind.”

Caroline Knapp (1959–2002) American writer

Source: Drinking: A Love Story

Learning

“Life turns on a dime.”

Stephen King book 11/22/63

Source: 11/22/63

“Perhaps it seems odd that a casual meeting on the street could have brought about such change. But sometimes life is like that isn't it”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Change

“You have a responsibility to your future self, who is someone you might not even know, might not even understand yet. Because until you die, that future self has as much of a life as you do. […] Your life is not disposable.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: Two Boys Kissing

Understanding, Future

“the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.”

Anita Shreve (1946–2018) American writer

Source: The Last Time They Met

“Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

Love, Angels

“She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.”

Charles Frazier book Cold Mountain

Source: Cold Mountain

Age, Literature, Reading

“There are more experiences in life than you’d think for which there are no words.”

Anita Shreve (1946–2018) American writer

Thinking

“If it can be verified, we don't need faith… Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Faith, Joy

“She would tell him what she wanted in her life--her hopes and dreams for the future--and he would listen intently and then promise to make it all come true. And the way he said it made her believe him, and she knew how much he meant to her.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

Dreams, Hope, Way, Future

“Trust is the glue of life. It's the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It's the foundational principle that holds all relationships.”

Stephen R. Covey (1932–2012) American educator, author, businessman and motivational speaker

Communication, Relationship

“All my life, I thought of love as some kind of voluntary enslavement. Well, that's a lie: freedom only exists when love is present. The person who gives him or herself wholly, the person who feels freest, is the person who loves most wholeheartedly.”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Source: Eleven Minutes

Love, Lie, Feeling, Freedom

“Life is a predicament which precedes death.”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

Death

“Live in the present. Take care of the relationships in front of you now. Most friendships have a natural life, and when they've lived that out, you'll know.”

Sara Zarr (1970) American children's writer

Source: Roomies

Friendship, Nature

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest.
The soul, uneasy, and confin'd from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”

Alexander Pope An Essay on Man

Source: An Essay on Man

Hope, Home, Soul, Spring

“Life is like stepping onto a boat which is about to sail out to sea and sink.”

Shunryu Suzuki (1904–1971) Japanese Buddhist missionary

Sea

“Goddamn it. Wait for me, Eva. I waited my whole life for you.”

Sylvia Day (1973) American writer

Source: Entwined with You

Waiting

“Knowledge is Life with wings”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Knowledge

“A growing community must integrate three elements: a life of silent prayer, a life of service and above all of listening to the poor, and a community life through which all its members can grow in their own gift.”

Jean Vanier (1928–2019) Canadian humanitarian

Source: Community And Growth

Communication

“People no longer try to decipher the mystery of life but choose instead to be a part of it.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: The Witch Of Portobello

People, Parting

“Susannah continued. "If and when I go off slow dancing in the ever after, I don't want to look like I've been stuck in a hospital room my whole life. I at least want to be tan.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: The Summer I Turned Pretty

Dance

“I am the planet's most affectionate life-form, something like the cross between a golden retriever and a barnacle.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

“You cannot expect to live a positive life if you hang with negative people.”

Joel Osteen (1963) American televangelist and author

People

“I don't expect life to make sense," he said after a few moments, "but it could certainly be pleasant if it would stop kicking us in the balls.”

Scott Lynch book The Republic of Thieves

Source: The Republic of Thieves (2013), Chapter 5 “The Five-Year Game: Starting Position” section 1 (p. 250)
Context: Locke put his head in his hands and sighed.
“I don’t expect life to make sense,” he said after a few moments, “but it would certainly be pleasant if it would stop kicking us in the balls.”

Sense

“You get one pass at life. That’s all. Only one. And the lasting measure of that life is Jesus Christ.”

John Piper (1946) American writer

Source: Don't Waste Your Life

Christ

“In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

Travel

“Ask people for help. You’ll be all right. Don’t worry. It’s a great adventure, your life, and it has only just begun…”

Gregory David Roberts book Shantaram

Source: Shantaram

People, Help

“If you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Damned

Source: Damned

Children, People

“Do every act of your life as though it were the very last act of your life.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

“So keep your head high, keep your chin up, and most importantly, keep smiling, because life's a beautiful thing and there's so much to smile about.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

Smile, Beauty, Heartbreaking, Inspirational

“How could I, who loved life so intensely, have let myself be entangled for so long in that balderdash of books and paper blackened with ink!”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Zorba the Greek

Source: Zorba the Greek

Love, Books

“He would look so young. They were both so young. Tessa knew it was unusual to marry at seventeen and eighteen, but they were racing a clock.
The clock of Jem's life, before it wound down.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

“It occurred to me then that a lot of life was either about wanting and not having, or having and not wanting.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

“A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…”

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

1930s, Mein Weltbild (My World-view) (1931)
Source: The World As I See It
Context: How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving....

Men, Time, Dead

“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Variant: Life's great happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
Source: Les Misérables

Love, Happiness, Romantic, love

“I believe people ought to mate for life… like pigeons or Catholics.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Source: Manhattan

People

“I had always turned to books, to knowledge, to help me get through everything in my life—and,
sometimes, to escape it. But grief was a journey through a forest of razor blades. I walked through every
painful inch of it—no shortcuts and no anesthesia.”

Michele Bardsley (1970) American writer

Source: Don't Talk Back To Your Vampire

Pain, Books, Knowledge, Help

“Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.”

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) British journalist, businessman, and essayist

“I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957) American children's writer, diarist, and journalist

"A Bouquet of Wild Flowers", article published in the Missouri Ruralist (20 July 1917)

Learning, Mother's Day

“My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady.”

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

Source: Self-Reliance

“Nothing's the same for anyone. That's why life's this Hell, if you do a thing you're damned, and if you don't you're damned….”

E.M. Forster book Maurice

Source: Maurice

Hell

“Life before toilet paper was not worth living.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Styxx

“Life, Stormy says, is not about how fast you run or even with what degree of grace. It's about perseverance, about staying on your feet and slogging forward no matter what.”

Dean Koontz (1945) American author

Perseverance

“There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.”

Aleksandar Hemon The Lazarus Project

Source: The Lazarus Project

Effort

“Every blade in the field - Every leaf in the forest - lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Season

“A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Reality

“If it's over--if it's really over--then don't let it screw up the rest of your life.”

Nicholas Sparks A Bend in the Road

Charlie Curtis, Chapter 37, p. 339
Source: 2000s, A Bend in the Road (2001)

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

Dr. Seuss book Happy Birthday to You!

Variant: There is no one alive who
is Youer than You!
Source: Happy Birthday to You!

Life, Good Morning, Heart Touching, Powerful

“I knew what it was to yearn for a life so distant it seemed that it had never been anything more than a dream.”

Alice Hoffman book The Dovekeepers

Source: The Dovekeepers

Dreams, Distant

“She wanted—what some people want throughout life—a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of sympathy.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Scarlet Letter

Source: The Scarlet Letter

People

“She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.”

Maggie O'Farrell (1972) British writer

Source: After You'd Gone

Feeling, Reality, Reading

“I like pessimists. They’re always the ones who bring life jackets for the boat.”

Lisa Kleypas book Christmas Eve at Friday Harbor

Source: Christmas Eve at Friday Harbor

“… all his faces were designed to express rage or loathing. Now that something had happened which really deserved a face, he had none to celebrate it with. As a kind of token, he made his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face.”

Kingsley Amis book Lucky Jim

Source: Lucky Jim

Sex, Rage

“Life is like a box of chocolates.”

Winston Groom book Gump and Co.

Source: Gump and Co.

Box

“We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

“Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Game

“[…] I've come to the conclusion that the artist can not justify life or come up with a cogent reason as to why life is meaningful, but the artist can provide you with a cold glass of water on a hot day.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Water

“Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.”

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) poet, short story writer, novelist

Innkeeper's wife
A Child is Born (1942)
Context: Life is not lost by dying! Life is lost
Minute by minute, day by dragging day,
In all the thousand, small, uncaring ways,
The smooth appeasing compromises of time,
Which are King Herod and King Herod's men,
Always and always. Life can be
Lost without vision but not lost by death,
Lost by not caring, willing, going on
Beyond the ragged edge of fortitude
To something more — something no man has ever seen.
Context: Life is not lost by dying! Life is lost
Minute by minute, day by dragging day,
In all the thousand, small, uncaring ways,
The smooth appeasing compromises of time,
Which are King Herod and King Herod's men,
Always and always. Life can be
Lost without vision but not lost by death,
Lost by not caring, willing, going on
Beyond the ragged edge of fortitude
To something more — something no man has ever seen.
You who love money, you who love yourself,
You who love bitterness, and I who loved
and lost and thought I could not love again,
And all the people of this little town,
Rise up! The loves we had were not enough.
Something is loosed to change the shaken world,
And with it we must change!

Way

Quotes about life page 90

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Quotes about life
page 90