“As night the life-inclining stars best shows,
So lives obscure the starriest souls disclose.”
George Chapman (1559–1634) English dramatist, poet, and translator
Epilogue to Translations; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living.”
Source: Notebook
Last update Sept. 27, 2023. History
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Do you have more details about the quote "Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living." by Mark Twain?
Mark Twain637
American author and humorist 1835–1910Related quotes
Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States
1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904)
Context: Of course, the worst of all lives is the vicious life; the life of a man who becomes a positive addition to the forces of evil in a community. Next to that and when I am speaking to people who, by birth and training and standing, ought to amount to a great deal, I have a right to say only second to it in criminality comes the life of mere vapid ease, the ignoble life of a man who desires nothing from his years but that they shall be led with the least effort, the least trouble, the greatest amount of physical enjoyment or intellectual enjoyment of a mere dilettante type. The life that is worth living, and the only life that is worth living, is the life of effort, the life of effort to attain what is worth striving for.
“It is not pleasure that makes life worth living. It is life that makes pleasure worth having.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright
Robert McKee (1941) American academic specialised in seminars for screenwriters
Source: Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
“The isness of things is well worth studying; but it is their whyness that makes life worth living.”
William Beebe (1877–1962) American ornithologist, marine biologist, entomologist, and explorer
As quoted in On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz (1963)
“Life isn't worth living, unless it is lived for someone else.”
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
James Hillman (1926–2011) American psychologist
“I believe in one thing—that only a life lived for others is a life worth living.”
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 91
“It is the encounters with people that make life worth living.”
Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer
Variant: It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living.
