“I have had a life in which I have had to face every big fear, and it has not been pleasant.”

Source: The Mill on the Floss

From the 1997 television program Stephen Hawking's Universe http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/html/home.html
Unsourced variant: All of my life, I have been fascinated by the big questions that face us, and have tried to find scientific answers to them. Perhaps that is why I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex. This quote seems to combine the above sentence from Stephen Hawking's Universe with a statement from the Foreword to The Illustrated Brief History of Time: As Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft (a former post-doc of mine) remarked: I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex.

Speaking at the Oxford Union, December 2, 1920; quoted in Beverley Nichols 25: Being a Young Man's Candid Recollections of his Elders and Betters (London, 1926), ch. 7, p. 69.
Sometimes said to have been the first usage of this now ubiquitous cliché, though in fact the phrase university of life had been in use for many years. Some early instances:
"The disciplined minds that go from [their university's] walls will be its jewels…It will worthily introduce them to the University of Life." ~ The New Englander and Yale Review (February 1853), p. 70.
"The late Professor Greenleaf…who, not born to affluence, and not bred up to scholarly studies, achieved an honorable scholarship in the university of life". ~ Cornelius Conway Felton An Address Delivered before the Association of the Alumni of Harvard College, July 20, 1854 (Cambridge, Mass., 1854), p. 7.
"But God be thanked…for the university of life where we may acquire, at the same time that we put in practice, the rules which are to fit us for, and conduct us through the eternities." Elizabeth D. Livermore Zoë (Cincinnati, 1855), p. 14.
"When our men go into the great university of life…there are few, indeed, who have practical reason to regret that so many years were spent in the severe but salutary discipline imposed by the University of Dublin." ~ The Dublin University Magazine (April 1858), p. 419.

[Eric Shipton, w:Eric Shipton, Illustrations by Biro, That Untravelled World, 1969, 2nd edition, 1977, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 0-340-21609-3]

De toutes choses ne m'est demeuré que l'honneur et la vie qui est saulve.
Letter to his mother, Louise of Savoy, after his defeat and capture by Chares Vat Pavia, 24 February 1525

Source: The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927), p. 61.

Source: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), chapter 2

Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter I, Consolations For Unpopularity, p. 7.

Source: How to Live on 24 Hours a Day