“If desires fly by like shadows,
If vows are empty words,
Is it worth it to live in this fog of delusion?
Is it worth it to live if the truth is dead?
is it worth when life’s summer grows to winter?
Then it is to know what love is,
waiting on a foreign shore.”

Last update Feb. 6, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "If desires fly by like shadows, If vows are empty words, Is it worth it to live in this fog of delusion? Is it worth…" by Alexis Karpouzos?

Related quotes

Theodore Roosevelt photo

“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.”

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.

“And love … love was worth dying for.
Worth living for, too.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Reborn

Johnny Depp photo
Alfred Austin photo

“He is dead already who doth not feel
Life is worth living still.”

Alfred Austin (1835–1913) British writer and poet

Source: Is Life Worth Living? http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/1/9/3/1/19316/19316.htm (1896)

Jonathan Safran Foer photo

“I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it?”

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
Context: I felt that night, on the stage, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming? (p. 145)

William Beebe photo

“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)

“It is good that a man's enemies want him dead, for it proves he has lived a life of worth.”

Forrest Carter (1925–1979) Political speechwriter, politician, novelist, memoirist

Source: The Outlaw Josey Wales

Stephen Fry photo

“It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.”

Referencing Oscar Wilde from the preface of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"; "All art is quite useless".
1990s, Moab is My Washpot (autobiography, 1997)
Source: Moab Is My Washpot
Context: … but love, like all art, as Oscar said, it's quite useless. It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe but not worth bothering with.

Related topics