Quotes about life

"A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world."

Huxley, Aldous on life   

"Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all."

Santayana, George on life   

"Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us."

Baudrillard, Jean on life   

"Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification."

Camus, Albert on life   

"The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one."

Cioran, E. M. on life   

"This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what's so."

Erhard, Werner on life   

"If you seek, how is that different from pursuing sound and form? If you don't seek, how are you different from earth, wood, or stone? You must seek without seeking."

Fo-Yan on life   

"The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning -- in other words, of absurdity --the more energetically meaning is sought."

Havel, Vaclav on life   

"Search for meaning, eat, sleep. Search for meaning, eat, sleep. Die, search for meaning, search for meaning, search for meaning."

Horton, Doug on life   

"Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding."

Lao-Tzu on life
4 fans of this quote   

"The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face."

Lin-Chi on life   

"The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order."

Miller, Henry on life
4 fans of this quote   

"Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning."

Miller, Henry on life
8 fans of this quote   

"The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair."

Percy, Walker on life
3 fans of this quote   

"After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment."

Poe, Edgar Allan on life
4 fans of this quote   

"Eternal truths will be neither true nor eternal unless they have fresh meaning for every new social situation."

Roosevelt, Franklin D. on life   

"How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on."

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De on life
5 fans of this quote   

"Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is."

Sartre, Jean-Paul on life
3 fans of this quote   

"If God exists and we are made in his image we can have real meaning, and we can have real knowledge through what he has communicated to us."

Schaeffer, Francis on life   

"Dare to err and to dream. Deep meaning often lies in childish plays."

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von on life   

"Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side."

Smith, Logan Pearsall on life   

"I am a part of all that I have met."

Tennyson, Lord Alfred on life
6 fans of this quote   

"There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

Wilder, Thornton on life   

"The mountains, rivers, earth, grasses, trees, and forests are always emanating a subtle, precious light, day and night, always emanating a subtle, precious sound, demonstrating and expounding to all people the unsurpassed ultimate truth."

Yuan-Sou on life   

"Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great."

Allen, Fred A. on life   

"The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi."

Allen, Fred A. on life   

"A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one."

Aristotle on life
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"I found Rome brick, I left it marble."

Augustus, Caesar on life
4 fans of this quote   

"We do not look in our great cities for our best morality."

Austen, Jane on life   

"One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound."

Austen, Jane on life   

"The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it."

Baudelaire, Charles on life   

"Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake."

Baudrillard, Jean on life   

"The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism."

Baudrillard, Jean on life   

"Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest."

Benjamin, Walter on life
4 fans of this quote   

"Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman."

Berger, John on life
3 fans of this quote   

"When in Rome, do as Rome does."

Bierce, Ambrose on life   

"What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness."

Brodsky, Joseph on life   

"Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night."

Brooke, Rupert on life
3 fans of this quote   

"The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins."

Calvino, Italo on life   

"As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means."

Camus, Albert on life