Quotes about life

Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life's ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets.

— Henry Miller

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

— Henry Miller

Life is a tough proposition and the first hundred years are the hardest.

— Wilson Mizner

My art and profession is to live.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

The finest lives in my opinion are the common model, without miracle and without extravagance.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mode of happiness. but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed the change; happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow Up.

— Charles Morgan

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

— Christopher Morley

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.

— Grandma Moses

This tattered life is my only robe; the wind my only refuge.

— Marian Mountain

Life is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you're gonna get.

— Forrest Gump Movie

Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.

— Lewis Mumford

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

— Lewis Mumford

Life is given for wisdom, and yet we are not wise; for goodness, and we are not good; for overcoming evil, and evil remains; for patience and sympathy and love, and yet we are fretful and hard and weak and selfish. We are keyed not to attainment, but to the struggle toward it.

— Thornton T. Munger

Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.

— Vladimir Nabokov

Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.

— Ogden Nash

Not by gain our life is measured, But by what we've lost 'Tis scored; 'Tis not how much wine is drunken But how much has been outpoured. For the strength of love never standeth In the sacrifice we bear; He who has the greatest suffering Ever has the most to share.

— Watchman Nee

Life at the top is financially rewarding, spiritually draining, physically exhausting, and short.

— Peter C. Newman

If you believed more in life you would fling yourself less to the moment.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

In the book of life every page has two sides: we human beings fill the upper side with our plans, hopes and wishes, but providence writes on the other side, and what it ordains is seldom our goal.

— Nisami

Life is easier to take than you think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable and bear the intolerable.

— Kathleen Norris

Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.

— Henri Nouwen

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

— Eugene O'Neill

Every time I look into the eyes of an animal I see life; the force of life and the beauty of creation

— Radar O'Reilly

Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.

— Sir William Osler

We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.

— Sir William Osler

This also -- that I live, I consider a gift of God.

— Ovid

We never live, but we hope to live; and as we are always arranging to be happy, it must be that we never are so.

— Blaise Pascal

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

— Blaise Pascal

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.

— Boris Pasternak

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

— Cesare Pavese

You can have peace of mind, improved health and an ever-increasing flow of energy. Life can be full of joy and satisfaction.

— Norman Vincent Peale

Life is like riding a bicycle. You don't fall off unless you stop peddling.

— Claude D. Pepper

You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

— Walker Percy

Life is a campaign not a battle, and has its defeats as well as its victories.

— Don Piatt

The simplification of life is one of the steps to inner peace. A persistent simplification will create an inner and outer well-being that places harmony in one's life.

— Peace Pilgrim

Most of us fall short much more by omission than by commission. While the world perishes we go our way: purposeless, passionless, day after day.

— Peace Pilgrim

To attain inner peace you must actually give your life, not just your possessions. When you at last give your life -- bringing into alignment your beliefs and the way you live then, and only then, can you begin to find inner peace.

— Peace Pilgrim

Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life.

— Luigi Pirandello

Man values life as a sacred jewel in such a way that he reveres him most who haughtily scorns it.

— Platen

The enjoyments of this life are not equal to its evils.

— Pliny The Elder

Too often man handles life as he does the bad weather, He whiles away the time as he waits for it to stop.

— Alfred Polgar

We come and go just like ripples in a stream.

— John V. Politis

See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little.

— Pope John XXIII

Life is too short to learn German.

— R. Porson

Make your life a happy one. That is where success is possible to every man.

— Robert Powell

Live as if everything you do will eventually be known.

— Hugh Prather

Life's a bitch, and life's got lots of sisters.

— Ross Presser

Life -- how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

— V. S. Pritchett

Some people seem to go through life standing at the complaint counter.

— Fred Propp Jr.

He who allows his day to pass by without practicing generosity and enjoying life's pleasures is like a blacksmith's bellows. He breathes, but does not live.

— Proverb

A light heart lives long.

— Proverb

Live today for tomorrow it will all be history.

— Proverb

Young people talk of what they are doing; old people of what they have done; and fools of what they have a mind to do.

— Proverb

Life is an onion and one cries while peeling it.

— French Proverb

In the morning of life, work; in the mid day give council; in the evening, pray.

— German Proverb

Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it.

— Indian Proverb

There are four things every person has more of than they know; sins, debt, years, and foes.

— Persian Proverb

May God bless you to live as long as you want to; and want to as long as you live!

— Scottish Proverb

No one knows when they are well off.

— Punch

Dance like no one is watching, Love like you'll never be hurt, Sing like no one is listening, Live like it's heaven on earth.

— William Purkey

Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.

— Gilda Radner

Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step, but most of the time we are taking small, seemingly insignificant steps on the stairway of life.

— Ralph Ransom

Life is really about a spiritual unfolding that is personal and enchanting -- an unfolding that no science or philosophy or religion has yet fully clarified.

— James Redfield

Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.

— Lou Reed

Don't brood. Get on with living and loving. You don't have forever.

— Eben Eugene Rexford

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

— Arthur Rimbaud

Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.

— Antoine Rivarol

Life is a gift, and it offers us the privilege, opportunity, and responsibility to give something back by becoming more.

— Anthony Robbins

Live life fully while you're here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You're going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process. Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it. Don't try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human.

— Anthony Robbins

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.

— Carl Rogers

In the early days of the Indian Territory, there were no such things as birth certificates. You being there was certificate enough.

— Will Rogers

The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experiences.

— Eleanor Roosevelt

Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

— Eleanor Roosevelt

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

— Eleanor Roosevelt

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

— Eleanor Roosevelt

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to save it.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

To live is not breathing it is action.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

Even when I'm sick and depressed, I love life.

— Arthur Rubinstein

It is advisable that a person know at least three things, where they are, where they are going, and what they had best do under the circumstances.

— John Ruskin

There is no wealth but life.

— John Ruskin

The good life is one inspired by life and guided by knowledge.

— Bertrand Russell

The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.

— Bertrand Russell

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

— Bertrand Russell

Live virtuously, and you cannot not die too soon, or live too long.

— Lady R. Russell

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

— Antoine De Saint-Exupery

There is no shortcut to life. To the end of our days, life is a lesson imperfectly learned.

— Harrison Salisbury

Life is a wilderness of twists and turns, where faith is your only compass.

— Paul Santaguida

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

— George Santayana

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

— George Santayana

Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

— William Saroyan

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Life is a rollercoaster. Try to eat a light lunch.

— David A. Schmaltz

Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Life is but a moment, death also is but another.

— Robert H. Schuller

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

— Albert Schweitzer

Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife! To all the sensual world proclaim. One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name.

— Sir Walter Scott