Life Quotes

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
– Saul Bellow
There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.
– Saul Bellow
Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
– Walter Benjamin
We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
– Walter Benjamin
Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.
– Tony Benn
Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort. No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life.
– Arnold Bennett
Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
– Alan Bennett
Every day, people settle for less than they deserve. They are only partially living or at best living a partial life. Every human being has the potential for greatness.
– Bo Bennett
Every minute you spend in your life is either spent bringing you closer to your goals or moving you away from your goals.
– Bo Bennett
If you are going to ask yourself life-changing questions, be sure to do something with the answers.
– Bo Bennett
If you have not taken the time to define what happiness means to you, what have your spent your whole life pursuing?
– Bo Bennett
One's work usually occupies more than half of one's waking life. Choosing work that does not bring happiness will lead to a life that is mostly disappointing.
– Bo Bennett
People who come from dysfunctional families are not destined for a dysfunctional life.
– Bo Bennett
The secret to having everything you want out of life is the realization that you really don't want most of the things you think you want.
– Bo Bennett
Traditional investment vehicles such as IRAs, CDs, stocks and bonds do have their place, but for the rich, they are used more as temporary storage facilities rather than life-long homes.
– Bo Bennett
Your life is the sum result of all the choices you make, both consciously and unconsciously. If you can control the process of choosing, you can take control of all aspects of your life. You can find the freedom that comes from being in charge of yourself.
– Robert Bennett
I have a simple life. I mean, you just give me a drum roll, they announce my name, and I come out and sing. In my job I have a contract that says I'm a singer. So I sing.
– Tony Bennett
I have been doing music all my life so everyday when I get up I expect music will be part of it.
– George Benson
My whole career from the early 70s on has been mind-blowing. I didn't imagine in my life that I would ever be considered a guitar player first of all because I started off as a singer.
– George Benson
After 13 years of life on the half shell in Hollywood, I have made a trip where I wasn't a tourist.
– Edgar Bergen
Charlie, what is nature of life?
– Edgar Bergen
Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.
– John Berger
That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.
– John Berger
Our job is to bring the dead facts to life.
– William Bernbach
The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.
– Leonard Bernstein
Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely and gallantly, as a splendid adventure in which you are setting out into an unknown country, to face many a danger, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.
– Annie Besant
Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.
– Ambrose Bierce
The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.
– Ambrose Bierce
Life is short, but it's long enough to ruin any man who wants to be ruined.
– Josh Billings
The man whose only pleasure in life is making money, weighs less on the moral scale than an angleworm.
– Josh Billings
There are two things in life for which we are never truly prepared: Twins.
– Josh Billings
There are two sighs of relief every night in the life of an opera manager. The first comes when the curtain goes up The second sigh of relief comes when the final curtain goes down without any disaster, and one realizes, gratefully, that the miracle has happened again.
– Rudolf Bing
The morning after a death, we learned an avalanche of goodies about the renowned, some of which persuaded the reader that he should have cultivated the deceased in life.
– Jim Bishop
It is the paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self.
– Hugo Black
I was doing bad movies as a day job. And it almost ruined my life for a while. But I have done 130-odd films, and only fourteen have been spooky ones. I'm not spooky! I want life!
– Karen Black
The states are not free, under the guise of protecting maternal health or potential life, to intimidate women into continuing pregnancies.
– Harry A. Blackmun
You only require two things in life: your sanity and your wife.
– Tony Blair
Anxiety is the poison of humans life. It is the parent of many sins, and of more miseries. In a world where everything is doubtful, where you may be disappointed, and be blessed in dis-appointment, what means this restless stir and commotion of mind? Can your solicitude alter the cause or unravel the intricacy of human events?
– Robert Blair
Friendship! Mysterious cement of the soul, Sweet'ner of life, and solder of society.
– Robert Blair
Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.
– William Blake
For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.
– William Blake
If I had my way, if I was lucky enough, if I could be on the brink my entire life - that great sense of expectation and excitement without the disappointment - that would be the perfect state.
– Cate Blanchett
We have two kinds of employment: one with decent pay and benefits - and another of part-time pay with full-time hours, at a wage that can't nearly support a healthy family. We have two kinds of healthcare: one where people have access and insurance - and another where basic care and life-saving treatments, come at a price beyond reach.
– Kathleen Blanco
Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.
– Allan Bloom
The European arguments against the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act demonstrate that some Europeans have never lost faith in appeasement as a way of life. It is clear that Iran is cynically manipulating gullible (or equally cynical) Europeans to advance its development of weapons of mass destruction.
– John Bolton
I haven't trusted polls since I read that 62% of women had affairs during their lunch hour. I've never met a woman in my life who would give up lunch for sex.
– Erma Bombeck
I've decided life is too fragile to finish a book I dislike just because it cost $16.95 and everyone else loved it. Or eat a fried egg with a broken yolk (which I hate) when the dog would leap over the St. Louis Arch for it.
– Erma Bombeck
If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
Advances in technology will continue to reach far into every sector of our economy. Future job and economic growth in industry, defense, transportation, agriculture, health care, and life sciences is directly related to scientific advancement.
– Christopher Bond
We have a good life when we manage to live with both satisfied and unsatisfied needs, when we are not obsessed by what is beyond our reach.
– Kjell Magne Bondevik
The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.
– Daniel J. Boorstin
A man's labor is not only his capital but his life. When it passes it returns never more. To utilize it, to prevent its wasteful squandering, to enable the poor man to bank it up for use hereafter, this surely is one of the most urgent tasks before civilization.
– William Booth
Life itself is a quotation.
– Jorge Luis Borges
If you must commit suicide... always contrive to do it as decorously as possible; the decencies, whether of life or of death, should never be lost sight of.
– George Borrow
Smoking has a sedative effect upon the nerves, and enables a man to bear the sorrows of this life (of which every one has his share) not only decently, but dignifiedly.
– George Borrow
There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?
– George Borrow
I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day-to-day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
– Alain de Botton
I find a welcome interest in the problems of everyday life. I find a humanity and a devotion to using thought to alleviate suffering.
– Alain de Botton
Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.
– Alain de Botton
Snobbery exists in all areas of life, not least literary criticism. By snobbery I mean, any method of judging someone or something whereby you latch on to one or two features about them/it, and use these to come to a definitive, immovable judgement. In intellectual matters, the snob will often take the external features of a work as a guide to its value.
– Alain de Botton
We need objects to remind us of the commitments we've made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we're in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.
– Alain de Botton
The small courtesies sweeten life; the greater ennoble it.
– Christian Nestell Bovee
There is great beauty in going through life without anxiety or fear. Half our fears are baseless, and the other half discreditable.
– Christian Nestell Bovee
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Really, life is complicated enough without having a bunch of Senators deciding what we should do in the privacy of our own homes.
– Barbara Boxer
We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.
– Ray Bradbury
People cut themselves off from their ties of the old life when they come to Los Angeles. They are looking for a place where they can be free, where they can do things they couldn't do anywhere else.
– Tom Bradley
To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.
– Marlon Brando
Ridiculous yachts and private planes and big limousines won't make people enjoy life more, and it sends out terrible messages to the people who work for them. It would be so much better if that money was spent in Africa - and it's about getting a balance.
– Richard Branson
One forgets too easily the difference between a man and his image, and that there is none between the sound of his voice on the screen and in real life.
– Bertolt Brecht
What a miserable thing life is: you're living in clover, only the clover isn't good enough.
– Bertolt Brecht
I hope they're going to learn, and as a result of our response, that it isn't going to work. They're not going to change our life, they're not going to have us throw out our Constitution, and they're not going to chase us out of the Middle East.
– Paul Bremer
I think we Americans, of all people, understand the importance of a good, legal, constitutional framework as the basis of political life.
– Paul Bremer
Sex, a great and mysterious motive force in human life, has indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages.
– William J. Brennan, Jr.
I busted out of the place in a hurry and went to a saloon and drank beer and said that for the rest of my life I'd never take a job in a place where you couldn't throw cigarette butts on the floor. I was hooked on this writing for newspapers and magazines.
– Jimmy Breslin
People born in Queens, raised to say that each morning they get on the subway and go to the city, have a resentment of Manhattan, of the swiftness of its life and success of the people who live there.
– Jimmy Breslin
My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.
– Robert Bresson
Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads.
– Andre Breton
No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.
– Andre Breton
No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.
– Andre Breton
It won't make for a quiet life but it will make for an interesting paper vastly more significant because it is doing something only a daily paper can do.
– Kingman Brewster
Birds are of all animals the nearest to men for that they take delight in both music and dance, and gracefully schooling leisure to enliven life, wer the earlier artists: moreover in their airy flight (which in its swiftness symboleth man's soaring thought) they hav no rival but man, and easily surpass in their free voyaging his most desperate daring, altho' he hath fed and sped his ocean-ships with fire.
– Robert Bridges
Repudiation of pleasur is a reason'd folly of imperfection. Ther is no motiv can rebate or decompose the intrinsic joy of activ life, whereon all function whatsoever in man is based.
– Robert Bridges
The name of happiness is but a wider term for the unalloy'd conditions of the Pleasur of Life, attendant on all function, and not to be deny'd to th' soul, unless forsooth in our thought of nature spiritual is by definition unnatural.
– Robert Bridges
How long after you are gone will ripples remain as evidence that you were cast into the pool of life?
– Grant M. Bright
After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.
– Joseph Brodsky
Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.
– Joseph Brodsky
Life-the way it really is-is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.
– Joseph Brodsky
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
– Joseph Brodsky
This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
– Joseph Brodsky
What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.
– Joseph Brodsky
You are educated. Your certification is in your degree. You may think of it as the ticket to the good life. Let me ask you to think of an alternative. Think of it as your ticket to change the world.
– Tom Brokaw
You will die but the carbon will not; its career does not end with you. It will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life.
– Jacob Bronowski
Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.
– Charlotte Bronte
You had no right to be born; for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's strength.
– Charlotte Bronte
I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after.
– Emily Bronte
Old men should have more care to end life well than to live long.
– Anita Brookner
Romanticism is not just a mode; it literally eats into every life. Women will never get rid of just waiting for the right man.
– Anita Brookner
The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.
– Anita Brookner
As you emphasize your life, you must localize and define it... you cannot do everything.
– Phillip Brooks