Life Quotes

Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast - you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.
– Eddie Cantor
Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to be controlled by good people, by people who love you.
– Orson Scott Card
So if it seems that some of what I'll have to say in the pages to come doesn't reflect the mellowing of age, that's only because I've never found that life and memories respond to time the way that tobacco does.
– Caleb Carr
As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
– M. Cartmill
I am an old man, but in many senses a very young man. And this is what I want you to be, young, young all your life.
– Pable Casals
She used to drag her mattress besider her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window - or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that is was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation.
– Willa Cather
We cannot control the evil tongues of others; but a good life enables us to disregard them.
– Cato the Elder
If grass can grow through cement, love can find you at every time in your life.
– Cher
Anything that is of value in life only multiplies when it is given.
– Deepak Chopra
I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly find - at the age of fifty, say - that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study, or read about...It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.
– Agatha Christie
It is necessary to try to surpass oneself always; this occupation ought to last as long as life.
– Queen Christina
A happy life consists in tranquillity of mind.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
A life of peace, purity, and refinement leads to a calm and untroubled old age.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
Our span of life is brief, but is long enough for us to live well and honestly.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
Turbulence is life force. It is opportunity. Let's love turbulence and use it for change.
– Ramsey Clark
In all the affairs of life, social as well as political, courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest to the grateful and appreciating heart.
– Henry Clay
Be you in what line of life you may, it will be amongst your misfortunes if you have not time properly to attend to pecuniary [monetary] matters. Want of attention to these matters has impeded the progress of science and of genius itself.
– William Cobbett
The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizzare which seems inherent in them.
– Jean Cocteau
Enjoy your own life without comparing it with that of another.
– Marquis de Condorcet
If a man withdraws his mind from the love of beauty, and applies it as sincerely to the love of the virtuous; if, in serving his parents, he can exert his utmost strength; if, in serving his prince, he can devote his life; if in his intercourse with his friends, his words are sincere - although men say that he has not learned, I will certainly say that he has.
– Confucius
The man who in view of gain thinks of righteousness; who in the view of danger is prepared to give up his life; and who does not forget an old agreement however far back it extends - such a man may be reckoned a complete man.
– Confucius
While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve spirits [of the dead]?...While you do not know life, how can you know about death?
– Confucius
I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.
– John Constable
The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief.
– Michael Crichton
I think wholeness comes from living your life consciously during the day and then exploring your inner life or unconscious at night.
– Margery Cuyler
Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
– Robertson Davies
A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.
– Robertson Davies
To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given the chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy. As everyone else, I love to dunk my crust in it. But alone, it is not a diet designed to keep body and soul together.
– Bette Davis
Life is a zoo in a jungle.
– Peter De Vries
Character - the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life - is the source from which self respect springs.
– Joan Didion
As a general rule the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.
– Benjamin Disraeli
Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forgo an advantage.
– Benjamin Disraeli
Dedicate some of your life to others. Your dedication will not be a sacrifice. It will be an exhilarating experience because it is an intense effort applied toward a meaningful end.
– Dr. Thomas Dooley
The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think.
– William O. Douglas
It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life.
– W. E. B. Du Bois
It is amazing how much crisper the general experience of life becomes when your body is given a chance to develop a little strength.
– Frank Duff
Give not over thy soul to sorrow; and afflict not thyself in thy own counsel. Gladness of heart is the life of man and the joyfulness of man is length of days.
– Ecclesiastes
The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. The trite subjects of human efforts, possessions, outward success, luxury have always seemed to me contemptible.
– Albert Einstein
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
– Albert Einstein
We succeed only as we identify in life, or in war, or in anything else, a single overriding objective, and make all other considerations bend to that one objective.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.
– George Eliot
The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
– George Eliot
Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness.
– George Eliot
Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life; he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Bear in mind that you should conduct yourself in life as at a feast.
– Epictetus
You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
– Evan Esar
The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us. If you can do that, and live that way, you are really a wise man.
– Euripides
There is one thing alone
that stands the brunt of life throughout its course:
a quiet conscience.
– Euripides
Eliminate something superfluous from your life. Break a habit. Do something that makes you feel insecure.
– Piero Ferrucci
I've never struck a woman in my life, not even my own mother.
– W. C. Fields
Death hath so many doors to let out life.
– John Fletcher
If I have learnt anything, it is that life forms no logical patterns. It is haphazard and full of beauties which I try to catch as they fly by, for who knows whether any of them will ever return?
– Margot Fonteyn
Life is consciousness.
– Emmet Fox
The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.
– Anatole France
If you wouldst live long, live well, for folly and wickedness shorten life.
– Benjamin Franklin
What is it about genus arboretum that socks us in the figurative solar plexus? We see a logging truck go cruising down the road, stacked with a bunch of those fresh-cut giants, we feel like we lost a brother. Next thing you know, we're in The Brick, we're flopping money down on the bar. Wood. We're under a roof. Wood. We're walking the floors. Wood. Grabbing a pool cue. That's wood. Our friends in the forest carry a set of luggage from the mythical baggage carousel. Tree of life, tree of knowledge, family tree, Buddha's Bodhi tree. Page one of life, in the beginning. Genesis 3:22. Adam and Eve. They're kicking back in the garden of Eden and boom, they get an eviction notice. Why is that? Lest they should also take of the tree of life, eat and live forever. A definitive Yahweh no-no. Be good to yourself, go out and plant a wet one on a tree.
– Diane Frolov and Robin Green
He's turned his life around. He used to be depressed and miserable. Now he's miserable and depressed.
– David Frost
Life is a risk.
– Diane Von Furstenberg
Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
– Paul Gauguin
I am convinced that life in a physical body is meant to be an ecstatic experience.
– Shakti Gawain
When I'm trusting and being myself... everything in my life reflects this by falling into place easily, often miraculously.
– Shakti Gawain
Make your life a mission - not an intermission.
– Arnold H. Glasgow
Is there life before death?
– Graffito
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.
– Martha Graham
Sex should be wild. Unfettered and free. We're animals, aren't we? And, basically, we're all wolves in sheep's fur. I always wanted more. Not frequency, I am not talking about frequency; although that would have been great, too. I wanted more intensity. I wanted to be out there, outside myself, outside my skin. I wanted sex to be like robbing life out of the jaws of death!
– Robin Green
Doubt 'til thou canst doubt no more...doubt is thought and thought is life. Systems which end doubt are devices for drugging thought.
– Albert Guerard
Unless a life is activated by sustained purpose it can become a depressingly haphazard affair.
– Richard Guggenheimer
Please write again soon. Though my own life is filled with activity, letters encourage momentary escape into others lives and I come back to my own with greater contentment.
– Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
Time is a cruel thief to rob us of our former selves. We lose as much to life as we do to death.
– Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
Because you are in control of your life. Don't ever forget that. You are what you are because of the conscious and subconscious choices you have made.
– Barbara Hall
You're alive. Do something. The directive in life, the moral imperative was so uncomplicated. It could be expressed in single words, not complete sentences. It sounded like this: Look. Listen. Choose. Act.
– Barbara Hall
Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible - not to have run away.
– Dag Hammarskjold
Every day we do things, we are things that have to do with peace. If we are aware of our life..., our way of looking at things, we will know how to make peace right in the moment, we are alive.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
It is only by following your deepest instinct that you can lead a rich life, and if you let your fear of consequence prevent you from following your deepest instinct, then your life will be safe, expedient and thin.
– Katharine Butler Hathaway
Laughing at our mistakes can lengthen our own life. Laughing at someone else's can shorten it.
– Cullen Hightower
I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one's inner life. And that too is a deed.
– Etty Hillesum
A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Miserable mortals who, like leaves, at one moment flame with life, eating the produce of the land, and at another moment weakly perish.
– Homer
Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.
– Bell Hooks
Engineering is a great profession. There is the satisfaction of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realisation in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings homes to men or women. Then it elevates the standard of living and adds to the comforts of life. This is the engineer's high privilege.
– Herbert Hoover
Don't take life too seriously. You'll never get out of it alive.
– Elbert Hubbard
He who every morning plans the transaction of the day and follows out that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through the maze of the most busy life. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidence, chaos will soon reign.
– Victor Hugo
I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life, than on the nature of those events themselves.
– Wilhelm von Humboldt
Custom is the great guide of human life.
– David Hume
Get pleasure out of life...as much as you can. Nobody ever died from pleasure.
– Sol Hurok
Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
– Henry James
Live all you can - it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?
– Henry James
There are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're the most wonderful sort.
– Henry James
Thanks to his constant habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught.
– Henry James
The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
– William James
The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.
– William James
Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.
– Storm Jameson
Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life: if it has been honest and dutiful to society the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one.
– Thomas Jefferson