Quotes about: life

Life isn't long enough for love and art.
– W. Somerset Maugham
There is no greater joy nor greater reward than to make a fundamental difference in someone's life.
– Sister Mary Rose McGeady
At the end of the day, whether or not those people are comfortable with how you're living your life doesn't matter. What matters is whether you're comfortable with it.
– Phillip C. McGraw
In reality, serendipity accounts for one percent of the blessings we receive in life, work and love. The other 99 percent is due to our efforts.
– Peter McWilliams
Pain (any pain--emotional, physical, mental) has a message. The information it has about our life can be remarkably specific, but it usually falls into one of two categories: We would be more alive if we did more of this, and, Life would be more lovely if we did less of that. Once we get the pain's message, and follow its advice, the pain goes away.
– Peter McWilliams
Life's a voyage that's homeward bound.
– Herman Melville
It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it is one damn thing over and over.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
Living apart and at peace with myself, I came to realize more vividly the meaning of the doctrine of acceptance. To refrain from giving advice, to refrain from meddling in the affairs of others, to refrain, even though the motives be the highest, from tampering with another's way of life - so simple, yet so difficult for an active spirit. Hands off!
– Henry Miller
Everybody has difficult years, but a lot of times the difficult years end up being the greatest years of your whole entire life, if you survive them.
– Brittany Murphy
Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you is determinism; the way you play it is free will.
– Jawaharlal Nehru
All I can say about life is, Oh God, enjoy it!
– Bob Newhart
Fear not that thy life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a beginning.
– John Henry Cardinal Newman
I made my mistakes, but in all my years of public life, I have never profited from public service. I've earned every cent. And in all of my years in public life I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I can say that in my years of public life that I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Feeling grateful to or appreciative of someone or something in your life actually attracts more of the things that you appreciate and value into your life.
– Christiane Northrup, M.D.
Make your own recovery the first priority in your life.
– Robin Norwood
But the life that no longer trust another human being and no longer forms ties to the political community is not a human life any longer.
– Martha Nussbaum
A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.
– P. J. O'Rourke
To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
– Cynthia Ozick
If you look good and dress well, you don't need a purpose in life.
– Robert Pante
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.
– Dorothy Parker
I've learned that all a person has in life is family and friends. If you lose those, you have nothing, so friends are to be treasured more than anything else in the world.
– Trey Parker and Matt Stone
I just realized that there's going to be a lot of painful times in life, so I better learn to deal with it the right way.
– Trey Parker and Matt Stone
I love life...Yeah, I'm sad, but at the same time, I'm really happy that something could make me feel that sad. It's like...It makes me feel alive, you know. It makes me feel human. The only way I could feel this sad now is if I felt something really good before. So I have to take the bad with the good. So I guess what I'm feeling is like a beautiful sadness.
– Trey Parker and Matt Stone
Remember! Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights - then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward, that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.
– Endicott Peabody
Real, constructive mental power lies in the creative thought that shapes your destiny, and your hour-by-hour mental conduct produces power for change in your life. Develop a train of thought on which to ride. The nobility of your life as well as your happiness depends upon the direction in which that train of thought is going.
– Laurence J. Peter
Whenever it is in any way possible, every boy and girl should choose as his life work some occupation which he should like to do anyhow, even if he did not need the money.
– William Lyon Phelps
Seek not, my soul, the life of the immortals; but enjoy to the full the resources that are within thy reach.
– Pindar
Words have a longer life than deeds.
– Pindar
No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.
– Plato
The whole life of man is but a point of time; let us enjoy it.
– Plutarch
The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.
– Jackson Pollock
A child's life is like a piece of paper on which every person leaves a mark.
– Chinese Proverb
Remember, that if thou marry for beauty, thou bindest thyself all thy life for that which perchance will neither last nor please thee one year; and when thou hast it, it will be to thee of no price at all; for the desire dieth when it is attained, and the affection perisheth when it is satisfied.
– Sir Walter Raleigh
That which you call your soul or spirit is your conciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.
– Ayn Rand
I hate life, I hate death and everything in between just doesn't interest me.
– Chris Rapier
A tough lesson in life that one has to learn is that not everybody wishes you well.
– Dan Rather
When life seems chaotic, you don't need people giving you easy answers or cheap promises. There might not be any answers to your problems. What you need is a safe place where you can bounce with people who have taken some bad hops of their own.
– Real Live Preacher
There isn’t much better in this life than finding a way to spend a few hours in conversation with people you respect and love. You have to carve this time out of your life because you aren’t really living without it.
– Real Live Preacher
My life is the story of a man who always wants to carry too much. My spiritual quest is the painful process of learning to let go of things not essential.
– Real Live Preacher
God, I don’t have great faith, but I can be faithful. My belief in you may be seasonal, but my faithfulness will not. I will follow in the way of Christ. I will act as though my life and the lives of others matter. I will love. I have no greater gift to offer than my life. Take it.
– Real Live Preacher
And so faith is closing your eyes and following the breath of your soul down to the bottom of life, where existence and nonexistence have merged into irrelevance. All that matters is the little part you play in the vast drama.
– Real Live Preacher
One thing is clear to me. You can’t know everything you’d like to know. You can’t do everything you’d like to do. You can’t read everything you’d like to read. You must hold onto some things and let go of others. Learning to make that choice is one of the big lessons of this life.
– Real Live Preacher
All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.
– Mary Caroline Richards
Never part without loving words to think of during your absence. It may be that you will not meet again in life.
– Jean Paul Richter
Only actions give life strength; only moderation gives it a charm.
– Jean Paul Richter
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
One thing life has taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. When you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
– Theodore Roosevelt
Golf isn't a game, it's a choice that one makes with one's life.
– Charles Rosin
[Spring is] when life's alive in everything.
– Christina G. Rossetti
Of course there is no formula for success except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings.
– Arthur Rubinstein
Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
– Bertrand Russell
Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favour of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position.
– Bertrand Russell
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
– Bertrand Russell
Life is an escalator: You can move forward or backward; you can not remain still.
– Patricia Russell-McCloud
Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives.
– A. Sachs
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
– Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The soul is the captain and ruler of the life of morals.
– Sallust
Life is like and ever-shifting kaleidoscope - a slight change, and all patterns alter.
– Sharon Salzberg
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
– Carl Sandburg
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
– George Santayana
Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
– George Santayana
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.
– George Santayana
The fact that we don't know this man, isn't important really. Cause his experience is our experience, and his fate is our fate. Vani tass, vani tatum, et omni i vani tass, says the preacher. All is vanity I think that's a pretty good epitaph for all of us. When we're stripped of all our worldly possessions and all our fame, family, friends, we all face death alone. But it's that solitude in death that's our common bond in life. I know it's ironic, but that's just the way things are. Vani tass, vani tatum, et omni i vani tass. Only when we understand all is vanity, only then, it isn't.
– Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider
If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.
– Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider
Men are confused. They're conflicted. They want a woman who's their intellectual equal, but they're afraid of women like that. They want a woman they can dominate, but then they hate her for being weak. It's an ambivalence that goes back to a man's relationship with his mother. Source of his life, center of his universe, object of both his fear and his love.
– Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider
I am going to concentrate on what's important in life. I'm going to strive everyday to be a kind and generous and loving person. I'm going to keep death right here, so that anytime I even think about getting angry at you or anybody else, I'll see death and I'll remember.
– Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider
Death is the enemy. I spent 10 years of my life singlemindedly studying, practicing, fighting hand to hand in close quarters to defeat the enemy, to send him back bloodied and humble and I am not going to roll over and surrender.
– Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider
Life here is so elemental. So real. Without the interference of civilization you can really experience things like,...silence. Silence and darkness in its purity. Right now, right outside my window all I can see is a black void. Endless darkness. It's totally exhilarating, and I feel very lucky to be here. Very, very lucky.
– Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider
I feel like I can handle a lot of things. I can handle a parasitic infection and separating lesions, arterial sclerosis. But this stuff...I just want to go through life thinking people are happy, naive as that may sound.
– Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider
Life is everywhere. The earth is throbbing with it, it's like music. The plants, the creatures, the ones we see, the ones we don't see, it's like one, big, pulsating symphony.
– Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider
A person has three choices in life. You can swim against the tide and get exhausted, or you can tread water and let the tide sweep you away, or you can swim with the tide, and let it take you where it wants you to go.
– Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider
If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?
– Charles M. Schulz
That's the secret to life... replace one worry with another....
– Charles M. Schulz
The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.
– Morrie Schwartz
You need only claim the event of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality.
– Florida Scott-Maxwell
It is through creating, not possessing, that life is revealed.
– Vida D. Scudder
There must be more to life than having everything.
– Maurice Sendak
As was his language so was his life.
– Lucius Annaeus Seneca
It should be our care not so much to live a long life as a satisfactory one.
– Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Life without the courage for death is slavery.
– Lucius Annaeus Seneca
To be always fortunate, and to pass through life with a soul that has never known sorrow, is to be ignorant of one half of nature.
– Lucius Annaeus Seneca
While the fates permit, live happily; life speeds on with hurried step, and with winged days the wheel of the headlong year is turned.
– Lucius Annaeus Seneca
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
– Dr. Seuss
I like life. It's something to do.
– Ronnie Shakes
His life was gentle; and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up,
And say to all the world, THIS WAS A MAN!
– William Shakespeare
Mine honour is my life; both grow in one; take honour from me and my life is done.
– William Shakespeare
The sands are number'd that make up my life.
– William Shakespeare
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep:
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,--'t is a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
– William Shakespeare
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
– William Shakespeare
Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale
Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.
– William Shakespeare
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
– William Shakespeare
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
– William Shakespeare
The better part of valor is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life.
– William Shakespeare
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
– George Bernard Shaw
You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.
– George Bernard Shaw
There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.
– George Bernard Shaw
Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.
– George Bernard Shaw