Quotes about: life

One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child's name and how old he or she is.
– Erma Bombeck
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, I used everything you gave me.
– 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
Creativity is a great motivator because it makes people interested in what they are doing. Creativity gives hope that there can be a worthwhile idea. Creativity gives the possibility of some sort of achievement to everyone. Creativity makes life more fun and more interesting.
– Edward de Bono
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
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
– Jorge Luis Borges
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
This is as true in everyday life as it is in battle: we are given one life and the decision is ours whether to wait for circumstances to make up our mind, or whether to act, and in acting, to live.
– Omar N. Bradley
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 appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.
– Charlotte Bronte
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 have dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.
– Emily 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
Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive.
– Mel Brooks
As you emphasize your life, you must localize and define it... you cannot do everything.
– Phillip Brooks
Be such a man, and live such a life, that if every man were such as you, and every life a life like yours, this earth would be God's Paradise.
– Phillip Brooks
Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.
– Phillip Brooks
No man has come to true greatness who has not felt that his life belongs to his race, and that which God gives to him, He gives him for mankind.
– Phillip Brooks
The ideal life is in our blood and never will be still. Sad will be the day for any man when he becomes contented with the thoughts he is thinking and the deeds he is doing - where there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger; which he knows he was meant and made to do.
– Phillip Brooks
The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.
– Andrew Brown
In business or in life, don't follow the wagon tracks too closely.
– H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
You must take action now that will move you towards your goals. Develop a sense of urgency in your life.
– H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
She knows what is the best purpose of education: not to be frightened by the best but to treat it as part of daily life.
– John Mason Brown
We must look for ways to be an active force in our own lives. We must take charge of our own destinies, design a life of substance and truly begin to live our dreams.
– Les Brown
A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action, not reaction.
– Rita Mae Brown
I believe you are your work. Don't trade the stuff of your life, time, for nothing more than dollars. That's a rotten bargain.
– Rita Mae Brown
The artist has one function - to affirm and glorify life.
– W. Edward Brown
Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious-that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment.
– Dan Brown
I consider myself a student of many religions. The more I learn, the more questions I have. For me, the spiritual quest will be a life-long work in progress.
– Dan Brown
I spend my life essentially alone at a computer. That doesn't change. I have the same challenges every day.
– Dan Brown
It is not my wish to lounge about the college and fatten on a fellowship all my days. I am always trying to look upon a college life as a medium not an end.
– Thomas Edward Brown
After a year in therapy my psychiatrist said to me, Maybe life isn't for everyone.
– Larry Brown
You have to do something in your life that is honorable and not cowardly if you are to live in peace with yourself, and for the firefighter it is fire.
– Larry Brown
And love can come to everyone, the best things in life are free.
– Lew Brown
One thing I really fear is living too long and becoming one of these vegetables and a burden to everybody and to yourself. And so I've had such a rich life, such fabulous opportunities, that I feel, Okay, take it as it comes.
– J. Carter Brown
I consider the probability that there is other intelligent life in the universe overwhelming. And we will ultimately find it.
– George E. Brown, Jr.
Human cloning is the deliberate creation of a human life for utilitarian purposes. That life is created simply for research or for the benefit of another. Any time in history when we have subjected one class of human beings to enslavement by another class has been wrong.
– Sam Brownback
Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living.
– Sir Thomas Browne
Though it be in the power of the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the strongest to deprive us of death.
– Sir Thomas Browne
You were made perfectly to be loved - and surely I have loved you, in the idea of you, my whole life long.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning
How good is man's life, the mere living! How fit to employ all the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!
– Robert Browning
I count life just a stuff to try the soul's strength on.
– Robert Browning
Love is energy of life.
– Robert Browning
White shall not neutralize the black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so: life's business being just the terrible choice.
– Robert Browning
His father, Vincent, took him to La Coupole in Paris and, after sitting on the terrace for a while, walked off and forgot him. It was the perfect start in life for a writer.
– Anatole Broyard
The midnight snack of a life in its 70s.
– Anatole Broyard
The tension between yes and no, between I can and I cannot, makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.
– Anatole Broyard
I wonder if those people shown protesting the deployment of nuclear weapons to western Europe during the Reagan era are feeling appropriately stupid today. 'Please don't take away our precious Soviet Union! - We demand the annihilation of all life on Earth!'
– Craig Bruce
If our life is unhappy it is painful to bear; if it is happy it is horrible to lose, So the one is pretty equal to the other.
– Jean de la Bruyere
Man has but three events in his life: to be born, to live, and to die. He is not conscious of his birth, he suffers at his death and he forgets to live.
– Jean de la Bruyere
There is not in the world so toilsome a trade as the pursuit of fame; life concludes before you have so much as sketched your work.
– Jean de la Bruyere
There are three principles in a man's being and life, the principle of thought, the principle of speech, and the principle of action. The origin of all conflict between me and my fellow-men is that I do not say what I mean and I don't do what I say.
– Martin Buber
I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.
– Pearl S. Buck
If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.
– Pearl S. Buck