quotes bout life

"Fear less, hope more;Whine less, breathe more;Talk less, say more;Hate less, love more;And all good things are yours." -Swedish Proverb


"Some people weave burlap into the fabric of our lives, and some weave gold thread. Both contribute to make the whole picture beautiful and unique." -Anon.


"Enjoy life. There's plenty of time to be dead." -Anon.


"Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow." -Anon.


"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us." another version ends with "what lies within us"
-Anon., variously attributed to Thoreau, Emerson, and Holmes

"Life is wasted on the living."
-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live. -Marcus Aurelius


"Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't."
-Richard Bach


"Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well." -Josh Billings


"The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live." -Joan Borysenko


"Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment."


"I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see." -John Burroughs


"The purpose of life is a life of purpose." -Robert Byrne


I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainty that just to be alive is a grand thing.
-Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, 1977


Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turn before we have learnt to walk.
-Cyril Connolly


Everything starts with yourself -- with you making up your mind about what you're going to do with your life. I tell kids that it's a cruel world, and that the world will bend them either left or right, and it's up to them to decide which way to bend. -Tony Dorsett


"Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile." -Albert Einstein


There is no Gain in the world: so be it: but neither is there any Loss. There is never any failure to this infinite freshness of life, and the ancient novelty is forever renewed. We realize the world better if we imagine it, not as a Progress to Prim Perfection, but as the sustained upleaping of a Fountain, the pillar of a Glorious Flame. For, after all, we cannot go beyond the ancient image of Heraclitus, the "Ever-living Flame, kindled in due measure and in the like measure extinguished." That translucent and mysterious Flame shines undyingly before our eyes, never for two moments the same, and always miraculously incalculable, an ever-flowing stream of fire. The world is moving, men tell us, to this, to that, to the other. Do not believe them! Men have never known what the world is moving to. Who foresaw--to say nothing of older and vaster events--the Crucifixion? What Greek or Roman in his most fantastic moments prefigured our thirteenth century? What Christian foresaw the Renaissance? Who ever really expected the French Revolution? We cannot be too bold, for we are ever at the incipient point of some new manifestation far more overwhelming than all our dreams. No one can foresee the next aspect of the Fountain of Life. And all the time the Pillar of that Flame is burning at exactly the same height it has always been burning at! The World is everlasting Novelty, everlasting Monotony. It is just which aspect you prefer. You will always be right.
-Havelock Ellis, Impressions and Comments, November 13, 1913


Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson


"If life were just, we would be born old and achieve youth about the time we'd saved enough to enjoy it." -Jim Fiebig


"Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself." -Harvey Fierstein


"We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
-Robert Frost


"It's not your blue blood, your pedigree or your college degree. It's what you do with your life that counts." Millard Fuller


"Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
-Mahatma Gandhi


I was only trying to live my life in accordance with the principles which sprang from my own true self. Why was that so very difficult? -Hermann Hesse, Damian


"The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it." -William James


"Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact." William James

"This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it." -William James


The gains in life come slowly and the losses come on suddenly. You work for years to get your life the way you want it and buy the big house and the time share on Antigua and one afternoon you’re run down by a garbage truck and lie in the intersection, dazed, bloodied, your leg unnaturally bent, and suddenly life becomes terribly challenging for six months.
-Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat, 2004


"The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it."
-W. M. Lewis


\"Tell me not, in mournful numbers,Life is but an empty dream!For the soul is dead that slumbers,and things are not what they seem.Life is real! Life is earnest!And the grave is not its goal;Dust thou art; to dust returnest,Was not spoken of the soul."
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men."
-Herman Melville


My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night;But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--It gives a lovely light!
-Edna St. Vincent Millay, "First Fig" (1920)


"Don't take life seriously because you can't come out of it alive."
-Warren Miller


Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
-O. Henry, Gift of the Magi


Dance like there's nobody watching Love like you'll never get hurtSing like there's nobody listeningLive like it's heaven on earthAnd speak from the heart to be heard. Purkey is the source of this quotation that is attributed to many others: it was made popular in the song "Come From The Heart" written by Susannah Clark and Richard Leigh. Purkey closed his speeches with this poem and it has now made it into the public domain.
-William W. Purkey


If I'd gotten the job I wanted at Montgomery Ward, I suppose I would never have left Illinois. I've often wondered at how lives are shaped by what seem like small and inconsequential events, how an apparently random turn in the road can lead you a long way from where you intended to go--and a long way from wherever you expected to go. For me, the first of these turns occurred in the summer of 1932, in the abyss of the Depression.
-Ronald Reagan, An American Life


"Everything has been figured out, except how to live." -Jean-Paul Sartre


"Live every day as if it were your last, because one of these days, it will be."
-Jeremy Schwartz


"Life becomes harder for us when we live for others, but it also becomes richer and happier."
-Albert Schweitzer


If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended,That you have but slumber'd hereWhile these visions did appear... date is its entry into the Stationer's Register
-William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Epilogue, October 8, 1600


"All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players.They have their exits and their entrances,And one man in his time plays many parts,His acts being seven ages."
-William Shakespeare, As You Like It


Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued." -Socrates


"... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?" -Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird, 1976


For some life lasts a short while, but the memories it holds last forever. -Laura Swenson


"May you live every day of your life." -Jonathan Swift


Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, "Where I lived, And What I Lived For"


The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. -Lily Tomlin


Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to live and to work and to play and to look up at the stars. -Henry Van Dyke


Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel.
-Horace Walpole, Letter to Sir Horace Mann, 1770


Life itself is a matter of salesmanship.
-Thomas J. Watson, Men–Minutes–Money, a Collection of Excerpts from Talks


Dr. Miller says we are pessimistic because life seems like a very bad, very screwed-up film. If you ask "What the hell is wrong with the projector?" and go up to the control room, you find it's empty. You are the projectionist, and you should have been up there all the time.
-Colin Wilson


So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living. -Virginia Woolf


"At thirty, man suspects himself a fool; Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan".
-Edward Young, Night Thoughts. Night i. Line 417


"All men think all men mortal but themselves."
-Edward Young, Night Thoughts. Night i. Line 424.


"Time flies, death urges, knells call, Heaven invites, Hell threatens."
-Edward Young, Night Thoughts. Night ii. Line 292.