Quotes about life

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

— Winston Churchill

While there's life, there's hope.

— Marcus T. Cicero

Everyone is trying to accomplish something big, not realizing that life is made up of little things.

— Frank A. Clark

In the early days all I hoped was to make a living out of what I did best. But, since there's no real market for masturbation I had to fall back on my bass playing abilities.

— Les Claypool

Attack life, it's going to kill you anyway.

— Steven Coallier

Life is a horizontal fall.

— Jean Cocteau

What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner.

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Life isn't like a book. Life isn't logical or sensible or orderly. Life is a mess most of the time. And theology must be lived in the midst of that mess.

— Charles Caleb Colton

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

— Joseph Conrad

It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

— Joseph Conrad

Life is too short to stuff a mushroom.

— Shirley Conran

We dribble away our life, little by little, in small packages -- we don't throw it away all at once.

— Robert A. Cook

Every morning I wake up saying, I'm still alive; a miracle. And so I keep on pushing.

— Jacques Cousteau

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

— William Cowper

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

— Quentin Crisp

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

— Crowfoot

The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

— Aleister Crowley

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

— Madame Marie Curie

Our life is made by the death of others.

— Leonardo Da Vinci

If life doesn't offer a game worth playing, then invent a new one.

— Anthony J. D'Angelo

The sad souls of those who lived without blame and without praise.

— Dante Alighieri

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness, and small obligations given habitually, are what preserve the heart and secure comfort.

— Sir Humphrey Davy

It's not how long life is but the quality of our life that is important.

— Roger Dawson

Life begins when you get out of the grandstand into the game.

— P. L. Debevoise

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

— Eugene Delacroix

Life is just a journey

— Princess of Wales Diana

Anything for the quick life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse.

— Charles Dickens

Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.

— Charles Dickens

This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.

— Charles Dickens

Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement.

— Ernest Dimnet

Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.

— Benjamin Disraeli

Let us live while we live.

— Philip Doddridge

Life is like eating artichokes, you have got to go through so much to get so little.

— Thomas A. Dorgan

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really merely commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outer results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.

— Henry Drummond

When I consider life, it is all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, people favor this deceit.

— John Dryden

What life means to us is determined, not so much by what life brings to us as by the attitude we bring to life; not so much by what happens to us as by our reaction to what happens.

— Lewis L Dunnington

Maxim for life: You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you.

— Wayne Dyer

Be glad of life because it gives you a chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at stars.

— Henry Van Dyke

He who is not busy being born is busy dying.

— Bob Dylan

The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.

— Thomas A. Edison

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth.

— Albert Einstein

We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity... what is still lacking here is a grasp of the connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order itself.

— Albert Einstein

What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

— 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

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

— T. S. Eliot

Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to the brass tacks.

— T. S. Eliot

It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

— Havelock Ellis

The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

If we live truly, we shall see truly.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life too near paralyses art.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Live, let live, and help live

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A ship should not ride on a single anchor, nor life on a single hope.

— Epictetus

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

— Epictetus

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs...

— Epicurus

Life is like a taxi. The meter just keeps a-ticking whether you are getting somewhere or just standing still.

— Lou Erickson

Life is at its best when it's shaken and stirred.

— F. Paul Facult

Life is a series of little deaths out of which life always returns.

— Charles Feidelson

I used to trouble about what life was for -- now being alive seems sufficient reason.

— Joanna Field

Remember, a dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream.

— W. C. Fields

My kids idea of a hard life is to live in a house with only one phone.

— George Foreman

Life -- No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.

— Edward M. Forster

Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.

— Viktor E. Frankl

Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.

— Viktor E. Frankl

Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.

— Viktor E. Frankl

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

— Viktor E. Frankl

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.

— Benjamin Franklin

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late

— Benjamin Franklin

Were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults in the first.

— Benjamin Franklin

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life. It goes on.

— Robert Frost

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- that myth is more potent than history. I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts -- That hope always triumphs over experience -- That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

— Robert Fulghum

Men, for the sake of getting a living forget to live.

— Margaret Fuller

We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.

— Thomas Fuller

The only reason they come to see me is that I know that life is great -- and they know I know it.

— Clark Gable

Some people go through life trying to find out what the world holds for them only to find out too late that it's what they bring to the world that really counts. OR It's not what the world holds for you it's what you bring to it

— Anne Of Green Gables

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

— Mahatma Gandhi

The old Quaker was right: I expect to pass through life but once. If there is any kindness, or any good thing I can do to my fellow beings, let me do it now. I shall pass this way but once.

— W. C. Gannett

Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only in proportion as we are desirous of living more do we really live.

— Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

— Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.

— Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

— Paul Gauguin

Live as you would have wished to live when you come to die.

— Gellert

People creep into childhood, bound into youth, sober in adulthood, and soften into old age.

— Henry Giles

What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There are nine requisites for contented living: HEALTH enough to make work a pleasure; WEALTH enough to support your needs; STRENGTH enough to battle with difficulties and forsake them; GRACE enough to confess your sins and overcome them; PATIENCE enough to toil until some good is accomplished; CHARITY enough to see some good in your neighbor; LOVE enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others; FAITH enough to make real the things of God; HOPE enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Plunge boldly into the thick of life, and seize it where you will, it is always interesting.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The life of man is a journey; a journey that must be traveled, however bad the roads or the accommodation.

— Oliver Goldsmith

Life at the greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humored and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.

— Oliver Goldsmith

Life is supposed to get tough.

— Kelsey Grammer

Not only is life a bitch, but it is always having puppies.

— Adrienne Gusoff

May you live as long as you want and not want as long as you live.

— Tom Hanks

There is only one way to come into this world; there are too many ways to leave it.

— Donald Harington

When I hear somebody sigh that Life is hard, I am always tempted to ask, Compared to what?

— Sidney J. Harris

Life flows on within you and without you.

— George Harrison