Quotes about life

Life is made up of marble and mud.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

— S. I. Hayakawa

The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.

— Helen Hayes

So in all these little ways we spin a web, a cocoon, around ourselves. The cocoon becomes nice and snug and comfortable because it is very familiar. We know every little corner of our life; we can even write poetry about it. We may also have ideas about the great mystery which religions speak of, which gives our cocoon an especial sense of security: we can worship the great mystery outside of it and feel good about that. The cocoon is safe, bounded, claustrophobic, and a little stale. We settle into it and live our lives.

— Jeremy W. Hayward

I can't be bitter. No one has a contract on life.

— David M. Heath

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

— Ernest Hemingway

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around.

— Katharine Hepburn

In soft regions are born soft men.

— Herodotus

It is a good thing that life is not as serious as it seems to a waiter.

— Don Herold

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

— Robert Herrick

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

— Alexander Herzen

The best things in life are never rationed. Friendship, loyalty, and love. They do not require coupons.

— George T. Hewitt

Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on us.

— Thomas L. Holdcroft

The person who does not know how to live while they are making a living is a poorer person after their wealth is won than when they started.

— Josiah Gilbert Holland

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

To live is to function. That is all there is in living.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Today, you have 100% of your life left.

— Tom Hopkins

Refrain from asking what going to happen tomorrow, and everyday that fortune grants you, count as gain.

— Horace

He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.

— Horace

Do not take life too seriously; you will never get out of it alive.

— Elbert Hubbard

Those who live are those who fight.

— Victor Hugo

Life is a voyage.

— Victor Hugo

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

— Victor Hugo

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

— David Hume

We Japanese enjoy the small pleasures, not extravagance. I believe a man should have a simple lifestyle -- even if he can afford more.

— Massaru Ibuka

Half my life is an act of revision.

— John Irving

Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination

— Christopher Isherwood

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

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

— Henry James

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.

— William James

The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.

— William James

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

— William James

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

— William James

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

— Thomas Jefferson

He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many fold in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale.

— Samuel Johnson

Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.

— David Starr Jordan

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

— James Joyce

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

— Franz Kafka

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

— Immanuel Kant

Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.

— Danny Kaye

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others

— Helen Keller

It is vanity to desire a long life and to take no heed of a good life.

— Thomas Kempis

There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war, and some men are wounded, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or personal life to assure complete equality. Life

— John F. Kennedy

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

— John F. Kennedy

Life is unfair.

— John F. Kennedy

All of life is a foreign country.

— Jack Kerouac

Living Life Tomorrow's fate, though thou be wise, Thou canst not tell nor yet surmise; Pass, therefore, not today in vain, For it will never come again.

— Omar Khayyam

Life is short; live it up.

— Nikita Khrushchev

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

— Søren Kierkegaard

This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness... they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.

— Søren Kierkegaard

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived --forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.

— Søren Kierkegaard

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.

— Søren Kierkegaard

Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards.

— Søren Kierkegaard

Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.

— Søren Kierkegaard

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.

— Paul Klee

To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one.

— Jack Kornfield

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow.

— Elisabeth KuBler-Ross

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.

— Milan Kundera

I would rather think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to come together and make sense.

— Rabbi Harold S. Kushner

They that have lived a single day have lived an age.

— Jean De La Bruyere

There are three stages in a person's life, birth, their life and death. They are not conscious of birth submit to death and forget to live.

— Jean De La Bruyere

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

To live lightheartedly but not recklessly; to be gay without being boisterous; to be courageous without being bold; to show trust and cheerful resignation without fatalism -- this is the art of living.

— Jean De La Fontaine

Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies.

— Ann Landers

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.

— Philip Larkin

We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do -- it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much.

— D. H. Lawrence

Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.

— Stephen B. Leacock

Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five years and you pay it back and then -- one day -- you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then -- one day -- you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.

— Denis Leary

Life is something you do when you can't get to sleep.

— Fran Lebowitz

People find life entirely too time-consuming.

— Stanislaw J. Lec

Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.

— Tom Lehrer

Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.

— John Lennon

The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand well.

— H. T. Leslie

You only live once -- but if you work it right, once is enough.

— Joe E. Lewis

Where there is life there is wishful thinking.

— Gerald F. Lieberman

If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.

— Lin Yu-tang

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

— Abraham Lincoln

The four stages of life are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence.

— Art Linkletter

Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Life is real! Life is earnest! And death is not its goal. Dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Live this day as if it will be your last. Remember that you will only find tomorrow on the calendars of fools. Forget yesterday's defeats and ignore the problems of tomorrow. This is it. Doomsday. All you have. Make it the best day of your year. The saddest words you can ever utter are, If I had my life to live over again. Take the baton, now. Run with it! This is your day! Beginning today, treat everyone you meet, friend or foe, loved one or stranger, as if they were going to be dead at midnight. Extend to each person, no matter how trivial the contact, all the care and kindness and understanding and love that you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.

— Og Mandino

The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.

— Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Life never becomes a habit to me. It's always a marvel.

— Katherine Mansfield

Life is not a matter of place, things or comfort; rather, it concerns the basic human rights of family, country, justice and human dignity.

— Imelda Marcos

We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.

— Edwin Markham

It's better to be an authentic loser than a false success, and to die alive than to live dead.

— William Markiewicz

Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.

— Rollo May

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.

— Mary Mccarthy

Can't nothing make your life work if you ain't the architect.

— Terry McMillan

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump; you have to get it right the first time.

— Margaret Mead

We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.

— Menander of Athens

Life is a dead-end street.

— H. L. Mencken

It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it's one damn thing over and over.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

— Agnes De Mille