Quotes about life

Our life's journey of self-discovery is not a straight-line rise from one level of consciousness to another. Instead, it is a series of steep climbs and flat plateaus, then further climbs. Even though we all approach the journey from different directions, certain of the journey's characteristics are common to all of us.

— Stuart Wilde

If I had been present at creation, I would have given some useful hints.

— Alfonso The Wise

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

— Thomas Wolfe

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.

— Virginia Woolf

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

— Virginia Woolf

The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.

— Frank Lloyd Wright

I have an existential map; it has you are here written all over it.

— Steven Wright

Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. Their families came and took them away. Eighty years later, by a bizarre coincidence, they lay in the same hospital, on their deathbeds, next to each other. One of them looked at the other and said, so. What did you think?

— Steven Wright

The purpose of life is the expansion of happiness.

— Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

The continuous invention of new ways of observing is man's special secret of living.

— J. Z. Young

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

— Maya Angelou

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

— Albert Camus

One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.

— Elias Canetti

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

— Paul Gauguin

A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.

— Aldous Huxley

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.

— George Santayana

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.

— Jean Baudrillard

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

— Albert Camus

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.

— E. M. Cioran

This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what's so.

— Werner Erhard

If you seek, how is that different from pursuing sound and form? If you don't seek, how are you different from earth, wood, or stone? You must seek without seeking.

— Fo-Yan

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning -- in other words, of absurdity --the more energetically meaning is sought.

— Vaclav Havel

Search for meaning, eat, sleep. Search for meaning, eat, sleep. Die, search for meaning, search for meaning, search for meaning.

— Doug Horton

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

— Lao-Tzu

The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.

— Lin-Chi

The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.

— Henry Miller

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

— Henry Miller

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

— Walker Percy

After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.

— Edgar Allan Poe

Eternal truths will be neither true nor eternal unless they have fresh meaning for every new social situation.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.

— Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

If God exists and we are made in his image we can have real meaning, and we can have real knowledge through what he has communicated to us.

— Francis Schaeffer

Dare to err and to dream. Deep meaning often lies in childish plays.

— Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

I am a part of all that I have met.

— Lord Alfred Tennyson

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

— Thornton Wilder

The mountains, rivers, earth, grasses, trees, and forests are always emanating a subtle, precious light, day and night, always emanating a subtle, precious sound, demonstrating and expounding to all people the unsurpassed ultimate truth.

— Yuan-Sou

Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.

— Fred A. Allen

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.

— Fred A. Allen

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

— Aristotle

I found Rome brick, I left it marble.

— Caesar Augustus

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.

— Jane Austen

One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.

— Jane Austen

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

— Charles Baudelaire

Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.

— Jean Baudrillard

The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.

— Jean Baudrillard

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

— Walter Benjamin

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

— John Berger

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

— Ambrose Bierce

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

— Joseph Brodsky

Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.

— Rupert Brooke

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

— Italo Calvino

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

— Albert Camus

New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.

— Johnny Carson

Paris, a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief. [About Paris]

— Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort

A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.

— John Ciardi

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

— Cyril Connolly

All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it -- an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.

— Peter Conrad

What is a city, but the people; true the people are the city.

— Coriolanus III

Where the criminals cover their crimes by making them legal. [On Washington D. C.]

— Frank Dane

If you're not in New York, you're camping out.

— Thomas E. Dewey

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.

— Benjamin Disraeli

I'm impressed with the people from Chicago. Hollywood is hype, New York is talk, Chicago is work.

— Michael Douglas

There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone is too far from home.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The city is recruited from the country.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The City attaches an exaggerated importance to the healing power of lunch.

— Christopher Fieldes

I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday.

— W. C. Fields

Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

— Edward M. Forster

The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Paris is the caf? of Europe.

— Ferdinando Galiani

Washington is a city of people doing badly what should not be done at all.

— Robert Gurney

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.

— Ernest Hemingway

What else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?

— O. Henry

There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.

— Don Herold

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

— Edward Hoagland

In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you're told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.

— Simon Hoggart

We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on but where life, in its real sense, is lost.

— Hubert H. Humphrey

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

— Aldous Huxley

Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.

— Ada Louise Huxtable

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

— Jane Jacobs

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

— Samuel Johnson

All things may be bought in Rome with money.

— (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) Juvenal

The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.

— Murray Kempton

Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.

— John F. Kennedy

We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.

— John F. Kennedy

If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.

— Alphonse De Lamartine

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

— D. H. Lawrence

The crime problem in New York is getting really serious. The other day the Statue of Liberty had both hands up.

— Jay Leno

New York now leads the world's great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn't make a sudden move.

— David Letterman

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.

— Federico Garcia Lorca

Man's course begins in a garden, but it ends in a city.

— Alexander Maclaren

The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist -- this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul -- a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.

— Margaret Mead

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

— Margaret Mead

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.

— Michelangelo

The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph.

— Henry Miller

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.

— C. Wright Mills