Quotes about life

Dost thou love life? then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of

There is grandeur in this view of life

No space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused!

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.

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

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Our life is frittered away by detail.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names.

Love your life, poor as it is.

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

The universe is transformation: life is opinion.

The art of life is more like the wrestler’s art than the dancer’s

Very little indeed is necessary for living a happy life.

The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden.

The unexamined life is not worth living

Marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

We do not receive a short life, but we make it a short one

And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.

Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Who lives without folly is not so wise as he thinks.

One has regarded life carelessly, if one has failed to see the hand that—kills with leniency.

One should part from life as Ulysses parted from Nausicaa—blessing it rather than in love with it.

A man is really alive only when he delights in the good-will of others.

Of all peoples, the Greeks have dreamt the dream of life the best.

The whole art of living consists in giving up existence in order to exist.

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.

Pity is for the living, Envy is for the dead.

There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it, and when he can.

The principal difference between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only nine lives.

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

It is only the gods who taste of death. Apollo has passed away, but Hyacinth, whom men say he slew, lives on. Nero and Narcissus are always with us.

There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

ADDER, n. A species of snake. So called from its habit of adding funeral outlays to the other expenses of living.

AGE, n. That period of life in which we compound for the vices that we still cherish by reviling those that we have no longer the enterprise to commit.

AMBITION, n. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.

CALAMITY, n. A more than commonly plain and unmistakable reminder that the affairs of this life are not of our own ordering. Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.

CHILDHOOD, n. The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth—two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.

CHRISTIAN, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

DIARY, n. A daily record of that part of one’s life, which he can relate to himself without blushing.

DUEL, n. A formal ceremony preliminary to the reconciliation of two enemies. Great skill is necessary to its satisfactory observance; if awkwardly performed the most unexpected and deplorable consequences sometimes ensue. A long time ago a man lost his life in a duel.

FOLLY, n. That “gift and faculty divine” whose creative and controlling energy inspires Man’s mind, guides his actions and adorns his life.

GOOD, adj. Sensible, madam, to the worth of this present writer. Alive, sir, to the advantages of letting him alone.

INCOMPATIBILITY, n. In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination. Incompatibility may, however, consist of a meek-eyed matron living just around the corner. It has even been known to wear a moustache.

INFANCY, n. The period of our lives when, according to Wordsworth, “Heaven lies about us.” The world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.

NOBLEMAN, n. Nature’s provision for wealthy American minds ambitious to incur social distinction and suffer high life.

NOMINEE, n. A modest gentleman shrinking from the distinction of private life and diligently seeking the honorable obscurity of public office.

PARDON, v. To remit a penalty and restore to the life of crime. To add to the lure of crime the temptation of ingratitude.

PHONOGRAPH, n. An irritating toy that restores life to dead noises.

PILLORY, n. A mechanical device for inflicting personal distinction—prototype of the modern newspaper conducted by persons of austere virtues and blameless lives.

POLITICIAN, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.

PRIMATE, n. The head of a church, especially a State church supported by involuntary contributions. The Primate of England is the Archbishop of Canterbury, an amiable old gentleman, who occupies Lambeth Palace when living and Westminster Abbey when dead. He is commonly dead.

RACK, n. An argumentative implement formerly much used in persuading devotees of a false faith to embrace the living truth. As a call to the unconverted the rack never had any particular efficacy, and is now held in light popular esteem.

SIREN, n. One of several musical prodigies famous for a vain attempt to dissuade Odysseus from a life on the ocean wave. Figuratively, any lady of splendid promise, dissembled purpose and disappointing performance.

The duration of our passions is no more dependant upon us than the duration of our life.

Jealousy lives upon doubt; and comes to an end or becomes a fury as soon as it passes from doubt to certainty.

The attachment or indifference which philosophers have shown to life is only the style of their self love, about which we can no more dispute than of that of the palate or of the choice of colours.

In the intercourse of life, we please more by our faults than by our good qualities.

The most deceitful persons spend their lives in blaming deceit, so as to use it on some great occasion to promote some great interest.

However deceitful hope may be, yet she carries us on pleasantly to the end of life.

Vices enter into the composition of virtues as poison into that of medicines. Prudence collects and blends the two and renders them useful against the ills of life.

We may say vices wait on us in the course of our life as the landlords with whom we successively lodge, and if we travelled the road twice over I doubt if our experience would make us avoid them.

Folly follows us at all stages of life. If one appears wise ‘tis but because his folly is proportioned to his age and fortune.

Love of glory, fear of shame, greed of fortune, the desire to make life agreeable and comfortable, and the wish to depreciate others are often causes of that bravery so vaunted among men.

Valour in common soldiers is a perilous method of earning their living.

We do not wish to lose life; we do wish to gain glory, and this makes brave men show more tact and address in avoiding death, than rogues show in preserving their fortunes.

There are persons of whom the world approves who have no merit beyond the vices they use in the affairs of life.

Sometimes there are accidents in our life the skilful extrication from which demands a little folly.

We reach quite inexperienced the different stages of life, and often, in spite of the number of our years, we lack experience.

In the old age of love as in life we still survive for the evils, though no longer for the pleasures.

Age is a tyrant who forbids at the penalty of life all the pleasures of youth.

Those who have had great passions often find all their lives made miserable in being cured of them.

The calm or disturbance of our mind does not depend so much on what we regard as the more important things of life, as in a judicious or injudicious arrangement of the little things of daily occurrence.

Young men entering life should be either shy or bold; a solemn and sedate manner usually degenerates into impertinence.

The great epochs of our life are at the points when we gain courage to rebaptize our badness as the best in us.

He who cannot find the way to HIS ideal, lives more frivolously and shamelessly than the man without an ideal.

From old Florentine novels—moreover, from life: Buona femmina e mala femmina vuol bastone.—Sacchetti, Nov. 86.

Every man must think after his own fashion; for on his own path he finds a truth, or a kind of truth, which helps him through life. But he must not give himself the rein; he must control himself; mere naked instinct does not become him.

In contemplation as in action, we must distinguish between what may be attained and what is unattainable. Without this, little can be achieved, either in life or in knowledge.

What I have tried to do in my life through false tendencies, I have at last learned to understand.

There are problematical natures which are equal to no position in which they find themselves, and which no position satisfies. This it is that causes that hideous conflict which wastes life and deprives it of all pleasure.

He is the happiest man who can set the end of his life in connection with the beginning.

Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them.

That is why children’s lives are a series of refined judgments, not to say prejudices; and to efface a rapid but partial perception in order to make way for a more general one, time is necessary. To bear this in mind is one of the teacher’s greatest duties.

The most privileged position, in life as in society, is that of an educated soldier. Rough warriors, at any rate, remain true to their character, and as great strength is usually the cover for good nature, we get on with them at need.

A man may live never so retired a life but he becomes a debtor or a creditor before he is aware of it.

To sit in judgment on the departed is never likely to be equitable. We all suffer from life; who except God can call us to account? Let not their faults and sufferings, but what they have accomplished and done, occupy the survivors.

The secret places in the way of life may not and cannot be revealed: there are rocks of offence on which every traveller must stumble. But the poet points to where they are.

If a man lives long in a high position, he does not, it is true, experience all that a man can experience; but he experiences things like them, and perhaps some things that have no parallel elsewhere.

A man is well equipped for all the real necessities of life if he trusts his senses, and so cultivates them that they remain worthy of being trusted.

Superstition is the poetry of life, and so it does not hurt the poet to be superstitious.

Let us remember how great the ancients were; and especially how the Socratic school holds up to us the source and standard of all life and action, and bids us not indulge in empty speculation, but live and do.

The pedagogue, in trying to write and speak Latin, has a higher and grander idea of himself than would be permissible in ordinary life.

Bodies which rot while they are still alive, and are edified by the detailed contemplation of their own decay; dead men who remain in the world for the ruin of others, and feed their death on the living,—to this have come our makers of literature.

In Sakontala the poet appears in his highest function. As the representative of the most natural condition of things, the finest mode of life, the purest moral endeavour, the worthiest majesty, and the most solemn worship, he ventures on common and ridiculous contrasts.

Kant taught us the critique of the reason. We must have a critique of the senses if Art in general, and especially German Art, is ever to regain its tone and move forward on the path of life and happiness.

Take care always to form your establishment so much within your income as to leave a sufficient fund for unexpected contingencies and a prudent liberality. There is hardly a year, in any man’s life, in which a small sum of ready money may not be employed to great advantage.