Life Quotes
“Life” is a smaller page than you might expect, and an older one. Seneca is the most-quoted of the classical writers, and the sourced entries run from Emerson’s journals in 1822 to Carl Jung’s memoir in 1963. Reading it is closer to browsing a shelf of moralists than scrolling a feed of captions.
One entry needs a warning. “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced” is credited to Søren Kierkegaard all over the internet. The earliest appearance anyone has located is in a 1976 book about Jack Kerouac, which is a long way from nineteenth-century Copenhagen. We keep it listed, with its flag, because people search for it. We would not put his name under it.
Life is like a game of tables, the chances are not in our power, but the playing is.
Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment uncertain, and judgment difficult.
Life is but a flicker shouting into the jaws of eternity. But it seems so damned unfair!
This sorrow weighs upon the melancholy souls of those who lived without infamy or praise.
This ME
made whole by
combining countless fragments
could not live in any one part
with complete ease.
Well, what was life but the difference between what you planned and what you got?