I asked my life
why it carried along my dreams but
chose to escape me.
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 a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding.
A narrow isthmus 'twixt two boundless seas,
The past, the future, two eternities.
Fix'd like a plant on his peculiar spot,
To draw nutrition, propagate and rot.
On life's vast ocean diversely we sail,
Reason the card, but passion is the gale.
Like bubbles on the sea of matter borne,
They rise, they break, and to that sea return.
No one is to be despaired of as long as he breathes. (While there is life there is hope).
There is one thing alone that stands the brunt of life throughout its course: a quiet conscience.
For Fate has wove the thread of life with pain,
And twins ev'n from the birth are Misery and Man!
I believe that we cannot live better than in seeking to become better.