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.
Can life be counted upon to limit itself? No. It is the mindless striving of two to become infinity.
They live that they may eat, but he himself [Socrates] eats that he may live.
Life for delays and doubts no time does give,
None ever yet made haste enough to live.
Our life must once have end; in vain we fly
From following Fate; e'en now, e'en now, we die.
Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.
The wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can.