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.
It is not necessary to live,
But to carve our names beyond that point,
This is necessary.
To-morrow I will live, the fool does say;
To-day itself's too late, the wise lived yesterday.
It is not the things we do in life that we regret on our death bed. It is the things we do not.
Whoever did not live in the years neighboring 1789 does not know what the pleasure of living means.
This strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims.
I know—is all the mourner saith,
Knowledge by suffering entereth;
And Life is perfected by Death.
Take not away the life you cannot give:
For all things have an equal right to live.