Then take, good sir, your pleasure while you may;
With life so short 'twere wrong to lose a day.
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.
We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
There is only one success … to be able to spend your life in your own way.
We have really lost in our society the sense of the sacredness of life.
Life and hope for the world are to be found only in the deeds of love.
Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life — It goes on.