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.
Lo! on a narrow neck of land,
'Twixt two unbounded seas, I stand.
Secure, insensible.
Like pilgrims to th' appointed place we tend;
The World's an Inn, and Death the journey's end.
We, we live! ours are the hours, and the living have their claims.
Our life is scarce the twinkle of a star
In God's eternal day.
… the giver of life, who gave it for happiness and not for wretchedness.
To exist is to make oneself a lack of being; it is to cast oneself into the world.
There is only one pleasure—that of being alive. All the rest is misery.