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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.

Random quote on Life

Most quoted on life:

I must agree, life is the best teacher, and without life nothing can be learned. But someone has to open our eyes, and without the leading Principle all evolution would be retarded for endless centuries. Therefore, the books of the Teaching are so essential.

Helena Roerich

For like a child, sent with a fluttering light
To feel his way along a gusty night,
Man walks the world. Again, and yet again,
The lamp shall be by fits of passion slain;
But shall not He who sent him from the door
Relight the lamp once more, and yet once more?

Edward FitzGerald

His saying was: live and let live.

Friedrich Schiller

What is the highest good in all matters of action? To the name, there is almost complete agreement; for uneducated and educated alike call it happiness, and make happiness identical with the good life and successful living. They disagree, however, about the meaning of happiness.

Aristotle

The dust we tread upon was once alive.

Sardanapalus

The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

William Saroyan The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934)

It seems that it is impossible to live without discovering the purpose of your life. And the first thing which a person should do is to understand the meaning of life. But the majority of people who consider themselves to be educated are proud that they have reached such great height that they cease to care about the meaning of existence.

Leo Tolstoy

Well, good things don't last (Good things don't last)
And life moves so fast (Life moves so fast)

Billie Eilish

So likewise all this life of martall men,
What is it but a certaine kynde of stage plaie?
Where men come forthe disguised one in one arraie,
An other in an other eche plaiying his part.

Erasmus Praise of Folie. Challoner's translation (1549)

Saw life steadily and saw it whole.

Matthew Arnold

Life is a smoke that curls—
Curls in a flickering skein,
That winds and whisks and whirls,
A figment thin and vain,
Into the vast inane.
One end for hut and hall.

William Ernest Henley

Vain were the man, and false as vain,
Who said, were he ordained to run
His long career of life again
He would do all that he had done.

Thomas Moore

In my strategy, the training for killing enemies is by way of many contests, fighting for survival, discovering the meaning of life and death, learning the Way of the sword, judging the strength of attacks and understanding the Way of the "edge and ridge" of the sword.

Miyamoto Musashi Go Rin No Sho (1645)

So his life has flowed
From its mysterious urn a sacred stream,
In whose calm depth the beautiful and pure
Alone are mirrored; which, though shapes of ill
May hover round its surface, glides in light,
And takes no shadow from them.

Thomas Noon Talfourd Ion (1835)

Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence. The man who seeks to justify his life must want freedom itself absolutely and above everything else.

Simone de Beauvoir

A picture without sky has no glory. This present, unless we see gleaming beyond it the eternal calm of the heavens, above the tossing tree tops with withering leaves, and the smoky chimneys, is a poor thing for our eyes to gaze at, or our hearts to love, or our hands to toil on.

Alexander Maclaren

For thousands of years, human beings have contemplated the world about them and asked the great questions of existence... Today... many of these great questions are part of science, and some scientists claim they may be on the verge of providing answers.

Paul Davies

Everyone - pantheist, atheist, skeptic, polytheist - has to answer these questions: 'Where did I come from? What is life's meaning? How do I define right from wrong and what happens to me when I die?' Those are the fulcrum points of our existence.

Ravi Zacharias

Love will come find you
Just to remind you
Of who you are
[...] See that's the thing about love
[...] Then life
It will embrace you
Totally amaze you
So you don't give up

Alicia Keys

On the surface it seems that the present moment is only one of many, many moments. Each day of your life appears to consist of thousands of moments where different things happen. Yet if you look more deeply, is there not only one moment, ever? Is life ever not this moment? This one moment, now, is the only thing you can never escape from. The one constant factor in your life. No matter what happens. No matter how much your life changes. One thing is certain. Its always now. Since there is no escape from the now, why not welcome it, become friendly with it.

Eckhart Tolle Stillness Speaks (2003)

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