Skip to content

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:

There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.

Samuel Butler The Genuine Remains in Verse and Prose of Mr. Samuel Butler (1759)

Yoga takes you into the present moment, the only place where life exists.

Patañjali

It seems that I have spent my entire time trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.

A. J. Ayer

I think no book is more stimulating than the history of a devoted and successful life.

Frederick Winslow Taylor F.W. Taylor (1911)

The unjust distribution of goods persists, creating a situation of social sin that cries out to Heaven and limits the possibilities of a fuller life for so many of our brothers.

Pope Francis

You've got to face facts and the fact is life is a joke, a fucking bad joke, or, no, a bad fucking joke.

Jeet Thayil

I guess I’ll do what everyone else does: get on with my life and forget the big questions.

Alastair Reynolds Century Rain (2004)

I’m just an information processor like any other living thing.

Algis Budrys Michaelmas (1977)

I have done nothing but my duty, and which I shall be doing so long as there is life in me.

Hyder Bux Jatoi

One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved.

Romain Rolland

To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Greek spirit, which distinguished it from all that had gone before. It is a vital distinction.

Edith Hamilton The Greek Way (1930)

Never try to convey your idea to the audience — it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they'll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.

Andrei Tarkovsky Sculpting in Time (1986)

Novels are long-term relationships, and short stories are flings. In art, as with life, I always opted for relationships.

Malcolm Azania E-Force (2012)

He who spends life in remoteness is much better, for it was the practice of the foremost saintly people. They liked to live comely instead of grandeur.

Sufyan al-Thawri The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004)

Death of Auliya Allah, in true sense is the death of their lower-self. When it is annihilated, he gets eternal life.

Mian Mir The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004)

Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure.

W. Somerset Maugham The Trembling of a Leaf (1921)

As life runs on, the road grows strange
With faces new, and near the end
The milestones into headstones change,
'Neath every one a friend.

James Russell Lowell Heartsease and Rue (1888)

I think...I would rather recollect a life misspent on fragile things than spent avoiding moral debt.

Neil Gaiman Fragile Things (2006)

Heresy is the life of a mythology, and orthodoxy is the death.

Joseph Campbell Mythology and the Individual (1997)

This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

Kurt Vonnegut Deadeye Dick (1982)

Related topics