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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:

It's not so bad to live out of a suitcase. It's a really beautiful life .

Jane Monheit

Life is each human being's workshop. If a man survives a lifetime with his creative capacities intact, he has done his part to make a better world for all men.

Paul Rosenfels Love and Power: The Psychology of Interpersonal Creativity (1966)

The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.

Bertrand Russell Political Ideals (1917)

For it all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

Carl Jung Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)

All that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it.

William Hazlitt Lectures on the English Poets (1818)

When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of 'saving' the suicidal is based on a hair-raising misapprehension of the nature of existence.

Peter Wessel Zapffe The Last Messiah (1933)

We create the dualism, not realizing that death, like life, is a process. The moment I am born, I enter the realm of death. Life and death are together one process, and we are dying every moment.

Trinh T. Minh-ha Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)

I can’t stop while there are lives to be saved.

Edith Cavell

The chain of life runs smoothly from one generation to the next and none of the links stand out except here and there a link one sees by accident.

Clifford D. Simak Time and Again (1951)

Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.

Randall Jarrell Poetry and the Age (1953)

Life was what you got, not what you expected.

Harry Turtledove Southern Victory (1997)

There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to – if there are no doors or windows – he walks through a wall.

Bernard Malamud

I’m totally not kidding. … Life is too short. This is all too hard to do to actually be kidding about the whole thing.

Miranda July

People who died could not come back to life, so guaranteeing the right to life should not be a thing of the future, but should be advancing right now.

Wang Ching-feng Wang Ching-feng (2010)

We can only choose between two kinds of life, the active and the contemplative.

Étienne Gilson

Life’s better, sounder, when we don’t brood unnecessarily on horrors. As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.

Elizabeth Kostova The Historian (2005)

My ultimate vocation in life is to be an irritant, someone who disrupts the daily drag of life just enough to leave the victim thinking there's maybe more to it all than the mere hum-drum quality of existence.

Elvis Costello New Music Express interview with Nick Kent (1978)

I've lived most of my life already and I suppose I can argue myself into believing that I have no great cause to love humanity. However, only a few people have hurt me, and if I hurt everyone in return that is unconscionable usury.

Isaac Asimov The Gods Themselves (1972)

Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.

Jack Kerouac

Is there life before death? — that is the question!

Anthony de Mello One Minute Wisdom (1989)

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