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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:

Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end, life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.

V. S. Naipaul

There is no need to carry me to another prison. My life is already ebbing away. I suggest that you nail me to a cross and burn me alive. My flaming body will be a torch to light my people on their path to freedom.

Gavrilo Princip

Life is not always perfect. Like a road, it has many bends, ups and down, but that’s its beauty.

Amit Ray World Peace: The Voice of a Mountain Bird (2014)

He felt…good, which should’ve been a sign. If life taught Zig anything, it’s that the universe saves its best punches for when you least expect it.

Brad Meltzer The Escape Artist (2018)

Alas! how easily things go wrong!
A sigh too deep or a kiss too long,
And then comes a mist and a weeping rain,
And life is never the same again.

George MacDonald Phantastes (1858)

[T]he aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

Henry Miller The Wisdom of the Heart (1941)

Life was given to me as a favor, so I may abandon it when it is one no longer.

Montesquieu Lettres Persanes (1721)

Would you not like to try all sorts of lives — one is so very small — but that is the satisfaction of writing — one can impersonate so many people.

Katherine Mansfield

Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.

Václav Havel

It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.

Boris Pasternak

The magic spring
that gives eternal Life,
is in your own heart
but you have blocked the flow.

Fakhruddin 'Iraqi

He seems to me a very foolish man, and very wretched, who will not increase his understanding while he is in the world, and ever wish and long to reach that endless life where all shall be made clear.

Alfred the Great

Fate gets you into positions of power. Life takes you there. I only do my duty and service to the people. I take all conditions as they come cheerfully and do my duty.

Morarji Desai

"The image projected in Veja Magazine about my life in exile, presenting me as a rich landlord, oblivious to the problems of the homeland, does not reflect reality."

João Goulart

Why didn't they give us a life different from the one we live?

Antonio Delfini

Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life — it is bad to damage and destroy life. And this ethic, profound and universal, has the significance of a religion. It is religion.

Albert Schweitzer Albert Schweitzer : The Man and His Mind (1947)

Chance seldom interferes with the wise man; his greatest and highest interests have been, are, and will be, directed by reason throughout his whole life. (16).

Epicurus

We, the structures we collectively refer to as “life,” are patterns of information—temporary reversals of the arrow of entropy within our universe—and conscious minds are the most concentrated such patterns we know of.

Charles Stross The Nightmare Stacks (2016)

Religion is a kind of life or experience.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

In Life's experience of varied kinds, this have I seen:
Your grace, O Lord, far outweighs my sins.
Strange, your mercy has become my excuse for more transgressions–
The greater your generosity, the greater my sins!

Sarmad Kashani Sarmad, Martyr to Love Divine, 1st Edition (2005)

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