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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 will face this challenge with the same energy and determination I've relied on to climb every hill and overcome every obstacle that I've faced in my life.

Larry Hogan Full Remarks: Governor Larry Hogan Announces Cancer Diagnosis (2015)

We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.

William Butler Yeats

I told him to smother Linda with a pillow while she was sleeping. All he said was “Can’t live with ’em, can’t smother ’em with a pillow." I disagreed.

Matthew Good

Life is immense, comprehensive and dynamic. It includes spirit and matter and idealism and pragmatism and rotates round the axis of the noble and the ignoble. Life strives for higher ends. It is a mission, a service, and finally worship.

Zakir Hussain Uniqueness of Zakir Husain and His Contributions (1997)

Because, really, what else is there? Life is years of sheer, endless boredom punctuated by bouts of the mildly interesting. Not much to do, not much to believe in. Just eat, sleep, shit, breathe, breed, grow old and die.

Jay Lake Last Plane to Heaven (2014)

The man old in days will not hesitate to ask a small child seven days old about the place of life, and he will live. For many who are first will become last, and they will become one and the same. (4)

Jesus

Discontinuity in continuity: that is how... the birth of thought, like that of life, presents... and defines itself.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin The Phenomenon of Man (1955)

They don't need me in New York. I'm the New England man. I'm vital in New England.

Arthur Miller Death of a Salesman (1949)

But I believe it was the Rilke who said that life is a game we must begin playing before we have learned the rules. Do we ever? Are there really rules?
Perhaps I read too many poets.

Roger Zelazny Frost & Fire (1989)

One of the problems with fame … is they try to pigeonhole you… like I’m stuck with The Greening of America for the rest of my life.

Charles A. Reich Washington Post in (1987)

I have lived a majestic life.

B. K. S. Iyengar

I believe that every human being has the right to his life and to his liberty, and to act in this world so as to secure his own happiness.

Henry Wilson

Life has a chance if ...human labor is... valued... but we have to fight for it...

Anna Heringer Gespräch mit den Lehmbauexperten (2017)

This world is bullshit. And you shouldn't model your life — wait a second — you shouldn't model your life about what you think that we think is cool and what we're wearing and what we're saying and everything. Go with yourself. Go with yourself.

Fiona Apple

I have just turned life into a proverb. I just killed it.

Giannina Braschi Empire of Dreams (1988)

The most notable difference (of the American character) lies in the psychology of work. In the Orient one works to live; in Europe one works to consume; in America one works to work. These are the three stages of a progressive evolution.

Corrado Gini

Yoga transformed my life from a parasitic one to a life of purpose. Later yoga inspired me to partake in the joy and nobility of life, which I carried to many thousands of people without consideration of religion, caste, gender, or nationality.

B. K. S. Iyengar

The older I get, the brighter colours I live. But in the past, they were dark, dingy, sad colours.

Margaret Keane

"Children are the most sweet burden of life." ~ Svi me vole, samo tata ne (1971)

Đuro Zrakić

May you live all the days of your life.

Jonathan Swift Polite Conversation (1738)

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