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.
It’s not my wish to walk intoxicated; to live for never is not my choice.
'Tis not for nothing that we life pursue;
It pays our hopes with something still that's new.
And life in a continual state of apprehension was no life at all.
Yes, this is Life; and everywhere we meet,
Not victor crowns, but wailings of defeat.
Expectation postponed makes the heart sick, but a desire realized is a tree of life.
There is no human life so poor and small as not to hold many a divine possibility.