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:

How many lives we live in one,
And how much less than one, in all.

Alice Cary Life's Mysteries; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)

A little rule, a little sway,
A sun beam in a winter’s day,
Is all the proud and mighty have
Between the cradle and the grave.

John Dyer Grongar Hill (1727)

When life leaps in the veins, when it beats in the heart,
When it thrills as it fills every animate part,
Where lurks it? How works it?.. we scarcely detect it.

Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton Lucile (1860)

'T is not the whole of life to live,
Nor all of death to die.

James Montgomery Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed (1919)

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Ayn Rand The Fountainhead (1943)