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.
The life given us by nature is short; but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.
Nature has lent us life at interest, like money, and has fixed no day for its payment.
Most men employ the first part of life to make the other part miserable.
It is a tedious thing to be always beginning life; they live badly who always begin to live.
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
To live is to experience things, not sit around pondering the meaning of life.
Will you please go journeying
for your own sake,
till I come living a moment of life?