Quotes by theme

life

Quotes including the word “life”.

370 results
Bhanu Acharya

Life is ignominious whose memories of existence fades away

Alfred Adler

“The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.”

Alfred Adler

“Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.”

Aeschylus

Who apart from the gods is without pain for his whole lifetime's length?

Maya Angelou

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.

Maya Angelou

No matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.

Aristophanes

Wise people, even though all laws were abolished, would still lead the same life.

Aristotles

The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.

Isaac Asimov

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Isaac Asimov

I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

Isaac Asimov

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Isaac Asimov

Above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.

Miguel Asturias

However life treats you, as time goes by you always get the feeling you've lost life in the very living of it.

Marcus Aurelius

Very little is needed to make a happy life.

Marcus Aurelius

Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is     either past and gone, or not yet revealed. Short, therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells.

Marcus Aurelius

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

Marcus Aurelius

Do every act of your life as if it were your last.

Marcus Aurelius

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under your observation in life.

Marcus Aurelius

Our life is what our thoughts make of it.

Jane Austen

Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.

Jane Austen

They are much to be pitied who have not been given a taste for nature early in life.

Francis Bacon

A bachelor's life is a fine breakfast, a flat lunch, and a miserable dinner.

Francis Bacon

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

Li Bai

What is there to value in this life's vaporous glory?

Matsuo Basho

Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.

Bataille

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.

Aisha Bauniyya

... because between the centuries, I gained a drop of life.

de Simone Beauvoir

Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.

Beckett

My mistakes are my life.

Beethoven

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Graham Bell

Man is the result of slow growth; that is why he occupies the position he does in animal life. What does a pup amount to that has gained its growth in a few days or weeks, beside a man who only attains it in as many years.”

Mario Benedetti

And, in the end, death is just a symptom that there was life.

Mario Benedetti

Five minutes is enough to dream a whole life, time is so relevant.

Henri Bergson

There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.

Hector Berlioz

A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine.

Elizabeth Bishop

What childishness is it that while there's breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around?

Karen Blixen

It is impossible that a town will not play a part in your life, it does not even make much difference whether you have more good or bad things to say of it, it draws your mind to it, by a mental law of gravitation.

Karen Blixen

Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before, how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.

Karen Blixen

We must leave our mark on life while we have it in our power.

Georges Braque

With age, art and life become one.

Brecht

Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.

Andre Breton

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

Andre Breton

No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.

Buddha

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.

Buddha

The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.

Buddha

Your purpose in life is to find your purpose and give your whole heart and soul to it.

George Byron

It is very certain that the desire of life prolongs it.

Calderon

What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.

Albert Camus

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

Fidel Castro

Quality of life lies in knowledge, in culture. Values are what constitute true quality of life, the supreme quality of life, even above food, shelter and clothing.

Cervantes

Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.

Chanel

You can be gorgeous at thirty, charming at forty, and irresistible for the rest of your life.

Chanel

Nature gives you the face you have at twenty. Life shapes the face you have at thirty. But at fifty you get the face you deserve.

Chanel

My life didn't please me, so I created my life.

Chateaubriand

Alexander created cities everywhere he passed: I have left dreams everywhere I have trailed my life.

Chateaubriand

There is nothing beautiful or sweet or great in life that is not mysterious.

Guevara Che

The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth.

Anton Chekhov

Life is given only once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full conscious and beauty.

Anton Chekhov

Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaningful life.

Cicero

The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living.

Cicero

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?

Cicero

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

Cicero

Books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.

Cicero

a happy life consists in tranquility of mind.

Leonard Cohen

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”

Confucius

The expectations of life depend upon diligence; the mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools.

Confucius

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

Joseph Conrad

I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life.

Joseph Conrad

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

Gustave Courbet

I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota.

Marie Curie

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

Marie Curie

All my life through, the new sights of nature made me rejoice like a child.

Darwin

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

Delacroix

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Democritus

Raising children is an uncertain thing; success is reached only after a life of battle and worry.

Democritus

Life without celebrations is a distant road without an inn.

Democritus

The world is a theater, life is a drama: You come, see and leave.

Rene Depestre

The relationships between consciousness and reality are extremely complex.... It is equally necessary to decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the same time that we decolonize society.

Dickens

We forge the chains we wear in life.

Dickens

And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death.

Emily Dickinson

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

Walt Disney

I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn't know how to get along without it.

Walt Disney

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Dostoevsky

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

Dostoevsky

I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.

Alexandre Dumas

Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes.

George Eliot

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”

Thomas Eliot

If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.

Thomas Eliot

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.

Thomas Eliot

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Elytis

Poetry should express the apex, should constitute a kind of pioneering outpost in the unexplored area of life

Eminescu

While love, of any kind, lightens and sweetens life, hate darkens it, fills it with bitterness and make it nasty.

Exupery

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

Exupery

Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.

Ahmad Faiz

It is the dignity with which one goes to his death that is remembered by all, What of life, it comes and goes.

Fitzgerald

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

Flaubert

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.

Flaubert

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Ian Fleming

Love of life is born of the awareness of death, of the dread of it.

Ian Fleming

Never say 'no' to adventures. Always say 'yes,' otherwise you'll lead a very dull life.

Viktor Frankl

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.

Sigmund Freud

It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.

Robert Frost

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

Du Fu

Wind, light and time ever revolve; Let us then enjoy life as best we can.

Du Fu

Separation by death must finally be choked down, but separation in life is a long anguish,

Gandhi

Where there is love there is life.

Gandhi

There is more to life than increasing its speed.

Gauguin

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.

Gauguin

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

Gauguin

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.

Gauguin

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Khalil Gibran

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

Khalil Gibran

The timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness. And knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream.

Khalil Gibran

Desire is half of life; indifference is half of death.

Goethe

Character develops itself in the stream of life.

Goethe

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

van Gogh,Vincent

As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.

van Gogh,Vincent

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul.

van Gogh,Vincent

Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all.

Nadine Gordimer

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

Maxim Gorky

When work is a pleasure, life is a joy. When work is a duty, life is slavery!

Gramsci

The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned.

Patrick Hearn

No man can possibly know what life means, what the world means, until he has a child and loves it. And then the whole universe changes and nothing will ever again seem exactly as it seemed before.

Martin Heidegger

Man is not something fixed or completed, but a being constantly shaped through choices, possibilities, and awareness of life itself.”

Hemingway

“Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Hermann Hesse

“It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.

Hippocrates

Life is short, art is long, opportunity is fleeting, experience misleading the judgment difficult.

Hobbes

There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.

Hobbes

The right of nature... is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life.

Hobbes

No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Horace

We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest.

Horace

Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work. ---- Whatever advice you give, be short.

Horace

Life is largely a matter of expectation.

Langston Hughes

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.

Langston Hughes

“Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams die Life is a broken-winged bird, That cannot fly.

Ted Hughes

“What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.

Victor Hugo

Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.

Victor Hugo

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.

Victor Hugo

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

Hypatia

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

Muhammad Iqbal

Rise above sectional interests and private ambitions... Pass from matter to spirit. Matter is diversity; spirit is light, life and unity.

Muhammad Iqbal

My ancestors were Brahmins. They spent their lives in search of god. I am spending my life in search of man

Isokratis

In sloth and strenuous amusements the pleasures are followed by sorrows, but the diligence of virtue and the prudent management of life always offer pure and safer pleasures.

William James

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

William James

Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.

William James

“To change one’s life: 1. Start immediately. 2. Do it flamboyantly. 3. No exceptions.”

William James

The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.

William James

If you can change your mind, you can change your life.

William James

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

Juan Jimenez

I do not cut my life up into days but my days into lives, each day, each hour, an entire life.

James Joyce

To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.

James Joyce

The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.

James Joyce

Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

Carl Jung

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.

Carl Jung

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Carl Jung

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Franz Kafka

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.

Franz Kafka

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

Franz Kafka

The meaning of life is that it stops.

Frida Kahlo

There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.

Maria Kallas

An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house.

Wassily Kandinsky

The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip.

Immanuel Kant

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Kazantzakis

Life is a shower, it will pass.

Kazantzakis

Life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and look for trouble.

Jack Kerouac

I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.

Omar Khayyam

Your hand can seize today, but not tomorrow; and thoughts of your tomorrow are nothing but desire. Don’t waste this breath, if your heart isn’t crazy, since "the rest of your life" won’t last forever

Omar Khayyam

Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.

Kierkegaard

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

Kierkegaard

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Srecko Kosovel

What is joy? The wish to live. The joy of life. Who care for awards!

Krishnamurti

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.

Krishnamurti

There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.

Kropotkin

Variety is life; uniformity is death

Laozi

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them - that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

Lautreamont

Although according to certain philosophers it is quite difficult to distinguish the jester from the melancholic, life itself being a comic drama or a dramatic comedy.

Lawrence

I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.

Lawrence

Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.

Lawrence

Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition.

Lawrence

A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.

Lawrence

We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. - Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.

John Lennon

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.

Vinci da Leonardo

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

Doris Lessing

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

Primo Levi

The aims of life are the best defense against death.

Sinclair Lewis

I think perhaps we want a more conscious life.

Jack London

Life is a strange thing. Why this longing for life? It is a game which no man wins. To live is to toil hard and to suffer sore, till old age creeps heavily upon us and we throw down our hands on the cold ashes of dead fires. It is hard to live. In pain the babe sucks his first breath, in pain the old man gasps his last, and all his days are full of trouble and sorrow; yet he goes down to the open arms of death, stumbling, falling, with head turned backward, fighting to the last. And death is kind. It is only life and the things of life that hurt. Yet we love life and we hate death. It is very strange.

Jack London

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

Jack London

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

Lucian

Human life is under the absolute dominion of two mighty principles, fear and hope, and that any one who can make these serve his ends may be sure of rapid fortune.

Norman Mailer

“I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

Malatesta

Anarchy is synonymous with Socialism. Because both signify the abolition of exploitation and of the domination of man over man, whether maintained by the force of arms or by the monopolization of the means of life.

Andre Malraux

“I've been very near death. And you can't imagine the wild elation of those moments- it's the sudden glimpse of the absurdity of life that brings it- when one meets death face to face."

Andre Malraux

One can fool life for a long time, but in the end it always makes us what we were intended to be.

Nelson Mandela

“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination.

Nelson Mandela

There is no passion to be found playing small - in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.

Edouard Manet

The attacks of which I have been the object have broken the spring of life in me... People don't realize what it feels like to be constantly insulted.

Bob Marley

Love the life you live. Live the life you love.

Bob Marley

Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you riding through the ruts, don’t complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief and jealousy.

Bob Marley

Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you're living?

Gabriel Marquez

I discovered to my joy, that it is life, not death, that has no limits.

Gabriel Marquez

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

Jose Martí

Like bones to the human body, the axle to the wheel, the wing to the bird, and the air to the wing, so is liberty the essence of life. Whatever is done without it is imperfect.

Karl Marx

Money is the alienated essence of man's labor and life; and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.

E.L. Masters,

How shall the soul of a man be larger than the life he has lived?

E.L. Masters,

To put meaning in one's life may end in madness, But life without meaning is the torture Of restlessness and vague desire. It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

Somerset Maugham

If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?

Somerset Maugham

Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure.

Somerset Maugham

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.

Somerset Maugham

The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.

Somerset Maugham

It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.

Maupassant

The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms, under the shadow of cosmic boredom.

Maupassant

It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living.

Maupassant

There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.

Michelangelo

If we have been pleased with life, we should not be displeased with death, since it comes from the hand of the same master.

Henry Miller

Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring.

Henry Miller

In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.

Henry Miller

Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.

Henry Miller

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

Edna Milley

“It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it's one damn thing over and over.”

Yukio Mishima

Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.

Gabriela Mistral

I feel my heart melting In the mildness like candles: My veins are slow oil And not wine, And I feel my life fleeing Hushed and gentle like the gazelle.

Gabriela Mistral

We are guilty of many errors and many faults, but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, and his senses are being developed. To him we cannot answer ‘Tomorrow,’ his name is today.

Mitropoulos

I only live for the moments I am in the podium and in order to live those moments, I spend my life preparing myself with discipline, doubts and humility.

A. Modigliani

It is your duty in life to save your dream.

Moliere

Without knowledge, life is no more than the shadow of death

Moliere

“Life is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think.”

Montaigne

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.

Montessori

As we observe children, we see the vitality of their spirit, the maximum effort put forth in all they do, the intuition, attention and focus they bring to all life’s events, and the sheer joy they experience in living.

Edvard Munch

The colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.

Edvard Munch

Sickness, insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life.

Alfred Musset

life is a deep sleep of which love is the dream.

Nabokov

Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

Sarojini Naidu

Till ye have battled with great grief and fears/And borne the conflict of dream-shattering years/Wounded with fierce desire and worn with strife/Children, ye have not lived: for this is life.”

Napoleon

“If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.”

Anais Nin

Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.

Anais Nin

Love is the axis and breath of my life.

Anais Nin

I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama.

Anais Nin

Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage.

Anais Nin

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

Novalis

Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.

George Orwell

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

Violeta Parra

Thanks to life, for what has given me

Boris Pasternak

When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.

Boris Pasternak

I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.

Boris Pasternak

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

Pessoa

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

Petrarca

True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.

Edith Piaf

To sing is to bring to life; impossible if the words are mediocre, however good the music.

Edith Piaf

All I've done all my life is disobey.

Edith Piaf

All I've done all my life is disobey.

Pablo Picasso

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

Pablo Picasso

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Pablo Picasso

Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.

Pindar

Seek not, my soul, the life of the immortals; but enjoy to the full the resources that are within thy reach.

Sylvia Plath

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative - whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.

Plutarch

“The whole of life is but a moment of time. It is our duty, therefore to use it, not to misuse it.”

A. Edgar Poe,

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

Jackson Pollock

When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.

Jackson Pollock

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Alexander Pope,

Passions are the gales of life.

Karl Popper

All life is problem solving.

Elvis Presley

I've tried to lead a straight, clean life, not set any kind of a bad example.

Jacques Prevert

An orange on the table, your dress on the rug, and you in my bed, sweet present of the present, cool of night, warmth of my life.

Sergei Prokofiev

In my view, the composer, just as the poet, the sculptor or the painter, is in duty bound to serve Man, the people. He must beautify life and defend it. He must be a citizen first and foremost, so that his art might consciously extol human life and lead man to a radiant future.

Sergei Prokofiev

My chief virtue (or if you like, defect) has been a tireless lifelong search for an original, individual musical idiom. I detest imitation, I detest hackneyed devices.

Marcel Proust

There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said things or done things that are so unpleasant to recall in later life that he would expunge them entirely from his memory if that were possible.

Marcel Proust

Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.

Pythagoras

Life is defined by the Law of Force and Necessity (the more you beat necessity the stronger you get)

Pythagoras

Friends are as companions on a journey, who ought to aid each other to persevere in the road to a happier life.

Quasimodo

All my life, you've told me that the world is a dark, cruel place. But now I see that the only thing dark and cruel about it is people like you!”

Racine

Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.

Remarque

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.

Remarque

Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.

Remarque

Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.

Renoir

I need to feel the excitement of life stirring around me, and I will always need to feel that.

Renoir

“I have arrived more definitely than any other painter during his lifetime; honours shower upon me from every side; artists pay me compliments on my work; there are many people to whom my position must seem enviable…. But I don’t seem to have a single real friend!”

Renoir

To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.

Rilke

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.

Rilke

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Rilke

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.

Rilke

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

Rimbaud

Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.

Rimbaud

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

Carl Rogers

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.

Rolland

It is not peace that I seek, but life.

Rolland

One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved.

Gabrielle Roy

The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance, the farther there is to go and the more there is to say, the less time there is to say it.

Jalaluddin Rumi

Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life's search for love and wisdom.

Jalaluddin Rumi

You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?

Bertrand Russell

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.

Bertrand Russell

Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give

Bertrand Russell

“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead.

Bertrand Russell

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

Bertrand Russell

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Carl Sandburg

A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.

Carl Sandburg

Time is the coin of your life. You spend it. Do not allow others to spend it for you.

Sartre

Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.

Sartre

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

Virginia Satir

“Life is not the way it's supposed to be, it's the way it is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference”

Schiller

Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told me in my childhood than any truth that is taught in life.

Schopenhauer

Need and boredom are the two poles of human life.

Schopenhauer

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

Schopenhauer

The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life; because that is the only reality, all else being merely the play of thought.

Schweitzer

There are two means of refuge from the misery of life — music and cats.

Seneca

Life, if well lived, is long enough.

Goh-Poh Seng

Words, words to weave, Into prose, into verse, Varied as life,

Shaaban

In practice, life conceals its remarkable people until big events occur and reveal them.

Shakespeare

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Bernard Shaw

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.

Bernard Shaw

God is the hope, we all have inside us and keep us alive. God is the soul, or otherwise the energy we have inside us and help us to deal with everything in life. God is the birth, a new life from nothing, from no existence to existence.

Mary Shelley

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.

Mary Shelley

Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.

Nina Simone

Once I understood Bach's music, I wanted to be a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was that teacher who introduced me to his world.

Frank Sinatra

I'm not one of those complicated, mixed-up cats. I'm not looking for the secret to life... I just go on from day to day, taking what comes.

Frank Sinatra

I would like to be remembered as a man who had a wonderful time living life, a man who had good friends, fine family - and I don't think I could ask for anything more than that, actually.

Skinner

I won't say that I'm an agnostic, since agnosticism maintains that one cannot know... but I'm not averse to the idea of some intelligence or some organizing force that set up the initial conditions of the universe in such a way that ultimately generated stars, planets and life.

Socrates

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Sophocles

One word frees us of all the weight and pain in life. That word is love.

Sophocles

It was my care to make my life illustrious not by words more than by deeds.

Kim Sowol

Life is not to live alone.

Spinoza

“In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable ; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth.

John Steinbeck

We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome.

John Steinbeck

It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.

Stendhal

A good book is an event in my life.

Stendhal

Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.

Stendhal

Love has always been the most important business in my life, I should say the only one.

Igor Stravinsky

I haven't understood a single piece of music in my life, but I have felt it.

Strindberg

People are constantly clamoring for the joy of life. As for me, I find the joy of life in the hard and cruel battle of life - to learn something is a joy to me.

Strindberg

Life is not so idiotically mathematical that only the big eat the small; it is just as common for a bee to kill a lion or at least to drive it mad.

Anne Sullivan

Is it not true, then, that my life with all its limitation touches at many points the life of the World Beautiful? Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be, therein to be content.

Jonathan Swift

May you live every day of your life.

Tagore

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.”

Tagore

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

Tagore

If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.

Tagore

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.

Tchaikovsky

To regret the past, to hope in the future, and never to be satisfied with the present: that is what I spend my whole life doing”

William Thackeray

Life is a mirror: if you frown at it, it frowns back; if you smile, it returns the greeting.

Henry Thoreau

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

Henry Thoreau

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Leo Tolstoy

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

Leo Tolstoy

Joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.

Leo Tolstoy

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.

Leo Tolstoy

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

Mark Twain

Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Mark Twain

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Unamuno

Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.

Unamuno

Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.

Marie Under

Ah, earthly life burns in a myriad splendours

Jules Verne

While there is life, there is hope.

Jules Verne

The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides.

Voltaire

Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.

Voltaire

God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.

Washington

My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am I owe to my mother. I attribute all my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her.

Simone Weil

Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it.

Simone Weil

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

Oscar Wilde

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

Tennessee Williams

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

Tennessee Williams

I suppose I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.

Tennessee Williams

“Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

L. Wittgenstein

We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming

L. Wittgenstein

The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.

Virginia Woolf

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

Virginia Woolf

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

Virginia Woolf

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

Yourcenar

“He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandonds himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.

Adela Zamudio

Oh, privileged mortal you enjoy lifelong honor and perfect ease!

Emile Zola

Dreyfus is innocent. I swear it! I stake my life on it — my honor!

Emile Zola

I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.

Stefan Zweig

In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.