Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower. ~Hans Christian Anderson
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me." ~Erma Bombeck
The purpose of life is a life of purpose. ~Robert Byrne
The miracle is not to fly in the air, or to walk on the water, but to walk on the earth. ~Chinese Proverb
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. ~Elwyn Brooks White
Life is simple, its just not easy. ~Author Unknown
A life without cause is a life without effect. ~Barbarella
Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you're alive, it isn't. ~Richard Bach
Life's not always fair. Sometimes you can get a splinter even sliding down a rainbow. ~Cherralea Morgen
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it. ~Jack Handey
Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it. ~Christopher Morley, Thunder on the Left
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee,
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
~Robert Frost, "Cluster of Faith," 1962
In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular. ~Kathy Norris
To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else. ~Emily Dickinson
Yes, I will try to be. Because I believe that not being is arrogant. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
My life has a superb cast but I can't figure out the plot. ~Ashleigh Brilliant
I say, if your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life. ~Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave. ~Quentin Crisp
As we struggle to make sense of things, life looks on in repose. ~Author Unknown
I think I've discovered the secret of life - you just hang around until you get used to it. ~Charles Schulz
Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets. ~Arthur Miller
Life is like a blanket too short. You pull it up and your toes rebel, you yank it down and shivers meander about your shoulder; but cheerful folks manage to draw their knees up and pass a very comfortable night. ~Marion Howard
Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while. ~Author Unknown
You can't escape history, or the needs and neuroses you've picked up like layers and layers of tartar on your teeth. ~Charles Johnson
Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can. ~Danny Kaye
I have a simple philosophy: Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. Scratch where it itches. ~Alice Roosevelt Longworth
Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once. ~Lillian Dickson
We are born wet, naked, and hungry. Then things get worse. ~Author Unknown
Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up. ~Author Unknown
Life is a cement trampoline. ~Howard Nordberg
To preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances and hostilities, is as great a miracle as to create him. ~Jeremy Taylor
Life... is like a box of chocolates - a cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that no one ever asks for, unreturnable because all you get back is another box of chocolates. So, you're stuck with mostly undefinable whipped mint crap, mindlessly wolfed down when there's nothing else to eat while you're watching the game. Sure, once is a while you get a peanut butter cup or an English toffee but it's gone too fast and the taste is fleeting. In the end, you are left with nothing but broken bits filled with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts, which, if you are desperate enough to eat, leaves nothing but an empty box of useless brown paper. ~The X-Files
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. ~Friedrich Nietzsche
God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled. ~Author Unknown
Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be. ~Grandma Moses
I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer. ~Jim Carrey
The great business of life is to be, to do, to do without, and to depart. ~John, Viscount Morley, Address on Aphorisms
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies. ~Erich Fromm
My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between, I occupy myself as best I can. ~Cary Grant
To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach. ~Havelock Ellis
Living involves tearing up one rough draft after another. ~Author Unknown
My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn. ~Louis Adamic
No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence. ~Thomas Carlyle, Sir Walter Scott, in London and Westminster Review, 12 November 1838
Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark. ~Samuel Johnson
Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: "I am with you kid. Let's go." ~Maya Angelou
Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Why torture yourself when life'll do it for you? ~Author Unknown
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. ~George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor's Dilemma, 1906
Puritans will never believe it, but life is full of disagreeable things that aren't even good for you. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
'Tis all a chequer board of nights and days,
Where destiny with men for pieces plays;
Hither and thither, and mates, and slays.
~Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, 1859
...the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse. ~Walt Whitman, "O Me! O Life!", Leaves of Grass
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. ~Mark Twain
Life is the game that must be played. ~Edwin Arlington Robinson
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. ~Albert Camus
There is no wealth but life. ~John Ruskin
I know what things are good: friendship and work and conversation. These I shall have. ~Rupert Brooke
Life will always remain a gamble, with prizes sometimes for the imprudent, and blanks so often to the wise. ~Jerome K. Jerome
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. ~Henry David Thoreau
Life is not a final. It's daily pop quizzes. ~Author Unknown
Eating, loving, singing and digesting are, in truth, the four acts of the comic opera known as life, and they pass like bubbles of a bottle of champagne. Whoever lets them break without having enjoyed them is a complete fool. ~Gioacchino Rossini
We mourn the transitory things and fret under the yoke of the immutable ones. ~Paul Eldridge
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. ~T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Life was a damned muddle - a football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of - everyone claiming the referee would have been on his side. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald
Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out. ~Anton Chekhov
Following straight lines shortens distances, and also life. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation. ~W. Somerset Maugham
In life we all have an unspeakable secret, an irreversible regret, an unreachable dream and an unforgettable love. ~Diego Marchi
I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on.
~Robert Browning
Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove. ~Ashleigh Brilliant
Life is an incurable Disease. ~Abraham Cowley
The philosophy of mine earth can be summed up as this: Sunshine creates happiness, and I create myself. Nights are long and life is predominantly good. Wind is refreshing. Tea is wisdom. Do the best you can, and be good to yourself so that you can above all be good to others. ~Jessi Lane Adams
Human life is purely a matter of deciding what's important to you. ~Anonymous
For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. ~Albert Camus
Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination. ~Christopher Isherwood
The only way to have a life is to commit to it like crazy. ~Angelina Jolie
Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do. ~Bruce Crampton
Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.
~Elinor Hoyt Wylie, Let No Charitable Hope
To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funnybone. ~Reba McEntire
The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss. ~Thomas Carlyle
All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on. ~Havelock Ellis
Sunday clears away the rust of the whole week. ~Joseph Addison
We tear life out of life to use it for looking at itself. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
[Psychoanalysis] is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist. ~Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts, 1945
Give us Lord, a bit o' sun,
A bit o' work and a bit o' fun;
Give us all in the struggle and sputter
Our daily bread and a bit o' butter.
~From an inn in Lancaster, England
The tragedy of life is not that man loses, but that he almost wins. ~Heywood Broun
We're all accidental soldiers in the army of life. ~Ymber Delecto
Life is a long process of getting tired. ~Samuel Butler
He who has nothing to die for has nothing to live for. ~Moroccan Proverb
But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. ~Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not the choice. You must take it. The only question is how. ~Henry Ward Beecher
Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. ~Douglas Adams
Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one? ~George Bernard Shaw
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life. It goes on. ~Robert Frost
Sometimes our hearts get tangled
And our souls a little off-kilter...
~Sera Christann
Life is like a ten-speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use. ~Charles Schulz
There is no finish line. ~Nike advertisement
It may be life is only worthwhile at moments. Perhaps that is all we ought to expect. ~Sherwood Anderson
Life is life, and death is life, and everything in between. ~Cherralea Morgen
I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment. ~Ludwig Wittgenstein
The art of life is the art of avoiding pain. ~Thomas Jefferson
The world is a sunny success. ~Ever Garrison
Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man's life. ~Vita Sackville-West
The fear of life is the favorite disease of the 20th century. ~William Lyon Phelps
In the book of life, the answers aren't in the back. ~Charlie Brown
The world is a grindstone and life is your nose. ~Fred Allen
Not unfortunately the universe is wild - game-flavoured as a hawk's wing. ~B.P. Blood
You live and learn. At any rate, you live. ~Douglas Adams
Everything which is properly business we must keep carefully separate from life. Business requires earnestness and method; life must have a freed handling. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers. ~Learned Hand
The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched. ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Life is the sum of all your choices. ~Albert Camus
Out of a hundred years a few minutes were made that stayed with me, not a hundred years. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
If A equals success, then the formula is: A = X + Y + Z, where X is work, Y is play, and Z is keep your mouth shut. ~Albert Einstein
I gave my life to learning how to live.
Now that I have organized it all...
It is just about over.
~Sandra Hochman
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic. ~Anaïs Nin
[P]erhaps nothing 'ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late. It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right. ~George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Adam Bede
Only a few things are really important. ~Marie Dressler
We are like people with short-term leases on summer cottages; we can never seem to make our provisions come out even with our stay. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. ~Henry Miller
Life is like eating artichokes; you have got to go through so much to get so little. ~Thomas Aloysius Dorgan
Life is a ticket to the greatest show on earth. ~Martin H. Fischer
Summing up, it is clear the future holds great opportunities. It also holds pitfalls. The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o'clock. ~Woody Allen, "My Speech to the Graduates," Side Effects, 1980
Situated in some nebulous distance I do what I do so that the universal balance of which I am a part may remain a balance. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
Few of us write great novels; all of us live them. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Life's like a novel with the end ripped out. ~Danny Orton and Blair Daly, "Stand"
If you stop struggling, then you stop life. ~Huey Newton
Sometimes questions are more important than answers. ~Nancy Willard, quoted in The Meaning of Life, compiled by Hugh S. Moorhead
It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you. ~Phillips Brooks
There is a strange reluctance on the part of most people to admit that they enjoy life. ~William Lyon Phelps
Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way around. ~David Lodge, The British Museum Is Falling Down, 1965
If a man in the morning hear the right way, he may die in the evening without regret. ~Confucius
Life is a sexually transmitted disease and there is a 100% mortality rate. ~R.D. Laing
In small proportions we just beauties see,
And in short measures life may perfect be.
~Ben Jonson, To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison, 1640
Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942, translated from French by Lewis Galantière
We should give meaning to life, not wait for life to give us meaning. ~Stacy
Many of us are equal to life's emergencies who cannot bear its day-after-dayness. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Life is like an onion; you peel off layer after layer and then you find there is nothing in it. ~James Gibbons Huneker
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor. ~Ogden Nash
I do like a little bit of butter to my bread. ~A.A. Milne, When We Were Very Young
Life may be defined to be the power of self-augmentation or assimilation, not of self-nurture; for then a steam-engine over a coal-pit might be made to live. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars. ~Henry Van Dyke
People find it hard to be both comic and serious, though life manages it easily enough. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
Life is a long lesson in humility. ~James M. Barrie
In life, as in restaurants, we swallow a lot of indigestible stuff just because it comes with the dinner. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Life seems nothing more than a quick succession of busy nothings." ~From the movie Mansfield Park
Reason and justice tell me there's more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism. ~Anton Chekhov
To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it. ~Samuel Butler
Life is easier than you'd think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable. ~Kathleen Norris
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. ~Mark Twain
One wanders through life as if wandering through a field in the dark of night, wearing a blindfold and very heavy shoes, with a poisonous toad waiting patiently beneath a clump of weeds, knowing full well that eventually you will step on him. ~Lemony Snicket
There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes. ~José Ortega y Gasset
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe. ~Peter De Vries, Let Me Count the Ways, 1965
Every creatures stalks some other, and catches it, and is caught. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
A great part of life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure. ~Robert Louis Stevenson
I have come one step away from everything. And here I stay, far from everything, one step away. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
Anxiety and distress, interrupted occasionally by pleasure, is the normal course of man's existence. ~Joseph Wood Krutch
I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit, but if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer.... I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me. ~Richard Phillips Feynman
Life is just a series of trying to make up your mind. ~Timothy Fuller
The history of man for the nine months preceding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting and contain events of greater moment than all the three score and ten years that follow it. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Perhaps we are looking at this from a wrong perspective; this search for the truth, the meaning of life, the reason of God. We all have this mindset that the answers are so complex and so vast that it is almost impossible to comprehend. I think, on the contrary, that the answers are so simple; so simple that it is staring us straight in the face, screaming its lungs out, and yet we fail to notice it. We're looking through a telescope, searching the stars for the answer, when the answer is actually a speck of dirt on the telescope lens. ~Jason Q., from generationterrorists.com
It's just life. Just live it. ~The Quote Garden
Life is little more than a loan shark: It exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes. ~Luigi Pirandello
Life is a shit sandwich. But if you've got enough bread, you don't taste the shit. ~Jonathan Winters
There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last. ~Robert Louis Stevenson
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. ~H.L. Mencken
Almost everything in life is easier to get into than out of. ~Agnes' Law
Life is one big judgment call. ~The Quote Garden
Chance is always powerful, let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish. ~Ovid
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Life is a series of collisions with the future. ~José Ortega y Gasset
The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing. ~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Life is half spent before we know what it is. ~George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, 1651
Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust - we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper. ~Albert Einstein, in The Saturday Evening Post, 26 October 1929
Jack Palance: "Do you know what the secret of life is? One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don't mean shit."
Billy Crystal: "Yeah, but what's that one thing?"
Jack Palance: "That's what you've got to figure out."
~From the movie City Slickers
Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian. ~Dennis Wholey
Life is an endless struggle full of frustrations and challenges, but eventually you find a hair stylist you like. ~Author Unknown
Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? is not life one? ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. ~Crowfoot, 1890, as quoted in Catch the Whisper of the Wind compiled by Cheewa James
Have you noticed that life, real honest-to-goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in the newspapers? ~Jean Anouilh, The Rehearsal, 1950
God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny. ~Garrison Keillor
The meaning of life is not an unquestionable answer; it is an unanswerable question. ~The Quote Garden
Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive. ~Mel Brooks
Unbeing dead isn't being alive. ~e.e. cummings
Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious. ~Brendan Gill
When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance. ~Thomas Merton
