Quotes

Quotes to inspire and reflect

Eurípides
Eurípides
Death is what men want when the anguish of living / is more than they can bear.
6
Eurípides
Eurípides
It is better that we live ever so / Miserably than die in glory.
6
Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard
I think that the dying pray at the last not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door.
8
John Donne
John Donne
All our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death.
12
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.
8
Samuel Butler
Samuel Butler
If a man know not life which he hath seen, how shall he know death, which he hath not seen?
9
Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe
The golden years of my life are slipping by on stealthy feet at nightfall; there is a footprint in the dark, a bell strikes twelve, and the flying year is gone.
5
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion.
11
W. Somerset Maugham
W. Somerset Maugham
For the complete life, the perfect pattern includes old age as well as youth and maturity.
9
John Updike
John Updike
As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
5
Jean de La Bruyère
Jean de La Bruyère
There are but three events which concern men: birth, life, and death. They are unconscious of their birth, they suffer when they die, and they neglect to live.
8
Cícero
Cícero
Every stage of human life, except the last, is marked out by certain and defined limits; old age alone has no precise and determinate boundary.
10
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibers, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.
5
Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.
15
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton
Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.
6
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton
Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death.
6
Alfred de Vigny
Alfred de Vigny
What is a great life if not a youthful idea executed by the man of mature years?
7
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.
6
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore
Life is given to us, we earn it by giving it.
12
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore
Life, like a child, laughs, shaking its rattle of death as it runs.
13
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift
Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for a while and then act our part in it.
7
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
Everyday life is a stimulating mixture of order and haphazardly. The sun rises and sets on schedule but the wind bloweth where it listeth.
13
Gloria Steinem
Gloria Steinem
As wise women and men in every culture tell us: The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us.
7
Sófocles
Sófocles
You cannot know a man’s life before the man / has died, then only can you call it good or bad.
7
Sócrates
Sócrates
What most counts is not to live, but to live aright.
17
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.
15
Sêneca
Sêneca
It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.
6
Sêneca
Sêneca
Nothing is so false as human life, nothing so treacherous. God knows no one would have accepted it as a gift, if it had not been given without our knowledge.
6
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
Life is a task to be done. It is a fine thing to say defunctus est; it means that the man has done his task.
11
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
I he scenes of our life are like pictures done in rough mosaic. Looked at close, they produce no effect. There is nothing beautiful to be found in them, unless you stand some distance off.
11
George Santayana
George Santayana
It is the acme of life to understand life.
3
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big. It is an indivisible point, drawn out and magnified by the powerful lenses of Time and Space.
9
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.
7
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
From the first moment of life, men ought to begin learning to deserve to live.
7
Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke
Fate loves to invent patterns and designs. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult
8
Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello
Life is little more than a loan shark: it exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes.
12
Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello
Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life.
12
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
We never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.
9
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.
9
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.
9
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.
6
Ogden Nash
Ogden Nash
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
13
Marcial
Marcial
No man is quick enough to enjoy life.
4
W. Somerset Maugham
W. Somerset Maugham
The life force is vigorous. The delight that accompanies it counter-balances all the pains and hardships that confront men. It makes life worth living.
9
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson
Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding.
5
Juan Ramón Jiménez
Juan Ramón Jiménez
I do not cut my life up into days but my days into lives, each day, each hour, an entire life.
15
Elbert Hubbard
Elbert Hubbard
The best way to prepare for life is to begin to live.
8
William Hazlitt
William Hazlitt
The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.
8