quotations about life
I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
speech during the Great March on Detroit, Jun. 23, 1963
It's a great time to be alive and talking about life. We just learned that geologists found what appear to be fossilized stromatolites in 3.7-billion-year-old rocks in Greenland. That suggests life popped up on Earth ridiculously soon after the planet formed. And last we learned about the discovery of a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun. Meanwhile we now know planets are common. Maybe the universe is simply throbbing with life!
JOEL ACHENBACH
"The 4 biggest milestones in the history of life on Earth", Albuquerque Journal, September 1, 2016
I realized that the ultimate joy in life comes from understanding that life is a process, the tapestry of threads bound together, where some fit in and some fall out of place: people come and go, events do not turn out as we would like to, we plan for the best, yet have to set for the worst. If we try to rush life, control it, get angry about it, it will run away from us. If we embrace life, breathe deeply into it and accept it as a wonder, we will be the richest people in the world in a split second.
MILENA MILICEVIC
"How I Overcame My Biggest Mistake in Life so Far", Huffington Post, June 14, 2016
Ah! this beautiful world ... Indeed, I know not what to think of it. Sometimes it is all gladness and sunshine, and heaven itself lies not far off. And then it changes suddenly, and is dark and sorrowful, and clouds shut out the sky. In the lives of the saddest of us, there are bright days like this, when we feel as if we could take the great world in our arms. Then come the gloomy hours, when the fire will neither burn on our hearths nor in our hearts; and all without and within is dismal, cold, and dark.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Hyperion
A life knows few revelations; these must be followed when they come.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit at Rest
Life -- a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
"Is Civilization Progress?", Reader's Digest, July 1964
Life's generally artless ... but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind your back, and before you know it you're in the final act of a lousy movie.
GLEN DUNCAN
Talulla Rising
Take responsibility for making your own life beautiful.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Your Brain Is God
Life is distressing insomuch as we give exaggerated importance to altogether unimportant matters. Drifting along, I have observed that we men and women disturb ourselves about trifles, overlooking in the needless excitement the innumerable beauties which wait upon the way. Every ripple is not a wave, every wind is not a hurricane. Why worry whilst we are still upon the stream? It will be time enough to trouble when we meet the sea.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
Life is like a school; one can learn, one can graduate, one can skip a grade or stay behind.
ELIZABETH LESSER
The New American Spirituality: A Seeker's Guide
To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Sounds of life and movement, people getting ready and people giving up, the sound of hope and the sound of hanging on, and behind them all, the quiet, deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks...
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Rum Diary
Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
IRVIN D. YALOM
The Schopenhauer Cure
Scorn ye not the little things,
For life is made from them.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Little Things"
So precious life is! Even to the old, the hours are as a miser's coins!
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Broken Music"
Activity does not necessarily mean life.
PHILIP K. DICK
A Scanner Darkly
Life is full of doors that don't open when you knock, equally spaced amid those that open when you don't want them to.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Blood of Amber
It is a matter of embracing one's only life, even though this life so often seems to be, merely, one's doom. And it is, in a way, though not "merely." But to refuse the doom of one's only life is to be trapped outside all nourishment.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Life -- and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison -- is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.
NEIL GAIMAN
Death Talks About Life
A bubble of air in the blood, a drop of water in the brain, and a man is out of gear, his machine falls to pieces, his thought vanishes, the world disappears from him like a dream at morning. On what a spider thread is hung our individual existence!
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime