Life

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Life is a state that distinguishes organisms from non-living objects or dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism and reproduction.

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  • All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?
  • Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.
  • I compare human life to a large mansion of many apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me.
    • John Keats, letter to J. H. Reynolds, 3rd May 1818
  • Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding.
  • 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.
    • Anaïs Nin, in D. H. Lawrence : An Unprofessional Study (1932)
  • Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
  • Life is the distance between dreams and reality.
  • Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
  • The Lives We try to make never seem to get Us anywhere but Dead.
    • Soundgarden in "The Day I Tried To Live" (1994)
  • Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.
    • Jesus, in John 17:3 (NIV)
    • Variants:
    • And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.
      • John 17:3 (KJV)
    • This means everlasting life, their taking in knowledge of you, the only true God, and of the one whom you sent forth, Jesus Christ.
  • Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage.
    • Anaïs Nin, as quoted in French Writers of the Past (2000) by Carol A. Dingle, p. 126
  • Living should be perpetual and universal benediction.
    • Wei Wu Wei in Why Lazarus Laughed : The Essential Doctrine, Zen — Advaita — Tantra (2003)
  • The life so short, the craft so long to learn.
    • Hippocrates, Aphorisms, I. i
      Often translated in Latin as:
      Ars longa, vita brevis
  • The sea is only beautiful if there's a shore. Life is like the sea. There'll be a direction to follow even if you sail more than one day or one life... the promise of a new land is your guide, because you know that the sea is a huge world that's beautiful only if there's a shore.
    • Patricky Field, as quoted in Beautiful if there's a shore (2008) song by Patricky Field
  • To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
  • We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it.
    • Anaïs Nin, entry for February 1954, in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5 as quoted in Woman as Writer (1978) by Jeannette L. Webber and Joan Grumman, p. 38
  • One is born, one runs up bills, one dies.
    • Richard Curtis (English screenwriter, actor and film director) and Ben Elton (British-Australian comedian and author). Stated by Rowan Atkinson playing Edmund Blackadder in the BBC situation comedy, Blackadder the Third, episode four, ‘Amy and Amiability’, 1987


[edit] Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).

  • Life as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence when it comes upon soundings.
  • Life is before you,— not earthly life alone, but life— a thread running interminably through the warp of eternity.
  • O thou child of many prayers!
    Life hath quicksands, Life hath snares!
    Care and age come unawares!
  • The grand question of life is, Is my name written in heaven?
  • The end of life is to be like unto God; and the soul following God, will be like unto Him.
  • God help us! it is a foolish little thing, this human life, at the best; and it is half ridiculous and half pitiful to see what importance we ascribe to it, and to its little ornaments and distinctions.
  • There is no life so humble that, if it be true and genuinely human and obedient to God, it may not hope to shed some of His light. There is no life so meager that the greatest and wisest of us can afford to despise it. We cannot know at what moment it may flash forth with the life of God.
  • Life is rather a state of embryo, a preparation for life; a man is not completely born till he has passed through death.
  • As one climbs a mountain roadway, and looks off on the landscape through the forest trees or from some overtopping crag, at each step he sees more and more of the outlying beauty of field and lake and forest and hill and river, till he reaches the summit, where the whole vast scene opens to the view, and enthuses his soul with delight. So life should be a constant lookout, through the gray mists, through the falling shadows, through the running tears, till he comes to the shining top of life in God Himself, where the fogs lift, and the shadows fall, and the view is all undisturbed.
  • A picture without sky has no glory. This present, unless we see gleaming beyond it the eternal calm of the heavens, above the tossing tree tops with withering leaves, and the smoky chimneys, is a poor thing for our eyes to gaze at, or our hearts to love, or our hands to toil on.
  • Life is great if properly viewed in any aspect; it is mainly great when viewed in connection with the world to come.
  • There is no human life so poor and small as not to hold many a divine possibility.
  • Let the current of your being set towards God, then your life will be filled and calmed by one master-passion which unites and stills the soul.
  • Man's life is so interwoven with the grand life of his Maker that it admits of no adequate or rational interpretation except when the Creator as Supreme and the creatures of His hand as subordinate, are seen working in unison.
  • I believe that we cannot live better than in seeking to become better.
  • While we seek to fill up life in a way that will best secure the ends of our existence here, our whole plan and course of action should be such as will not hinder but serve our preparation for a future world.
  • Pray for and work for fullness of life above every thing; full red blood in the body; full honesty and truth in the mind; and the fullness of a grateful love for the Saviour in your heart.
  • Act as if you expected to live a hundred years, but might die to-morrow.
  • Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou livest,
    Live well; how long, or short, permit to Heaven.
  • We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
    In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
    We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
    Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
  • I would not choose to go where I would be afraid to die, nor could I bear to live without a good hope for hereafter.
  • Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment uncertain, and judgment difficult.
  • A few years hence and he will be beneath the sod; but those cliffs will stand, as now, facing the ocean, incessantly lashed by its waves, yet unshaken, immovable; and other eyes will gaze on them for their brief day of life, and then they, too, will close.
  • They waste life in what are called good resolutions—partial efforts at reformation, feebly commenced, heartlessly conducted, and hopelessly concluded.
  • And thus does life go on, until death accomplishes the catastrophe in silence, takes the worn frame within his hand, and, as if it were a dried-up scroll, crumbles it in his grasp to ashes. The monuments of kingdoms, too, shall disappear. Still the globe shall move; still the stars shall burn; still the sun shall paint its colors on the day, and its colors on the year. What, then, is the individual, or what even is the race in the sublime recurrings of Time? Years, centuries, cycles, are nothing to these. The sun that measures out the ages of our planet is not a second-hand on the great dial of the universe.
  • Oh, I believe that there is no away; that no love, no life, goes ever from us; it goes as He went, that it may come again, deeper and closer and surer, and be with us always, even to the end of the world.
  • The highest life is a broken column; the fairest life, a tar niahed gem; the richest life, an unripened fruit.
  • This earth will be looked back on like a lowly home, and this life of ours be remembered like a short apprenticeship to duty.
  • This is life's greatest moment, when the soul unfolds capacities which reach beyond earth's boundaries.
  • Life! we've been long together
    Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;
    Tis hard to part when friends are dear,—
    Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear.
    Then steal away, give little warning.
    Choose thine own time,
    Say not "Good-night," but in some brighter clime,
    Bid me "Good-morning."

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