Life

From Wikiquote

Jump to: navigation, search
This theme article needs cleanup. Please review Wikiquote:Templates, especially the standard format of theme articles, to determine how to edit this article to conform to a higher standard of article quality. This page has been listed as needing cleanup since 2008-09-19.

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

Contents

[edit] Sourced

  • 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.
  • 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


[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."

[edit] Unsourced

[edit] Positive

  • It's all about options. Once one disappears, there are many others.
  • I grew up knowing I could have had a million different lives. It makes your life mysterious and your imagination go wild.
  • Life is a waterfall; we're one in the river and one again after the fall.
  • A man is like a spark. Some will start a fire, but most will burn out quickly.
  • Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
  • Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today.
  • Every day is my best day; this is my life. I'm not going to have this moment again.
  • Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see the beauty, believe in them and try to follow where they lead.
  • Life is like pizza, When it's good, It's really good. When it's bad, it's still pretty good.
    • Unknown
  • Life isn't what you want it to be, it's what you make it become.
  • The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.
  • The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
  • I'm alright. I love you. I love my life. I'm always close to you..
  • I am waiting for a sign that will indicate to me what meaning I must give to my life, but right now my existence is satisfactory.
  • I've created my own path and I'm content with that.
  • It is never too late to be what you might have been.
  • Let us endeavor to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
  • Let's live today, let's live tomorrow, and let's live the day after that - even if it means living in eternal pain.
    • Vash the Stampede (Trigun)
  • Life is a challenge, meet it; life is love, share it; life is a dream, realize it; life is a game, play it.
    • [Sri Sathya Sai Baba ]]
  • Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full.
  • Life is like riding a bicycle. You don't fall off unless you plan to stop pedaling.
  • Live all you can - it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?
  • Man is happy only as he finds work worth doing — and does it well.
  • Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.
  • Purpose of mankind: To better yourself and all that you know by seeking knowledge and truth, while at the same time never forgetting that all life is as equally important as your own.
  • The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.
  • Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
  • You don't love a woman because she is beautiful, but she is beautiful because you love her.
  • When nothing is sure, everything is possible.
  • Humans can choose the type of life they want to live. The important thing is that you choose life...and then...live!
  • Life is a sequence of moments, live each moment to its fullest and you're bound to live a happy life
  • I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirm the worth of life as an end in itself.

[edit] Cynical

  • Life is a bad game, imperfect and unfair. Let us play it well.
  • Life comes with lousy odds. You wouldn't want to bet on it.
  • Life is strange. If you don't believe me, just live longer.
  • Life... is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. You're stuck with this undefinable whipped-mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there's nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while, there's a peanut butter cup, or an English toffee. But they're gone too fast, the taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits, filled with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts, and if you're desperate enough to eat those, all you've got left is a... is an empty box... filled with useless, brown paper wrappers.
  • Life — and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison — is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.
  • There have to be clouds for there to be silver linings.
  • After all we can do....life is still a terminal disease.
  • All you have is existence, that's all there is to it.
  • The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.
  • It is not true that life is one damn thing after another — it's one damn thing over and over.
  • Life is like a butterfly: it doesn't last long.

[edit] Philosophical: in relation to death

  • The primary question about life after death is not whether it is a fact, but even if it is, what problems that really solves.
  • Let us endeavor so to live that, when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry.
  • Do not seek death; death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.
  • The inevitability of death is the greatest affirmation of life.
  • Must not all things in the last be swallowed by death?
  • I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.
  • I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.
  • Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.
  • Sometimes, dead is bettah
  • We are born with two incurable diseases, life, from which we die, and hope, which says maybe death isn't the end.
  • We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
  • What a folly to dread the thought of throwing away life at once, and yet have no regard to throwing it away by parcels and piecemeal.
  • While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
  • Such a long, long time to be gone and a short time to be there.
  • What else can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man?
  • We do what we must because we can, for the good of all of us (except the ones who are dead) but there's no use crying over every mistake, you just keep on trying until you run out of cake, and the science gets done and you make a neat gun for the people who are still alive'
    • Still Alive from Portal

Insert Wikipedia pagename=== Philosophical: other ===

  • Life, man is given as something worthy of sacrifice in the way of His love; free will, as exemplary of justice, is the mechanism by which one's choice in that sacrifice must be made.


  • Each person that has ever lived has had the same problem. They wanted to be remembered by everyone for what they were. To be forgotten is worse than death. People wanted to be remembered by other things than books and stories. But in the end that's all we can be remembered by. There's nothing you can do at this points but live. But when I'm to die I want to be remembered by one thing. I want people to say "He was the type of person that believed and saw the good in others even when they couldn't believe or see it in themselves." That is how I want to be remembered.
  • ...for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It's an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally underappreciated state known as existence.
    Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don't actually care about you — indeed, don't even know that you are there. They don't even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will answer to a single overarching impulse to keep you you.
  • We each carry the weight of personal choice and the responsibility for playing our part in furthering the persistence of life. At the same time, we each hold within the possibility for an awareness of the lightness at work in existence, the ultimate illusion of the material world, the absence of meaning beyond the meaning of that which presents itself to us.
  • Life is like a farm, one wrong step and you're in DEEP SHIT!!!
  • I don't believe in miracles — I rely on them.
  • Lives aren't handed out somewhere, they're rewarded. And that reward, that priceless reward is only given out once. It's so fragile that one little tear, one little scratch, can destroy it.
  • I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.
  • If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.
  • Living a life is a hard thing to do, clutching it in your grasp and protecting it is easy for some, but not for others.
  • If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.
  • In the midst of winter, I found there was within me, an invincible summer.
  • If you're careful enough, nothing bad or good will ever happen to you.
  • Is that your own life you're living?
  • It's a magical world, Hobbes, ol' buddy ... Let's go exploring!
  • Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.
  • Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.
  • Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour." Stephen Leacock
  • A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.
  • Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.
  • ...nothing is desperately important and the joy of life is just looking at it.
  • Opportunity is missed by most people because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work.
  • The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experiences.
  • Reality is a term for people who refuse to see things as they can be, so that they might be, instead seeing things as they are, and lazily assuming that's how they'll always be.
  • The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
    • Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations, 1988
  • So many people tiptoe through life, so carefully, to arrive, safely, at death.
  • Somewhere along the line of development we discover what we really are, and then we make our real decision for which we are responsible. Make that decision primarily for yourself because you can never really live anyone else's life, not even your own child's.
  • The difference between theory and practice is that in theory there isn't any.
  • The major value in life is not what you get. The major value in life is what you become.
  • The real world: no time to do it right, but always time to do it over.
  • There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.
  • There's no point in living, if you can't feel alive.
    • Shirley Ann Manson, in song performed by Garbage, The World Is Not Enough.
  • To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.
  • We are a wondrous gathering of atoms formed into an incredible being, capable of experiencing our own existence. While we live this experience we must be thankful for it, and live it fully. When it ends, we return to what we were before it began. What we create and leave behind is our gift to those who will follow us. We return to the universe as we came from it, to be recreated, and recycled into the infinite all.
  • What ought one to say then as each hardship comes? I was practicing for this, I was training for this.
  • With dried blood stiff on my temples I climbed the hill, cursing the satanic way of men, yet knowing myself vile, for they had not known what they were doing, but I betrayed an innocent; and the tears— weak whiskey tears— would not wash from my brow the blood of a little brother." [after a killing of a badger by villagers] - Henry Williamson in The Village Book
  • Life isn't easy unless you behave as though it is.
  • The special way of growing that real living things employ is exponential growth. Another way of saying this is that living things grow by local doubling.
  • Life is not easy for us, but what of that! We must have perseverance and confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing at whatever cost must be obtained.
  • Life is like an incessant series of problems, all difficult, with brutal choices, and a time limit. The worst thing you can do is to make no choice, waiting for the ideal conclusion to present itself.
    • [Chapel the Evergreen]
  • We've been evolving for millions of years, how come life still feels so short?
  • Life doesn't revolve around what you need to know, it revolves around what you need to understand.
  • There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.
  • If you're not living life on the edge, you're not taking up enough room.
  • I believe everyone decision is neither wrong or right because it affects your life no matter what! So how can you affect you life in a wrong way? It's your life, You choose how it goes.
  • If everything went the way we want it to in life, then we'd never learn.
  • Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
  • In life, everything will be ok...As long as you don't define ok.

[edit] Humorous

  • The BBC would like to make a correction: several weeks ago, a singer was on this program singing a song to the effect that life was a bowl of cherries. The BBC would like to point out that Life is not a bowl of cherries, but rather Life is a state of being categorized by organic metabolic reactions. The BBC would also like to apologize to one viewer who, in an attempt to take his own life, instead took a bowl of cherries, and was then promptly sick in the upstairs lavatory.
  • Ever since I was a kid, I've always been a real deep thinker and stuff.
  • You ever wish that all your friends, family, and loved ones would die so that you wouldn't feel so guilty about blowing your own brains out?
  • Always look on the Bright Side of Life
  • Everybody has their moment of great opportunity in life. If you happen to miss the one you care about, everything else in life becomes eerily easy.
  • Hush. For we are going to stay buried here in this tomb together for a very, very long time, so hug me!
  • I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.
    • Life's a Laugh and Death's a Joke,its true.You'll see its all a Show,keep 'Em laughing as You go,just Remember that the last Laugh is on You
    • Eric Idle,Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life
  • You wish that you could do something this ugly, and make it look this good.
  • I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it.
  • I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.
  • If it turns out to be a joke at the end, I'm going to be so pissed at whoever started it.
  • If your parents never had children, chances are ... neither will you.
  • Life consists of two phases: first you have health and no brains, then you have brains and no health.
  • Life: adjusting a necktie in a funhouse mirror.
  • Life is gamble at terrible odds — if it was a bet, you wouldn't take it.
  • Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.
  • Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering — and it's all over much too soon.
  • Life is like a sewer — what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.
  • Life is too important to be taken seriously.
  • Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove.
  • Life's a jest and all things show it, I thought so once but now I know it.
  • You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
  • Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
    • David Brent in "The Office"
  • Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get.
  • I can face anything in life, except difficulties.
  • Life is like underwear. Should be changed twice daily.
  • Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.
  • My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.
  • If life were perfect, it would be boring.

[edit] Verse

  • After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
  • The Road goes ever on and on,
    Down from the door where it began.
    Now far ahead the road has gone,
    And I must follow, if I can,
    Pursuing it with eager feet,
    Until it joins some larger way
    Where many paths and errands meet.
    And whither then? I cannot say.
    • Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien. The same poem, in another version, occurs in The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship.
  • Life is a music,
    it can be a sure hit
    but one thing is for sure, it will end.
Harold Mamitag, BSECE2 SLU Baguio City, PHIL.
  • My friend, the things that do attain
    The happy life be these, I find:
    The riches left, not got with pain:
    The fruitful ground, the quiet mind.
  • Isn't your life extremely flat
    With nothing to grumble at?

[edit] External links

Wikipedia
Wikipedia has an article about:
Retrieved from "http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Life"