Live It Up !

Quotes on Life

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 
 
 
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 
 
 
Life may have no meaning.  Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove.  ~Ashleigh Brilliant 
 
 
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 
 
 
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 
 
 
Life is like a ten-speed bicycle.  Most of us have gears we never use.  ~Charles Schulz 
 
 
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 
 
 
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 
 
 
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  
 

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 
 
 
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 
 
 
If a man in the morning hears 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 creature 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
 
 
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 
 
 
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
 
 
Life is a series of collisions with the future.  ~José Ortegay 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
 
 
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 
 
 
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 tragic comedies? 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 
 
 
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

Compiled by : T.A. Ramesh (India)

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