4,486 Life Quotes

I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don't remember ever having seen one weep.

Nothing but a speck we seem In the waste of waters round, Floating, floating like a dream, - Outward bound.

I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door - or I'll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.

It is very important to generate a good attitude, a good heart, as much as possible. From this, happiness in both the short term and the long term for both yourself and others will come.

Follow the three Rs: Respect for self, Respect for others and Responsibility for all your actions.

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.

It is a pity that, as one gradually gains experience, one loses one's youth.

One must work and dare if one really wants to live.

You write in your letter something which I sometimes feel also: Sometimes I do not know how I shall pull through.

I do not intend to spare myself, not to avoid emotions or difficulties. I don't care much whether I live a longer or shorter time: the world concerns me only in so far as I feel a certain debt toward it, because I have walked on this earth for thirty years, and out of gratitude I want to leave some souvenir.

There are some people who begin the Zoo at the beginning, called WAYIN, and walk as quickly as they can past every cage until they get to the one called WAYOUT, but the nicest people go straight to the animal they love the most, and stay there.

There, like the wind through woods in riot, Through him the gale of life blew high; The tree of man was never quiet: Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.

Lest Arab governments be tempted out of sheer routine to rush into impulsive rejection, let me suggest that tragedy is not what men suffer but what they miss.

Life is an incurable disease.

The better part of one's life consists of his friendships.

To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.

If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.

A callous disregard for the claims of innocent human life is the heart and soul of the evil of terrorism.

You can't build marriage on a foundation of selfish hedonism, because that would be to promise people only roses, and marriage is also thorns.

Material existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind, whose nature and geography are unexplored.

There is not love of life without despair about life.

I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.

What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.

What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.

Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.

Death is the end of life; ah, why Should life all labour be? Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast, And in a little while our lips are dumb. Let us alone. What is it that will last? All things are taken from us, and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful past. Let us alone. What pleasure can we have To war with evil? Is there any peace In ever climbing up the climbing wave? All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave In silence; ripen, fall and cease: Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind, In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar; O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

Comfort? comfort scorn'd of devils! this is truth the poet sings, That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.

Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are seal'd: I strove against the stream and all in vain: Let the great river take me to the main: No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield; Ask me no more.

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crossed the bar.

The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.

There's no sense crying over what can't be changed' 'that's what people cry over, things they can't change'

They darted down and rose up like a wave Or buzzed impetuously as before; One would have thought the corpse was held a slave To living by the life it bore!

Our only truth is our sorrow.

What crime have we commited in order to be born?

I know they say that man can't live on bread alone.. but this is one man who's willing to try.

to a truck that roars by while he's filming: Get a muffler!

Since I never thought I'd come this far, I honestly have no idea what will be next... I'm working on it though. I guess that above all I'd like to stay employed.

Life is always the best teacher, no matter what you're doing.

Under which head do you class those who are at sea?

No creature loves an empty space; Their bodies measure out their place.

Man must first live before he can live abundantly.

Live everyday like it'll be your last...Because one of these days, it will be.

When you focus on bigger things...Bigger than you and your life, you can find peace!

You know, we all need to just wake up excited about life. I just want to do the job I always wanted to do ever since I was a little girl, and live in peace with family and people I love, and just be silly and collect t-shirts from gas stations and go on road trips and eat popcorn in the middle of the night and watch tv. That's all I want, you know?

Love is the whole history of a woman's life, it is an episode in a man's.

If you don't set a baseline standard for what you'll accept in life, you'll find it's easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that's far below what you deserve.

It's in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.

there are four things that man own that are no use at sea, a compass, a rudder, a sail and the fear of going down.

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents, for these only gave life, those the art of living well.

'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.'

Thy duty do? rejoined the voice, Ah, do it, do it, and rejoice; But shalt thou then, when all is done, Enjoy a love, embrace a beauty Like these, that may be seen and won In life, whose course will then be run; Or wilt thou be where there is none? I know not, I will do my duty.

You cut your life down for spite!

Nothing's Planted, I don't have a thing in the ground.

O saisons, o chateaux, Quelle ame est sans defauts?

La vie est la farce a mener par tous.

I'm going to spend the rest of my life in the future, and possibly even longer.

Tot species, tantosque ortus variosque novatus una dies aperit, conficit ipsa dies.

Collige, virgo, rosas, dum flos novus et nova pubes, et memor esto aevum sic properare tuum.

Omne aevum curae; cunctis sua displicet aetas.

Today I read your autobiography in two volumes, Living My Life. These two books full of life, shocked me greatly. Your roaring of forty years like spring thunder, knocked at the door of my living grave throughout the whole book. At this time, silence lost its effect, the fire of my life was lit, I want to come to life and go through great anguish, immeasurable joy, dark despair and enthusiastic hope, throughout the peak and the abyss of life. I will calmly go on living with an attitude you taught me until I spend my whole life.

Keed, I'll give you a little bit of advice. Don't believe anything they write about you, good or bad. Two, get the dough while the getting is good, but don't break your heart trying to get it. And don't pick up too many checks!

No vaya por generalidades en el vivir, si ya no fuere en favor de la virtud, ni intime leyes precisas al querer, que avra de bever manana del agua que desprecia hoi.

You can take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the big house and the nice suits, but I hope you don't. Not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate, although I believe you do have that obligation. Not because you have a debt to all those who helped you get here, although I do believe you have that debt. It's because you have an obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. Because thinking only about yourself, fulfilling your immediate wants and needs, betrays a poverty of ambition.

Life always provides me with better jokes than any I could invent.

There's never gonna be a moment of truth for you While the world is watching All you need is the thing you forgotten And that's to learn to live with what you are.

Glad I'm not an astronaut...I'd be fucking dead.

A cripple in the way out-travels a footman or a post out of the way.

Well, the first cause is not...it's lightning striking a mud puddle. See, and this is what the evolutionists say. And by the way, they may be right -- you know, I'm not a scientist, they could be right.

'My own mystic bent leads me to believe that musical variations, collage, reiteration and process, or evolution, are beautiful. Life is worth living and beauty is worth making.'

We're all busy little bees, full of stings, making honey day and night, aren't we honey?

Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone - but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.

My father liked Iowa. He lived his whole life in the state, and is even now working his way through eternity there, in Glendale Cemetery in Des Moines.

I had to calm down because a state trooper pulled up alongside me at a traffic light and began looking at me with that sort of casual disdain you often get when you give a dangerously stupid person a gun and a squad car.

I was asked what I would like to be said of me in a hundred years from now. I replied '...and he's still sexually active!'

Some people want to express...apathy with noise and brutality...It's the want to transcend all that, to find some deeper essence in life that drives me.

Entre nous, et l'enfer ou le ciel, il n'y a que la vie entre deux, qui est la chose du monde la plus fragile.

Qui sait si cette autre moitie de la vie ou nous pensons veiller n'est pas un autre sommeil un peu different du premier.

In every man's heart there is an emptiness that only God can fill with his son Jesus Christ.

To make music is a life that I have to live.

This year I just want to enjoy myself. I could give up tomorrow without having the slightest regret. I could keep away from this world for a year and then perhaps start to feel the desire to prove something to myself again.

A later generation could have explained the miracle to Sir Frank - though explaining in terms he would not have understood. Though he knew well enough the theory of family traits and likenesses, it would have been impossible then to make him comprehend the intricacy of a chromosome which carries inside it - not merely the stereotypes of parental hair or temperament - but the secret knowledge of how to breathe, how to work the muscles to move the bones, how to grow, how to remember, how to commence the processes of thought : all the infinite number of secret 'how to's' that have to be passed on for life to stay above jelly level. A freak chromosome in Sir Frank ensured he passed on, together with these usual secrets, the secret of his individual consciousness.

Full of years, Sir Frank's body died. The diphtheria which carried him off caused him as much suffering as it would have done an ordinary man; dying was not eased by his unique gift. He slid out into the long darkness - but his consciousness continued unabated in eight other bodies.

The ambition of the original Frank had not died; it had grown subtler. It had become a wish to sample everything. The more bodily habitations there were with which to sample, the more tantalizing the idea seemed: for many experiences, belonging only to one brief era, are never repeated, and may be gone before they are perceived and tasted.