Quotes About Life

302 quotes

Confucius speaks of a man whose strength gives out along the course, having set the limits beforehand. The failure is one of planning, not fate. A man can set his limits, even if he cannot plan his exhaustion. These writers take up life through suffering, struggle, faith, politics, and the small daily occupations that keep us moving.

Buddha asks that all that have life be delivered from suffering. Voltaire, through his character Martin, advises working without reasoning, calling it the only way to make life endurable. Churchill holds that without a measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed. Each of these is a decision about how to face life. Atatürk says a nation which makes the final sacrifice for life and freedom does not get beaten.
English playwright and poet

Life ... is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

— Macbeth

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

— De Profundis

English author

Dumbledore watched her fly away, and as her silvery glow faded he turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears."After all this time?""Always," said Snape.

— Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

German philosopher

The more thoroughly a person understands life, the less he will mock, though in the end he might still mock the "thoroughness of his understanding.

— Human, All Too Human

English modernist writer

It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.

— Mrs. Dalloway

English novelist and social critic

Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.

— Great Expectations

Author, novelist, writer

One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.

— Emma

French novelist, poet, dramatist and politician

The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.

— Les Misérables

French philosopher, author, and journalist

I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.

— The Plague

Russian author

And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death--but it's more peaceful.

— Anna Karenina

Irish playwright, critic, and polemicist

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

— Man and Superman

British writer and journalist

This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.

— Animal Farm

English writer and philologist

Your time may come. Do not be too sad, Sam. You cannot be always torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years. You have so much to enjoy and to be, and to do.

— The Return of the King

French novelist, critic and essayist

... the idea that 'Life' contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.

— Swann's Way

English mystery and detective writer

When you're in the middle of a nightmare, something ordinary is the only hope. Anyway, ordinary things are the best. I've always thought so.

— Sad Cypress

French writer, historian and philosopher

Let us work without reasoning,' said Martin; 'it is the only way to make life endurable.

— Candide

Nobel Prize winning German-Swiss poet, novelist and painter

I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I've got.

— Verliebt in die verrückte Welt: Betrachtungen, Gedichte, Erzählungen, Briefe

Greek philosopher

One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.

— The Nicomachean Ethics

4th-century BCE Greek philosopher

For, let me tell you that the more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me are the pleasure and charm of conversation.

— Republic: Books 1-5