Quotes About Life Lessons

35 quotes

Mark Twain identified the most dangerous kind of error: what gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we know for sure that just ain't so. Nietzsche thought it nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right, especially when one is right. Leo Tolstoy observed that men always did and always will err, and nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.

Several of these lessons concern how to treat others. Immanuel Kant told readers to treat people as an end, and never as a means to an end. Henrik Ibsen held that a thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed. Hermann Hesse reminded readers that never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. Rudyard Kipling preferred to believe the best of everybody, because it saves so much trouble. Bob Dylan supplied the lesson of age running backward: I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.
English author

NEWT: Now there's absolutely nothing for you to worry about.JACOB: Tell me - has anyone ever believed you when you told them not to worry?NEWT: My philosophy is that worrying means you suffer twice.

— Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original Screenplay

Author, novelist, writer

She looked back as well as she could; but it was all confusion. She had taken up the idea, she supposed and made everything bend to it.

— Emma

Greek philosopher

The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

— The Philosophy of Aristotle

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

German writer, artist, natural scientist and politician

We look back on our life as a thing of broken pieces, because our mistakes and failures are always the first to strike us, and outweigh in our imagination what we have accomplished and attained.

— Maxims and Reflections

French existentialist philosopher

At an age when most children are playing hopscotch or with their dolls, you, poor child, who had no friends or toys, you toyed with dreams of murder, because that is a game to play alone.

— No Exit and Three Other Plays

Bohemian writer from Prague

If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.

— The Castle

Dutch painter

And the memories of all we have loved stay and come back to us in the evening of our life. They are not dead but sleep, and it is well to gather a treasure of them.

— The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

French novelist, poet, dramatist and politician

To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further, There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.

— Les Misérables

English writer

...and spend my days surrounded by wise books, - bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men.

— The Island of Dr. Moreau

French novelist, critic and essayist

But, instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover, life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.

American actor and comedian

I used to think the worst thing in life is to end up all alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone.

English novelist and social critic

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.

— David Copperfield