Quotes About Life

302 quotes

English modernist writer

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

— Moments of Being

Russian novelist

You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid—and I know they are—yet I won't be wiser?

— Crime and Punishment

French novelist, poet, dramatist and politician

where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?

— Les Misérables

French philosopher, author, and journalist

What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

— The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

Russian author

This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer.

— War and Peace

Irish playwright, critic, and polemicist

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.

— Man and Superman

British writer and journalist

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.

— Animal Farm

English writer and philologist

End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path. One that we all must take.

— The Return of the King

English mystery and detective writer

In the midst of life, we are in death.

— And Then There Were None

Nobel Prize winning German-Swiss poet, novelist and painter

I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.

— Peter Camenzind

Greek philosopher

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.

— The Nicomachean Ethics

American deafblind author, political activist, lecturer, scholar

For one wild, glad moment we snapped the chain that binds us to earth, and joining hands with the winds we felt ourselves divine.

— The Story of My Life

Colombian writer and Nobel laureate

Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life.

— Love in the Time of Cholera

6th-century BC semi-legendary Chinese philosopher, founder of Taoism

If you try to change it, you will ruin it. Try to hold it, and you will lose it.

— Tao Te Ching

French novelist

One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.

— Madame Bovary

American writer and literary critic

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

— The Mystery of Marie Rogêt

French existentialist philosopher

She smiled and said with an ecstatic air: "It shines like a little diamond","What does?""This moment. It is round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; I am eternal.

— The Age of Reason

French writer and dramatist

When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream forever.

— The Count of Monte Cristo