LIFE QUOTES VIII
quotations about life
Life has a value only when it has something valuable as its object.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
Lectures on the Philosophy of History
Our life is nothing, it is true, but our life is divine. A breath of nature annihilates us, but we surpass nature in penetrating far beyond her vast phantasmagoria to the changeless and the eternal.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
I believe that this life is a journey home. Someone is calling us, someone we know as God, and whom others know by different names.
JAMES BEHRENS
Newton Citizen, May 19, 2016
Let us all so live as we shall wish we had lived when we come to die; for that only is well, that ends well.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Let us pounce
upon this red prey,
let us tear life
that passes throbbing
and lift together
our wild flight.
PABLO NERUDA
"The Condor"
Live to the point of tears.
ALBERT CAMUS
Notebooks
Life is more sweet than I
Knew: the shifted scene
Less wavered, more trimmed with light,
Than the years before.
Look down. People pass over the ice
As a file of thin ghosts creep,
And fade beyond the hill.
You, and you, and you--
Small souls, shrinking away.
MARK TURBYFILL
"Journey"
Store well Life's sheaves, the grains of thought--
Your harvest will be good,
If sheaves are bound by ties of love,
And evil you've withstood.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Gathering of the Sheaves"
The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
We are meant to taste of life ... and drink the cup of it to the dregs, bitter and sweet alike.
JACQUELINE CAREY
Kushiel's Dart
Meeting each other and leaving each other. Leaving and meeting. That's what life is!
AUGUST STRINDBERG
A Dream Play
Our life is in the loom; it rolls up and is hidden as fast as it is woven. It is to be taken out of the loom only when we leave this world; then only shall we see the pattern.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"The Rainy Day"
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain.
EMIL CIORAN
A Short History of Decay
Each new epoch in life seems an encounter. There is a tussle and a cloud of dust, and we come out of it triumphant or crest-fallen, according as we have borne ourselves.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
If life is a death sentence, then we all have plenty of time to kill.
GREGORY ADAMS
"Review: Life Is a Death Sentence", Exclaim, June 10, 2016
To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations.
EMILY DICKINSON
letter to T. W. Higginson, winter 1871
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?
JOHN GREEN
An Abundance of Katherines
What misery to live in this world! We are like men whose enemies are at the door, who must not lay aside their arms, even while sleeping or eating, and are always in dread lest the foe should enter the fortress by some breach in the walls. O my Lord and my all! How canst thou wish us to prize such a wretched existence?
TERESA OF AVILA
The Interior Castle
I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Rain Taxi, winter 2000/2001