Quotes About Life

The more science learns what life is, the more reluctant scientists are to define it.

— Leila M. Coyne

Is life worth living?  This is a question for an embryo, not for a man.

— Samuel Butler

I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.

— Frank Lloyd Wright

The first forty years of live give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.

— D. H. Lawrence

Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

— Samuel Butler

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.  It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

— H. L. Mencken

Life backs up life.  Nobody loves creditors and dead men.

— Ugo Betti

The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.

— William Hazlitt

All life is an experiment.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

— George Bernard Shaw

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

— Charlie Chaplin

What a fine comedy this world would be if one did not play a part in it!

— Denis Diderot

There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers, by living productively.

— Erich Fromm

Indifference may not wreck a man’s life at any one turn, but it will destroy him with a kind of dry rot in the long run.

— Bliss Carman

We live not as we wish to, but as we can.

— Menander

The unexamined life is not worth living.

— Plato

Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.  He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.

— Job 14:1-2

Do not take life too seriously; you will never get out of it alive.

— Elbert Hubbard

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives.

— George Bernard Shaw

Life is a foreign language.  All men mispronounce it.

— Christopher Morley

It does not at present look as though Nature had designed the universe primarily for life...Life is the end of a chain of by-products; it seems to be the accident, and torrential deluges of life-destroying radiation the essential.

— James Hopwood Jeans

Life is an incurable disease.

— Abraham Cowley

The only thing I regret about my life is the length of it.  If I had to live my life again, I’d make all the same mistakes— only sooner.

— Tallulah Bankhead

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.

— James M. Barrie

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

— William Shakespeare

Let us endeavor to live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry.

— Mark Twain

This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel...

— Horace Walpole

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

— Guy Bellamy

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

— Susan Ertz

Not a shred of evidence occurs in favor of the idea that life is serious.

— Brendan Gill

Most of the evils of life arise from man’s inability to sit still in a room.

— Blaise Pascal

There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other particular.  The first is that everyone can, in the end, get what he wants if he only tries.  This is the general rule.  The particular rule is that every individual is more or less an exception to the general rule.

— Samuel Butler

Life is one long process of getting tired.

— Samuel Butler

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

— Samuel Butler

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

— Helen Keller

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

— Soren Kierkegaard

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

— Henry David Thoreau

When I hear somebody sigh, “Life is hard,” I am always tempted to ask, “Compared to what?”

— Sydney J. Harris

Life was a lot simpler when what we honored was father and mother rather than all the major credit cards.

— Robert Orben

Life is not for everyone.

— Michael O’Donoghue

The purpose of life is living.  Men and women should get the most they can out of their lives. The smallest, the tiniest intellect may be quite as valuable to itself; it may have all the capacity for enjoyment that the wisest has.

— Clarence Darrow

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.

— Charlotte Bront‘

Life is worth living...since it is what we make it.

— William James

You should make a point of trying every experience once — except incest and folk-dancing.

— Arnold Bax