Life

The purpose of life is the maturing of the soul. Do not pursue what is illusory,
such as property and position. All that is gained at the expense of the nerves, decade after decade, and is confiscated in the fell night."
Alexander Solzhenitzyn

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.
Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina

The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not?
That is the question of life.
Carl Jung
Memories, Dreams and Reflections

The fundamental precept of the fight for longevity is avoidance of safety. One must not lose desires. They are mighty stimulants to creativeness, to love, and to long life.
Alexander A. Bogomoletz
The Prolongation of Life

Live dangerously. Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius.
Frederick Nietzsche
The Gay Science

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
Jack London
Jack London's Tales of Adventure

Yes! Life is a banquet, and most poor sons-of-bitches are starving to death! Live!
Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
Auntie Mame

To live is like to love - all reason is against it,
and all healthy instinct for it.
Lord Byron
Note-books

A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.
Carl Sandburg

Life is a romantic business. It is painting a picture, not doing a sum - but you have to make the romance, and it will come to the question how much fire you have in your belly.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

A precipice in front of you, and wolves behind you, in your rear; that is life.
Latin Proverb

It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It has now become clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.
Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus

The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression.
Sigmund Freud
to Marie Bonaparte

The world itself is but a large prison,
out of which some are daily led to execution.
Sir Walter Raleigh

Reason thus with life;
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep.
William Shakespeare
Measure for Measure

The value of life for us, measured simply by what we enjoy (by the natural end of the sum of all our inclinations, that is, by happiness), is easy to decide. It is less than nothing. For who would enter life afresh under the same conditions?
Immanuel Kant
Critique of Teleological Judgment

The web of our life is of mingled yarn,
good and ill together.
William Shakespeare
All's Well That Ends Well

There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or in personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair.
John F. Kennedy

Life involves suffering and transitoriness. No person can choose his age or the condition of his time. The past may rob the present of much joy and much mystery. The generation of Buchenwald and the Siberian labor camps cannot talk with the same optimism as its fathers. The bliss of Dante has been lost on our civilization.
Henry Kissinger
from his senior thesis at Harvard University

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.
William Shakespeare
As You Like It

Unrest of spirit is a mark of life; one problem after another presents itself and in the solving of them we can find our greatest pleasure.
Karl Menninger
Take Your Choice

Why are we so fond of that life which begins with a cry and ends with a groan?
Mary, Countess of Warwick

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard of no more.
William Shakespeare
Macbeth

Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.
Jean de la Bruyere

We come inevitably to the fundamental question: What are people for? What is living for? If the answer is a life of dignity, decency and opportunity, then every increase in population means a decrease in all three. The crowd is a threat to every single being.
Mayra Mannes
Life June 12, 1964

Now the answer...is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it.
There is no reason for life and life has no meaning.
W. Somerset Maughn
The Summing Up

Not to be born is best.
Sophocles

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale
Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy old man.
William Shakespeare
King John III

Life is one long process of getting tired.
Samuel Butler

Most men live lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau

Life is a disease from which sleep gives us relief every sixteen hours.
Sleep is a palliative, death is a remedy.
Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chafort
Maximes et Pensées

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour on 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
Macbeth

The enjoyments of this life are not equal to its evils.
Pliny the Elder

Life is a waste of wearisome hours,
Which seldom the rose of enjoyment adorns;
And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers
Is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.
Thomas Moore

The lure of happiness and the fear of pain are fundamental qualities possessed by all living things and are the two forces which have through untold millenniums kept what we usually call life from destruction by the ever encroaching outside forces of destruction.
Luther Burbank

Man alone has created out of the constant threat of death, a will-to-endure, and out of the desire for continuity and immortality in all their conceivable forms, a more meaningful kind of life, in which Man redeems the littleness of individual men.
Lewis Mumford
The Condition of Man

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
Albert Camus
Summer in Algiers

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
Soren Kierkegaard

The whole life of the philosopher is a preparation for death.
Marcus Tullius
Cicero Tusculanes Disputationes

An unused life is an early death.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Iphigenie auf Tauris

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.
Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago

If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.
Martin Luther King

     This is a world in which each of us, knowing his limitations, knowing the evils of superficiality and the terrors of fatigue, will have to cling to what is close to him, to what he knows, to what he can do, to his friends and his tradition and his love, lest he be dissolved in a universal confusion and know nothing and love nothing.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
The Open Mind

     Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me. It is an uncomfortable doctrine which the true ethics whisper into my ear. You are happy, they say; therefore you are called upon to give much.
Albert Schweitzer
Civilization and Ethics

     But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
Thorton Wilder
The Bridge of San Luis Rey