Life Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Life may unfold chronologically for the body and for bureaucracies that keep track of such things as births, marriages, deaths, visas, tax returns, expulsions, and identity cards, but memory does not play this game in quite the same way, always manages to confound the desire for tidiness.

Now life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere beginner.

Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life.

Fernand Braudel

In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.

But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of Bravery, in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.

Try not to turn your life into a race, least of all an obstacle race.

José Bergamín

The military is a very cool world to write about. I went down to Fort Benning, Georgia, for military training, and I learned a lot about soldiers and officers and why they joined up and what their life has been like. I also got my butt kicked.

No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.

I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life.

Each person's life is lived as a series of conversations.

The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him.

Henry L. Stimson

Every day has been so short, every hour so fleeting, every minute so filled with the life I love that time for me has fled on too swift a wing.

While we are living in the present, we must celebrate life every day, knowing that we are becoming history with every work, every action, every deed.

Mattie Stepanek

Mistakes are a fact of life
It is the response to error that counts.

Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed
the floor.

The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them.

Frank Moore Colby

Of course, when you're training your whole life to get to the Olympics, you train for gold.

I never had any hesitation or regrets in this sense. My life has been enriched by excellent human relations, work and interests. I have never felt lonely.

Rita Levi-Montalcini

The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!

Robert Browning

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor — those great tools of thought — and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.

The structure of life I have described in buildings - the structure which I believe to be objective - is deeply and inextricably connected with the human person, and with the innermost nature of human feeling.

Christopher Alexander

All my life as an artist I have asked myself: What pushes me continually to make sculpture? I have found the answer — at least the answer for myself. Art is an action against death. It is denial of death.

Jacques Lipchitz

There are two great rules of life: never tell everything at once.