Life Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Gustave Flaubert

All love that has not friendship for its base,
Is like a mansion built upon the sand.
Love, to endure life's sorrow and earth's woe,
Needs friendship's solid masonwork below.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Now, occultism is not like mystic faculty, and it very seldom works in harmony either with business aptitude in the things of ordinary life or with a knowledge of the canons of evidence in its own sphere.

Many of the artists who have represented Negro life have seen only the comic, the ludicrous side of it, and have lacked sympathy with and appreciation for the warm, big heart that dwells within such a rough exterior.

Henry Ossawa Tanner

There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences. The life of Christ is worth its example, its moral force, its heroism of benevolence.

Robert G. Ingersoll

Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.

A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the oneself that there is no self left to die.

Bernard Berenson

Therefore keep in the midst of life. Do not isolate yourself. Be among men and things, and among troubles, and difficulties, and obstacles.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

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

Samuel Butler (novelist)

Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.

This is to be a summary poem of the life of the Atlantic coast of this country, nourished by the communications which run down it. Gauley Bridge is inland, but it was created by theories, systems, and workmen from many coastal sections — factors which are, in the end, not regional or national. Local images have one kind of reality. U.S. 1 will, I hope, have that kind and another too. Poetry can extend the document.

Muriel Rukeyser

Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.

Nations are represented by their poets and their writers in the open competition for the Nobel Prize. Consequently the award of the Prize by the Academy glorifies not only the author but the people whose son he is, and it bears witness that that nation has a share in the universal achievement, that its efforts are fruitful, and that it has the right to live for the profit of mankind. If this honour is premous to all, it is infinitely more so to Poland. It has been said that Poland is dead, exhausted, enslaved, but here is the proof of her life and triumph. Like Galileo, one is forced to think when before the eyes of the world homage has been rendered to the importance of Poland's achievement and her genius.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress.

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you.

Frederick Buechner

I was told all my life I was part Cherokee. Then it was Crow. The latest is Blackfoot.

Kathie Lee Gifford

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.

It is a good thing that life is not as serious as it seems to a waiter.

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

I can hardly express in words my deep feeling and sympathy for them, knowing as I do, the many serious handicaps and obstacles that will confront them in almost every walk of life.

Marshall Taylor

There is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, — light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.

There is no power on earth, that can neutralize the influence of a high, pure, simple and useful life.

Booker T. Washington

On this basis, which was originally financial and goes back to George Peabody, there grew up in the twentieth century a power structure between London and New York which penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and the practice of foreign policy.

Carroll Quigley