Life Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The rule of my life is to make business a pleasure and pleasure my business.

It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life.

Since 1990 I have been occupied creating new forms of life. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic material of this new nature. I make skeletons that are able to walk on the wind, so they don't have to eat. Over time, these skeletons have become increasingly better at surviving the elements such as storm and water and eventually I want to put those animals out in herds on the beaches so they will live their own lives.

I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.

Langston Hughes

On the road to equality there is no better place for blacks to detour around American values than in foregoing its example in the treatment of its women and the organization of its family life.

Eleanor Holmes Norton

It has been my fate in a long life of production to be credited chiefly with the equivocal virtue of industry, a quality so excellent in morals, so little satisfactory in art.

Margaret Oliphant

Loss and Possession, Death and Life are one.
There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.

I can no more think of my own life without thinking of wine and wines and where they grew for me and why I drank them when I did and why I picked the grapes and where I opened the oldest procurable bottles, and all that, than I can remember living before I breathed.

M. F. K. Fisher

At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experiences of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.

No one should ever work.
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost all the evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.
That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By "play" I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive.

Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

William Goldman

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

All we are asked to bear we can bear. That is a law of the spiritual life. The only hindrance to the working of this law, as of all benign laws, is fear.

Elizabeth Goudge

Boyhood is the longest time in life for a boy. The last term of the school-year is made of decades, not of weeks, and living through them is like waiting for the millennium.

Booth Tarkington

Romance is mush, stifling those who strive.
I'll live a lush life in some small dive,
And there I'll be, while I rot with the rest Of those whose lives are lonely, too.

Billy Strayhorn

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

I have learned that life is an adventure in forgiveness. Nothing clutters the soul more than remorse, resentment, recrimination.

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers, so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.

Greed probably figures in my intellectual life as well, as I attempt to absorb a massive amount of information with consequent mental indigestion.

Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!…whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age…Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

Of Oxford

One word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love.

For the duration of its collective life, or the time during which its identity may be assumed, each class resembles a hotel or an omnibus, always full, but always of different people.

Joseph Schumpeter

The real business of life is trying to understand each other.

Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge.

Instruction ends in the schoolroom, but education ends only with life. A child is given to the universe to be educated.

Frederick William Robertson