Life Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

Every life is a march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or to vice.

One must choose between Obscurity with Efficiency, and Fame with its inevitable collateral of Bluff. There is a period, well on toward middle life, when a man can say such things to himself and feel comforted.

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.

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: 'he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth.'

When I can look Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
And taken in exchange — my youth.

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.

Archibald MacLeish

In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death.

Alfred Russel Wallace

The men who abandon themselves to the passions of this miserable life, are compared in Scripture to beasts.

To bare our souls is all we ask, to give all we have to life and the beings surrounding us. Here the nature spirits are intense and we appreciate them, make offerings to them - these nature spirits who call us here - sealing our fate with each other, celebrating our love.

But I now entered on my fifteenth year - a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import

We are here to add what we can to, not to get what we can from, Life.

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

Samuel Butler (novelist)

There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to – if there are no doors or windows – he walks through a wall.

Bernard Malamud

The German landscape is something unique that we cannot disturb and have no right to destroy. The more densely populated our 'living space' becomes with settlements, the greater our hunger will grow for unspoilt nature. The ever increasing spiritual damage caused by life within the big city will make this hunger practically uncontrollable... when we build here on this the landscape of our homeland we must be clear that we will protect its beauty; and in places where this beauty has already disappeared, we will reconstruct it.

I don't really believe in evil at all. I mean, I don't believe in God. I certainly don't, therefore, believe in some sort of supernatural or trans-historical force that somehow organizes life on dark or black principles. I think there are only people behaving, and sometimes behaving monstrously.

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Every article on these islands has an almost personal character, which gives this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of the artistic beauty of medieval life.

John Millington Synge

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

In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old.

Alfred Marshall

Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life.

Year by year we are learning that in this restless, strenuous American life of ours vacations are essential.

Ellsworth Huntington

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies within us while we live.

To save an animal's life in order that it may suffer indefinitely is something I would never condone.

Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well.