Life Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Generally young men are regarded as radicals. This is a popular misconception. The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life.

My darling girl, Unfortunately this earth is not a fairy-land, but a struggle for life, perfectly natural and therefore extremely harsh. All the same, or precisely for this reason, it is happiness and comfort for us men to have a precious sweetheart - and I have the most precious, the dearest and best of all!

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, and stumble from defeat to defeat.

Ryszard Kapuściński

Do not take life too seriously – you will never get out of it alive.

Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity do not easily resume life.

"Forbear to ask what tomorrow may bring" … If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine.

Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another.

Augusto Roa Bastos

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Samuel Butler (novelist)

There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.

Age is not all decay; it is the ripening,
the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husks.

George MacDonald

May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best – out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.

You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.

Faith is the first factor in a life devoted to service. Without it, nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible.

Mary McLeod Bethune

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living.

Henri Poincaré

Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality. Though different traditions may emphasize different aspects, it is only the interplay of these antithetic forces and the struggle for their synthesis that constitute the life, usefulness, and supreme value of mathematical science.

Richard Courant

Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

The surrender of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledgment of inferiority.

John C. Calhoun

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.

Muriel Rukeyser

Many Continentals think life is a game; the English think cricket is a game.

The only principles of public conduct that are worthy of a gentleman or a man are to sacrifice estate, ease, health, and applause, and even life, to the sacred calls of his country.

Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.

There must be more to life than having everything!

I used to go and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his art. It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it.

Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm; it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure, and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words, or in exact and priggish argument.