Life Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Life is pain, highness! Anyone who says differently is selling something.

William Goldman

Preaching is of much avail, but practice is far more effective. A godly life is the strongest argument that you can offer to the skeptic.

At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.

It is no small mischief to a boy, that many of the best years of his life should be devoted to the learning of what can never be of any real use to any human being. His mind is necessarily rendered frivolous and superficial by the long habit of attaching importance to words instead of things; to sound instead of sense.

William Cobbett

On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.

William Wordsworth

The crest and crowning of all good,
Life's final star, is Brotherhood;
For it will bring again to Earth
Her long-lost Poesy and Mirth;
Will send new light on every face,
A kingly power upon the race.
And till it come, we men are slaves,
And travel downward to the dust of graves.

Creativity — like human life itself — begins in darkness. We need to acknowledge this. All too often, we think only in terms of light: "And then the lightbulb went on and I got it!" It is true that insights may come to us as flashes. It is true that some of these flashes may be blinding. It is, however, also true that such bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary.

Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based upon excellence of performance.

James Bryant Conant

Loving can cost a lot but not loving always costs more, and those who fear to love often find that want of love is an emptiness that robs the joy from life.

The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away. In this book we are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which man can have the chance to live by values that give meaning to life.

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

Samuel Butler (novelist)

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.

In everyone there sleeps. A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make. By loving others, but across most it sweeps. As all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures.

Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.

Giacomo Leopardi

It is easier to influence strong than weak characters in life.

"Life is like a sewer — what you get out of it depends on what you put into it." It's always seemed to me that this is precisely the sort of dynamic, positive thinking that we so desperately need today in these trying times of crisis and universal brouhaha.

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.

Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort. No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life.

Natural Selection never made it come to pass, as a habit of nature, that an unsupported stone should move downwards rather than upwards. It applies to no part of inorganic nature, and is very limited even in the phenomena of organic life.

Chauncey Wright

Life is something that happens to you while you're making other plans.

Margaret Millar

Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life.

So many people, you know, hit the White House with their dictaphone running. I never even kept a journal. I thought, 'I want to live my life, not record it.'

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Some people think football is a matter of life and death…I can assure them it is much more serious than that.