Life is made up of marble and mud.
All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever present perils of life.
- Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
- That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
- And then is heard no more. It is a tale
- Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
- Signifying nothing.
It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome. Nevertheless, there can be but few of us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening when we see, hear, understand ever so much — everything — in a flash — before we fall back again into our agreeable somnolence.
- A useless life is but an early death.
Stuff your eyes with wonder ... live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that ... shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.
They killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. Making them think the next sunrise would be worth it; that another stroke of time would do it at last. Only when she was dead would they be safe. The successful ones — the ones who had been there enough years to have maimed, mutilated, maybe even buried her — kept watch over the others who were still in her cock-teasing hug, caring and looking forward, remembering and looking back.
Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.
Life is short; this being so, who would pursue great things and not bear with what is at hand? These are the ways of madmen and men of evil counsel, at least in my judgment.
I often wonder: suppose we could begin life over again, knowing what we were doing? Suppose we could use one life, already ended, as a sort of rough draft for another? I think that every one of us would try, more than anything else, not to repeat himself, at the very least he would rearrange his manner of life, he would make sure of rooms like these, with flowers and light ... I have a wife and two daughters, my wife's health is delicate and so on and so on, and if I had to begin life all over again I would not marry. ... No, no!
Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.
Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it.
It is nothing to die; it is horrible not to live.
It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.
What was life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accompanied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of protein molecules that were too impossibly ingenious in structure.
Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.
Droll thing life is — that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself — that comes too late — a crop of unextinguishable regrets.
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
Everybody knows life isn't worth living.
Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.
Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.
- Dear friend, all theory is gray,
- And green the golden tree of life.
There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten — before the end is told — even if there happens to be any end to it.
Life is obstinate and clings closest where it is most hated.
Life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.
What is life but a series of inspired follies?
- Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou livest
- Live well; how long, or short, permit to Heaven.
He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most.
His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief.
Life is nourishment.
Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you're alive, it isn't.
Nobody teaches life anything.
This was life, I supposed, running and running and running, and realizing along the way that the phantom was getting closer.
It's just because the chances are all against you, just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet.
Ordinary life was laced with miracles, I knew that, had read enough poetry to understand that we are elevated with the knowing, and yet it was difficult to notice and be grateful when one was continually fatigued and irritated. I suppose that unquenchable sense of wonder is what separates us dolts from the saints and the poets.
Life on earth, filled with uncertainty and change, seemed far more difficult than what lay beyond the grave.
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