Quotations: Life

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
Diane Ackerman

The Answer to the Great Question Of . . . Life, the Universe and Everything . . . [is] Forty-two.
Douglas Adams

Life is probation: mortal man was made to solve the solemn problem--right or wrong.
John Adams

Life is a problem; mortal man was made to solve the solemn problem right or wrong.
John Quincy Adams

Though we seem grieved at the shortness of life in general, we are wishing every period of it at an end. The minor longs to be at age, then to be a man of business, then to make up an estate, then to arrive at honors, then to retire.
Joseph Addison

We make provisions for this life as if it were never to have an end, and for the other life as though it were never to have a beginning.
Joseph Addison

It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring.
sam Alfred Adler

The less of routine, the more of life.
Amos Bronson Alcott

Ofttimes the test of courage becomes rather to live than to die.
Vittorio Alfieri

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.
Woody Allen

Knowledge, love, power,--there is the complete life.
Henri Frederic Amiel

Life is short and we never have enough time for gladdening the hearts of those who travel the way with us. Oh, be swift to love! Make haste to be kind.
Henri Frederic Amiel

Every man's life is a fairy-tale written by God's fingers.
Hans Christian Andersen

In the midst of life we are in death.
Anon

Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse.
Anon

Enjoy life. There's plenty of time to be dead.
Anon

Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.
Anon

Saw life steadily and saw it whole.
Matthew Arnold

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
Isaac Asimov

I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.
Isaac Asimov

Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.
Herbert Henry Asquith

They live that they may eat, but he himself [Socrates] eats that he may live.
Athenaeus

We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I do not know.
W. H. Auden

Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route.
Charles Caleb Colton

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have really lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.
Henry Drummond

Men heap together the mistakes of their lives, and create a monster they call Destiny.
John Oliver Hobbes

Life is just one damned thing after another.
Elbert Hubbard

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
R. D. Laing

I detest life-insurance agents; they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so.
Stephen Leacock

Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.
Fran Lebowitz

I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.
Dudley Field Malone

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
Groucho Marx

When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.
Christopher Morley

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.
Christopher Morley

A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.
P. J. O'Rourke

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, A medley of extemporanea; And love is a thing that can never go wrong; And I am Marie of Romania.
Dorothy Parker

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.
George Bernard Shaw

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
George Bernard Shaw

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.
George Bernard Shaw

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.
Henry David Thoreau

Life is something that everyone should try at least once.
Henry J. Tillman

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
Elie Wiesel

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