Modern life is a mistake.
— Richard Koch, author of Living the 80/20 Way.
The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what
I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than
sixty years, dicebox in hand, shaking the dice.
— Denis Diderot
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, say, to
life itself than this incessant business.
— Henry David Thoreau
The art of
living is more like wrestling than dancing.
— Marcus Aurelius
Life is like preparing food . It all depends on what you add and how you mix it. Sometimes you follow
the recipe and other times you decide to use
your creativity to add more spice to
the end result.
— Anon
You can always make up in creativity what you lack in good fortune.
Playing the game of life is like playing poker. Playing three aces badly
won't get you as far as playing a terrible hand well.
— from The Lazy Person’s Guide to Success
No illusion is more crucial than the illusion that great success and huge money buy you immunity from
the common ills of mankind, such as cars that won't start.
— Larry McMurtry
As you walk and eat and travel, be where you are. Otherwise you will
miss most of your life.
— Buddha
Life is like dancing. If we have a big floor, many people
will dance. Some will get angry when the rhythm changes. But life is changing all the time.
— Miguel Angel Ruiz
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the
things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe
harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
— Mark Twain
The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.
—David Russell
It's easy to live the expected and conventional. It's when you live the
unexpected that you start having fun with your life.
— from Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul by Richard Bach
There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what
you want; and after that to joy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.
— Logan Pearsall Smith
Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much
imagination.
— Christopher Isherwood
Life does not require you to be consistent, cruel, patient,
helpful, angry rational, thoughtless, loving, rash, open-minded, neurotic, careful, rigid, tolerant, rich
downtrodden, gentle, sick, considerate, funny, stupid, healthy, greedy, beautiful, lazy, responsive,
foolish, sharing pressured, intimate, hedonistic, industrious, manipulative, insightful, carpricious, wise,
selfish, kind, or sacrificed. Life does, however, require you to feel the consequences of your choices.
— from Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul
You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with
the face, the friends, the health, and the children you have earned.
— Fay Weldon
Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. We guess. We
may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
— Agnes de Mille
America has become so tense and nervous it has
been years since I have seen anyone sleep in church — and that is a sad
situation.
— Norman Vincent Peale
Life is a succession of moments. To live each one is to succeed.
— Corita Kent
Try to arrange your life in such a way that you can afford to
be disinterested. It is the most expensive of all luxuries, and the one best worth having.
— William Inge
The contemplative life is often miserable. One must act more, think less, and not watch
oneself live.
— Nicolas Chamfort
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide
your problems are your own. You don't blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the President. You realize
that you control your own destiny.
— Albert Ellis
The course of life is unpredictable — no one can write his autobiography in
advance.
— Abraham Joshua Heschel
My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey
off a thorn.
—Louis Adamic
One's only real life is the life one never leads.
— Oscar Wilde
Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss
by going too fast — you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.
— Eddie Cantor
The first half of our life is ruined by our parents and the second half by our
children.
—Clarence Darrow
Imagine that you are in control of your life. Now, the
question is: Why do you have to imagine this?
— from Life's Secret Handbook
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood
up to live!
— Henry David Thoreau
Paradise is where I am.
— Voltaire
The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but
to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.
— Arnold Schwarzenegger
To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.
— Gelett Burgess
I had a lover's quarrel with the world.
— Robert Frost
Pythagoras used to say life resembles the Olympic Games; a few men strain their muscles to
carry off a prize; others bring trinkets to sell to the crowd for a profit; and some there are who seek no
further advantage than to look at the show and see how and why everything is done. They are spectators of
other men's lives in order petter to judge and manage their own.
— Michel de Montaigne
Regardless of circumstances, each man lives in a
world of his own making.
— Josepha Murray Emms
May you live all the days of your life.
—Jonathan Swift
You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to
enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with finer spirit of hope and achievement.
You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.
— Woodrow Wilson
My whole life is a movie. It's just that there are no dissolves. Ihave to live every
agonizing moment of it. My life needs editing..
— Mort Sahl
To be free is to have achieved your life.
—Tennessee Williams
Life just is. You have to flow with it. Give yourself to the moment. Let it
happen.
— Jerry Brown
Life is mostly froth and bubble.
Two things stand like stone:
Dodging duty at the double,
Retiring and leaving work alone.
— Unknown Retiree
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
—Soren Kierkegaard
Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be
experienced.
—Soren Kierkegaard
Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.
—Thomas La Mance
Life is all about anticipation of events and memories of events.
The actual events never live up to either, however.
— from Mr. Boffo cartoon by Jim Martin
Think often, but not too much;
And not too deep.
Life is meant to be lived.
It isn’t meant to be figured out.
— from Life's Secret Handbook by Ernie Zelinski
Look in the mirror for the cause of your problems.
The person looking back is the only one over whom you have control.
— Robert J. Ringer\
Does thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life
is made of.
— Benjamin Franklin
Don't mistake wants for needs.
— Robert J. Ringer
Life is an hereditary disease.
— Graffiti
In my youth I hoped to do great things; now I shall be
satisfied to get through without scandal.
— Walter Bagehot
Most people's lives aren't complex — they're just complicated.
— L. Rust Hills
Life is long if it is full.
— Seneca
The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not
merely unhappy but hardly fit for life.
— Albert Einstein
It is not true that life is one damn thing after another —
it's one damn thing over and over.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be
lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no
meaning.
—Albert Camus
It is so.
It cannot be otherwise.
— Inscription in a cathedral in Amsterdam
As you walk and eat and travel, be where you are.
Otherwise you will miss most of your life.
— Buddha
The day you start blaming yourself in a positive
way is the day you are well on your way to a life that works. Winners blame themselves; losers blame
others.
— from Life's Secret Handbook
He who asks of life nothing but the improvement of his own nature ... is less liable than
anyone else to miss and waste life.
— Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
Beer: The cause of, and solution to, all of life's
problems.
— Homer Simpson
Life is short, but it's long enough to ruin any man who wants to be ruined.
— Josh Billings
From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to
die with life.
— Carl Jung
The best part of the art of living is to know how to grow old gracefully.
— Eric Hoffer
The secret of a long life is knowing when it's time to go.
— Michele Shocked
Life doesn't make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy's job is
to point out that it doesn't make sense, and that it doesn't make much difference anyway.
— Eric Idle
Life is either always a tight-rope or a featherbed. Give me a tight-rope.
- Edith Wharton
It's a funny thing about life, if you refuse to accept
anything but the best, you will often get it.
— W. Somerset Maugham
Love the moment, and the energy of that moment will spread beyond all
boundaries.
— Corita Kent
I still find each day too short for all the
thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I
want to see.
— John Burrough
What is it that you like doing? If you don’t like it, get out of it, because
you’ll be lousy at it. You don’t have to stay with a job for the rest of your life, because if you don’t
like it you’ll never be successful in it.
— Lee Iacocca
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living; the world
owes you nothing, it was here first.
— Mark Twain
Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.
— Charlotte Bronte
A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success
or
financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.
— Ellen Glasgow
Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others.
— Helen Keller, 1880-1968, American Blind/Deaf Author
To fear retirement is to
fear life.
— from How
to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free
Life is hard if you live
it the easy way and easy is you live it the hard way.
— Joe Polish
You must have been warned against letting the
golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.
— James M. Barrie
Life would be
infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of 80 and gradually approach 18.
— Mark Twain
Life is too short for traffic.
— Dan Bellack
There are few things easier than to live badly and
die well.
— Oscar Wilde
Life moves pretty
fast; [if] you don't stop and look around every once in a while, you could miss it.
— Matthew Broderick
When one has great gifts, what answer to the
meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise them?
— W. H. Auden
The goal of all life
is death.
— Sigmund Freud
When people are serving, life is no longer
meaningless.
— John Gardner
Life is just a bowl
of pits.
— Rodney Dangerfield
Life is like a blanket too short. You pull it up
and your toes rebel, you yank it down and shivers meander about your shoulder; but cheerful folks manage to
draw their knees up and pass a very comfortable night.
— Marion Howard
A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do
as he likes.
— T.H. Huxley
The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.
What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.
— Oscar Wilde
I am never frustrated,
The reason is quite plain.
If at first I don't succeed,
I don't try again.
— Graffiti
There is more to
life than increasing its speed.
— Gandhi
One learns in life to keep silent and draw one's own confusions.
— Cornelia Otis Skinner
Life is like riding an elevator. Sometimes someone
pushes your button, sometimes no one does. Upon entering you get shafted, then you have your ups and downs.
And what is annoying is encountering all those stupid jerks along way.
— Unknown wise person
Visit your mother today. Maybe she hasn't had any problems lately.
— Unknown wise person
Our life is frittered away by detail ... simplify, simplify.
— Henry David Thoreau
Experience is what we call all our screw ups in life.
— Graffiti
Let us endeavor so to live that
when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
— Mark Twain
If you take care of the small things, the big things take care of themselves.
You can gain more control over your life by paying closer attention to the little things.
— Emily Dickinson
The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing
is to be taken seriously.
— Nicholas Murray Butler
Be pleasant until ten o'clock in the morning
and the rest of the day will take care of itself.
— Elbert Hubbard
Spring is nature's way of saying, "Let's party!"
— Robin Williams
To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
— Emily Dickinson
It is the epitome of life. The first half of life consists of
the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.
— Mark Twain
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come
by.
— Annie Dillard
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to
bore ourselves?
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
—George Bernard Shaw
The dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its
meaninglessness.
—Martin Esslin
Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It
doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that,
what have you had?
— Henry James
The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge
accessible to man.
— Count Leo Tolstoy
Be kind and considerate to others, depending somewhat upon who they
are.
— Don Herold
To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals.
— Ben Franklin
Life doesn't make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy's job is to
point out that it doesn't make sense, and that it doesn't make much difference anyway.
— Eric Idle
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the
ideal life.
— Mark Twain
Trust not what inspires other members of society to choose a career. Trust what
inspires you. From this decision alone will come over a third of your satisfaction or misery in your
life.
— from Life's Secret Handbook
The answer to having a better life is not about getting
a better life, it's just about changing how we see the one we have right now.
— Angel Kyodo Williams
Prescription for Life-long Happiness:
Purpose enough for
satisfaction;
Work enough for sustenance;
Sanity enough to know when to play and rest;
Wealth enough for basic needs;
Affection enough to like many and love a few;
Self-respect enough to love yourself;
Charity enough to give to others in need;
Courage enough to face difficulties;
Creativity enough to solve problems;
Humor enough to laugh at will;
Hope enough to expect an interesting tomorrow;
Gratitude enough to appreciate what you have;
Health enough to enjoy life for all its worth.
— From the book Life's Secret Handbook
Forgiving someone is solid proof of your intent to live
your life now, while you have it, and to be dead later when you are.
— Ron Smotherman
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than
a life spent doing nothing.
— George Bernard Shaw
As I grow to understand life less and less, I
learn to live it more and more.
—Jules Renard
Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your
dreams come true.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Own only what you can always carry with you;
know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
— Alexander Solzhenitsyn
I really don't think life is about the I-could-have-beens. Life is only about
the I-tried-to-do. I don't mind the failure but I can't imagine that I'd forgive myself if I didn't
try.
— Nikki Giovanni
Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
— Alan Bennett
Life is a meaningless comma in the sentence of time.
— Chris Garratt and Mick Kidd
During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, ... the life of
man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
— Thomas Hobbes
The majority of men employ the first part of life in making the rest miserable.
— Jean de La Bruybre
We are born crying, live complaining and die disappointed.
— Thomas Fuller
In the great game of human life one begins by being a dupe and ends by being a
rogue.
— Voltaire
Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be
enjoyed.
— Samuel Johnson
Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the
change itself is nothing; when we have made it the next wish is to change again.
— Samuel Johnson
Nothing can exceed the vanity of our existence but the folly of our pursuits.
— Oliver Goldsmith
The whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of death.
— Samuel Johnson
Life to the great majority is only a constant struggle for
mere existence — with the certainty of losing it.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
Life is a predicament that precedes death.
— Henry James
Life is like an onion: you peel off layer after layer and then you find there is
nothing in it.
— James Gibbons Huneker
Life is a lease imposed upon the occupant without previous communication of the
conditions in the contract.
— Guy Delaforest
To pass through life tranquilly, one must not be too clear-sighted.
— Gustave Droz
Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
— Paul Gauguin
To what point of insignificance may human life not dwindle! To what fine, agonizing
threads will it not cling!
— William Hazlitt
Life is an apprenticeship to constant renunciations, to the steady failure of our
claims, our hopes, our powers, our liberty.
— Henri-Frederic Amiel
If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which he has inflicted upon men, he
would kill himself.
— Alexander Dumas
Life is a hospital is which every patient is possessed by the desire to change his
bed.
— Charles Baudelaire
Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
Life is one long process of getting tired.
— Samuel Butler
Almost every person, if you will believe himself, holds a quite different theory
of life from the one on which he is patently acting.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
All ways end at the same point ... Disillusion.
— Oscar Wilde
The meaning of life is that it stops.
— Franz Kafka
Society is a madhouse where the wardens are the officials and police.
— August Strindberg
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
— George Santayana
The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of
ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
— Quentin Crisp
Don't take life too seriously - you will never get out of it alive.
— Elbert Hubbard
The one dependable law of life: everything is always worse than you
thought it was going to be.
— Dorothy Parker
Why should not things be largely absurd, futile and transitory? They are so, and we are
so, and they and we go very well together.
— George Santayana
What is life? Life is stepping down a step or sitting in a chair.
And it isn't there.
— Ogden Nash
Bring down the curtain, the farce is over
— Last words of François
Rabelias
For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle ... he feels himself master of
his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavouring
to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him.
— George Orwell
Human life begins on the other side of despair.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk.
— Cyril Connolly
We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of life.
— Cyril Connolly
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human
face — forever ... And remember that is forever.
— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1948
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is
suffering and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
— George Orwell
To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life.
— Eric Hoffer
Life is hell. Most people are bastards and everything is bullshit.
— George Montegu Black, to his son Conrad Black
A man can look upon his life and accept it as good or evil; it is far, far harder for him to confess
that it has been unimportant in the sum of things.
— Murray Kempton
We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
— Tennessee Williams
We cry when we are born, and what follows can only be an attenuation of this cry.
— Frangoise Sagan
Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.
— Thornton Wilder
It takes a kind of shabby arrogance to survive in our time, and a fairly
romantic nature to want to.
— Edgar Z. Friedenberg
For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.
— Clifton Fadiman
The messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.
— Daniel J. Boorstin
Human life is mainly a process of filling in time until the arrival of
death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of what kind of business one is going to
transact during the long wait.
— Eric Berne
Human life ... is only theatre, and mostly cheap melodrama at that.
— Malcolm Muggeridge
I have always felt that concentration camps . . . are the logical conclusion of contemporary life.
— Arthur Miller
Life is a gamble at terrible odds — if it was a bet you wouldn't take
it.
— Tom Stoppard
Life is a game at which everybody loses.
— Leo Sarkadi-Schuller
What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.
— Gore Vidal
Our daily life is a bad serial by which we let ourselves be bewitched.
— Michel Butor
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if ever there was one.
— E.M. Cioran
All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance
and inebriation.
— E.M. Cioran
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.
— Philip Larkin
Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.
— Karl Kraus
Being frustrated is disagreeable, but the real disasters in life begin when you get what you want.
— Irving Kristol
To desire immortality is to desire the perpetuation of a great mistake.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
Life can then little else supply
But a few good f*cks and then we die.
— Thomas Potter
Life is a concentration camp. You're stuck here and there's no way out and you can only rage impotently
against your persecutors.
— Woody Allen
Life always comes to a bad end.
— Marcel Ayme
Do not try to live forever. You will not
succeed.
— George Bernard Shaw
