quotations about life
Q: Is life a dream or a meditation? A: Life is a meditation when you know it is a dream.
BABA HARI DASS
Yoga Journal, May 1977
That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Paris Review, spring 2009
The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.
ECKHART TOLLE
The Power of Now
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began,
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Fellowship of the Ring
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES
Leisure
Along the road of life are many pleasure resorts, but think not that by tarrying in them you will take more days to the journey. The day of your arrival is already recorded.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
Funny. You talk of life as if it were a train you have to catch up with. How long have you been trying, three days? And not got a glimpse of it yet, in spite of caviar and champagne?
VICKI BAUM
Grand Hotel
If you have no wounds, how can you know if you're alive?
EDWARD ALBEE
The Play About the Baby
In bowling and in life, if a person made the spares, the strikes would take care of themselves.
STEPHEN KING (as Richard Bachman)
Blaze
Just because life's meaningless doesn't mean we can't experience it meaningfully.
GLEN DUNCAN
The Last Werewolf
Life divine! O life eternal!
Man cannot translate the thought.
Strong the chain that God hath welded;
Link on link hath chain been wrought.
Fabric new each day is woven,
Woven it on God's own loom.
We the threads can ne'er unravel,
Hidden they in Nature's womb.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Dost Thou Know?"
Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck.
FRANK HERBERT
Chapterhouse: Dune
Life is a gift horse in my opinion.
J. D. SALINGER
"Teddy"
Life is dangerous. That's what makes it interesting.
JOHN TWELVE HAWKS
The Traveler
Life is life--whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man's own advantage.
SRI AUROBINDO
attributed, Humanimal
Life is one long struggle in the dark.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
Life is what you do while you're waiting to die.
DONALD TRUMP
interview, Playboy, Mar. 1990
Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.
JULIAN BARNES
The Sense of an Ending
Study more how to die than how to live; if you would live till you were old, live as if you were to die when you are young.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed