Top Quotes about Life (2023)

Life is and will ever remain an equation incapable of solution, but it contains certain known factors.Nikola Tesla, A Machine to End War in Liberty Magazine (February 9, 1935)

Life is an echo. What you send out comes back. What you sow, you reap. What you give, you get. What you see in others, exists in you.Zig Ziglar, See You at the Top (1975)

Life’s as kind as you let it be.Charles Bukowski, Hot Water Music (1983)

Life is a business that does not cover the costs.Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume 2 (1844)

Life is a progress, and not a station.Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series (1841)

Life is a dream from which we only wake when we meet death.Paulo Coelho, Aleph (2011)

Life is a wave, which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles.John Tyndall, Fragments of Science (1876)

Life is an adventure in forgiveness.Norman Cousins, Saturday Review (April 15, 1978)

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.Charlie Chaplin, As quoted in his obituary in The Guardian (December 28, 1977)

Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell (1791)

Every life is a march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or to vice.Lyman Abbott, Problems of Life (1900)

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.Samuel Butler, Speech at the Somerville Club (February 27, 1895)

Life is like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope – a slight change, and all patterns and configurations alter.Sharon Salzberg, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience (2003)

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going.Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More (1963)

Life is but a day at most.Robert Burns, Verses on Friars' Carse Hermitage (June 1788)

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (1961)

A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor's Dilemma (1911)

One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age (1970)

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, “What are you doing for others?”Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love (1963)

What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day.George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion (1912)

What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.Nelson Mandela on life, 90th birthday celebration of Walter Sisulu, Walter Sisulu Hall, Randburg, Johannesburg, South Africa (May 18, 2002)

The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop it. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.David Viscott, Finding Your Strength in Difficult Times (1993)

Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.Voltaire, Letter to Pierre-Joseph Luneau de Boisjermain (October 21, 1769)

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.Marie Curie, Michigan Education Journal, Volume 22 (1944)

Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends whom we choose.Tehyi Hsieh, Chinese epigrams inside out, and proverbs (1948)

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.Eleanor Roosevelt, Tomorrow Is Now (1963)

Life always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant.Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes (2003)

There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941)

Life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals (May 17, 1843)

The unexamined life is not worth living.Socrates, at his trial for impiety and corrupting youth, for which he was subsequently sentenced to death, as described in Plato's Apology (38a5-6).

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life – It goes on.Robert Frost, Robert Frost's Secret by Ray Josephs (This Week Magazine, September 1954)

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Houghton Mifflin, ed. 1909), Volume VI, Page 302

The important thing to you is not how many years in your life, but how much life in your years!Edward J. Stieglitz, How Long Do You Plan to Live?, Chicago Tribune (March 16, 1947)

Life is 10 percent what happens to us and 90 percent how we respond to it.Charles R. Swindoll, The Tale of the Tardy Oxcart (1998)

Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957)

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.John Lennon, Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy) - Double Fantasy (1980)

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.Maya Angelou, Angelou's Facebook (June 28, 2011)

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor's Dilemma (1911)

Life is the childhood of our immortality.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, As quoted in 'A Dictionary of Thoughts,' edited by Tryon Edwards (1908)

Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education (1762)

To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.Jean-Paul Sartre, Dirty Hands (1948)

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.Helen Keller, Faith Fears Not, Let Us Have Faith (1940)

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.William James, The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

The fullness of life is in the hazards of life. And, at the worst, there is that in us which can turn defeat into victory.Edith Hamilton, The Great Age of Greek Literature (1942)

Participate in your life, don’t just bear witness to the rain washing you away.Thomm Quackenbush, We Shadows (2010)

Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That’s why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930)

No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (1876)

Get busy living or get busy dying.Stephen King, Different Seasons (1982)

I find ecstasy in living; the mere sense of living is joy enough.Emily Dickinson, Letter to T. W. Higginson (August 17, 1870)

The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved; it is a reality to be experienced.J. J. van der Leeuw, The Conquest of Illusion (1928)

What one needs to do at every moment of one’s life is to put an end to the old world and to begin a new world.Nikolai Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End (1947)

Life is in ourselves and not in the external.Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Letter to his brother (December 22, 1849)

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume III (1939-1944)

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.Charles Darwin, Letter to sister Susan Elizabeth Darwin (August 4, 1836)

Dost thou love Life? then do not squander Time; for that’s the Stuff Life is made of.Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard (1746)

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.Steve Jobs, Commencement speech at Stanford University, 2005.

Do not take life too seriously – you will never get out of it alive.Elbert Hubbard, A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard (1911)

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)

Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.Rollo May, Love and Will (1969)

Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795)