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We are like people with short-term leases on summer cottages; we can never seem to make our provisions come out even with our stay. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. ~Henry Miller
Life is like eating artichokes; you have got to go through so much to get so little. ~Thomas Aloysius Dorgan
Life is a ticket to the greatest show on earth. ~Martin H. Fischer
Summing up, it is clear the future holds great opportunities. It also holds pitfalls. The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o'clock. ~Woody Allen, "My Speech to the Graduates," Side Effects, 1980
There is a lesson we learn early and harmlessly, or late and traumatically - that there are things we can break that our parents can't fix. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
Situated in some nebulous distance I do what I do so that the universal balance of which I am a part may remain a balance. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
Few of us write great novels; all of us live them. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Life's like a novel with the end ripped out. ~Danny Orton and Blair Daly, "Stand"
If you stop struggling, then you stop life. ~Huey Newton
Sometimes questions are more important than answers. ~Nancy Willard, quoted in The Meaning of Life, compiled by Hugh S. Moorhead
It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you. ~Phillips Brooks
My quest for cosmic understanding is a book I have picked up and put down many times, always forgetting to insert a bookmark. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
There is a strange reluctance on the part of most people to admit that they enjoy life. ~William Lyon Phelps
Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way around. ~David Lodge, The British Museum Is Falling Down, 1965
If a man in the morning hear the right way, he may die in the evening without regret. ~Confucius
The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature. ~Joseph Campbell
You don't want to get to the end of life's journey and discover you never left the interstate. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
In small proportions we just beauties see,
And in short measures life may perfect be.
~Ben Jonson, To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison, 1640
We should give meaning to life, not wait for life to give us meaning. ~Stacy
Life is a sexually transmitted disease and there is a 100% mortality rate. ~R.D. Laing
Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942, translated from French by Lewis Galantière
Many of us are equal to life's emergencies who cannot bear its day-after-dayness. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
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 not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor. ~Ogden Nash
I do like a little bit of butter to my bread. ~A.A. Milne, When We Were Very Young
Life may be defined to be the power of self-augmentation or assimilation, not of self-nurture; for then a steam-engine over a coal-pit might be made to live. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars. ~Henry Van Dyke
People find it hard to be both comic and serious, though life manages it easily enough. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
Shall I redirect my life's journey because down some sideroad might be some trifle I'm entitled to? ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
Life is a long lesson in humility. ~James M. Barrie
In life, as in restaurants, we swallow a lot of indigestible stuff just because it comes with the dinner. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Life seems nothing more than a quick succession of busy nothings." ~From the movie Mansfield Park
Reason and justice tell me there's more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism. ~Anton Chekhov
To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it. ~Samuel Butler
Life is easier than you'd think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable. ~Kathleen Norris
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. ~Mark Twain
One wanders through life as if wandering through a field in the dark of night, wearing a blindfold and very heavy shoes, with a poisonous toad waiting patiently beneath a clump of weeds, knowing full well that eventually you will step on him. ~Lemony Snicket
There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes. ~José Ortega y Gasset
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe. ~Peter De Vries, Let Me Count the Ways, 1965
Every creatures stalks some other, and catches it, and is caught. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
A great part of life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure. ~Robert Louis Stevenson
I have come one step away from everything. And here I stay, far from everything, one step away. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
Anxiety and distress, interrupted occasionally by pleasure, is the normal course of man's existence. ~Joseph Wood Krutch
I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit, but if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer.... I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me. ~Richard Phillips Feynman
Life is just a series of trying to make up your mind. ~Timothy Fuller
The history of man for the nine months preceding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting and contain events of greater moment than all the three score and ten years that follow it. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Perhaps we are looking at this from a wrong perspective; this search for the truth, the meaning of life, the reason of God. We all have this mindset that the answers are so complex and so vast that it is almost impossible to comprehend. I think, on the contrary, that the answers are so simple; so simple that it is staring us straight in the face, screaming its lungs out, and yet we fail to notice it. We're looking through a telescope, searching the stars for the answer, when the answer is actually a speck of dirt on the telescope lens. ~Jason Q., from generationterrorists.com
It's just life. Just live it. ~Terri Guillemets
Life is little more than a loan shark: It exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes. ~Luigi Pirandello
Life is a shit sandwich. But if you've got enough bread, you don't taste the shit. ~Jonathan Winters
There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last. ~Robert Louis Stevenson
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. ~H.L. Mencken
Almost everything in life is easier to get into than out of. ~Agnes' Law
Life is one big judgment call. ~Terri Guillemets
Chance is always powerful, let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish. ~Ovid
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Life is a series of collisions with the future. ~José Ortega y Gasset
To the student I would say, "Life is principally multiple choice, but at the end there's a tough essay question." ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing. ~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Life is half spent before we know what it is. ~George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, 1651
Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust - we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper. ~Albert Einstein, in The Saturday Evening Post, 26 October 1929
Jack Palance: "Do you know what the secret of life is? One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don't mean shit."
Billy Crystal: "Yeah, but what's that one thing?"
Jack Palance: "That's what you've got to figure out."
~From the movie City Slickers
Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian. ~Dennis Wholey
Life is an endless struggle full of frustrations and challenges, but eventually you find a hair stylist you like. ~Author Unknown
Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? is not life one? ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. ~Crowfoot, 1890, as quoted in Catch the Whisper of the Wind compiled by Cheewa James
Have you noticed that life, real honest-to-goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in the newspapers? ~Jean Anouilh, The Rehearsal, 1950
God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny. ~Garrison Keillor
The meaning of life is not an unquestionable answer; it is an unanswerable question. ~Terri Guillemets
Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive. ~Mel Brooks
Unbeing dead isn't being alive. ~e.e. cummings
Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious. ~Brendan Gill
When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance. ~Thomas Merton
