Quotes About Life

Death is at work in every person. It is the natural progression of life. Paul realized this and elected to participate willingly by purposely putting himself to death by spending his life on others.

Prayer is not merely an occasional impulse to which we respond when we are in trouble: prayer is a life attitude.

Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have – life itself.

I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have - life itself

A man's mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault.

The military habit makes man think far too much of definite action and far too little of brooding meditation: life is not a set campaign but an irregular work, and the main forces in it are not overt resolutions but latent and half-involuntary promptings.

Life is a school of probability. In the writings of every man of patient practicality, in the midst of whatever other defects, you will find a careful appreciation of the degrees of likelihood; a steady balancing of them one against another; a disinclination to make things too clear, to overlook the debit side of the account in mere contemplation of the enormousness of the credit.

A family on the throne is an interesting idea. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life.

Custom is the first check on tyranny; that fixed routine of social life at which modern innovations chafe, and by which modern improvement is impeded, is the primitive check on base power.

Because he never raises his eyes to the great and the meaningful, the philistine has taken experience as his gospel. It has become for him a message about life's commonness. But he has never grasped that there exists something other than experience, that there are values--inexperienceable--which we serve.

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

The daily life of the world is not dramatic—it is monotonous ; the novelist makes it dramatic by his silences, his suppressions, and his exaggerations.

Our public life is largely premised on an exploitation of our common anxiety. The advertising of consumerism and the drives of the acquisitive society, like he serpent, seduce into believing there are securities apart from the reality of God.

Relationship with God is not immune to the surprises and costs of our daily life.

The truth that is variously enacted by such agents is not an idea or a proposition. It is rather a habit of life that simply (!) refuses the totalizing claims of power. The governor, on behalf of the empire, will continue to ask, "What is truth?" And the apostles will continue to give answer, uncommonly unintimidated: "'We must obey God rather than any human authority'" (Acts 5:29).14

the threat of life, so palpable among us, is a threat that can and will be countered by the Creator who continues the work of governance, order, and sustenance. Creation faith is the summons and invitation to trust the Subject of these verbs, even in the face of day-to-day, palpable incursions of chaos. The testimony of Israel pushes toward a verdict that the One embedded in these doxological statements can be trusted in the midst of any chaos, even that of exile and finally that of death.

But these matters of life and faith cannot be expressed in the tongues of modernity, for it is this very epistemology that has consigned us to death and despair.

The shock of such a partner destabilizes us too much. The risk too great, the discomfort so demanding. We much prefer to settle for a less demanding, less overwhelming meeting. Yet we are haunted by the awareness that only this overwhelming meeting gives life.

What the myth founds is a double existence between the upper world and the underworld: a dimension of death is introduced into life, and a dimension of life is introduced into death.

You're only here for a short visit. Don't hurry. Don't worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way.

After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts – like a Chinese nest of boxes – oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front – in our ancestors, back and back until...

Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. ... How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life.

It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness alike were really only appreciable with one's legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.

That's why I've just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it – just Life, seen through a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint of genius in his making.