Quotes About Life

This life is a shadowy thing, lad. We live in a crowded space of lights and shadows, and when left to ourselves, we all too often fail to see the brightest light of all.

You don't fear so you live, you live so you fear.

My fate is my own; my heart remains free Not magic but wisdum reveals destiny.

my fate is my own, my heart remains free, not magic but wisdom reveals destiny

To-morrow — oh, 'twill never be, If we should live a thousand years! Our time is all to-day, to-day, The same, though changed; and while it flies With still small voice the moments say: "To-day, to-day, be wise, be wise."

That from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Nihil est melius quam vita diligentissima.(Nothing is better than a most diligent life.)

Fiction can be more real to the reader than reality itself because fiction is the essence of life

The only principles of public conduct that are worthy of a gentleman or a man are to sacrifice estate, ease, health, and applause, and even life, to the sacred calls of his country.

Properly speaking, life and death as such are rarely the stakes of a finite game. What one wins is a title; and when the loser of a finite game is declared dead to further play, it is equivalent to declaring that person utterly without title-a person to whom no attention whatsoever need be given. Death, in finite play, is the triumph of the past over the future, a condition in which no surprise is possible.

If the losers are dead, the dead are also losers. There is a contradiction here: If the prize for winning finite play is life, then the players are not properly alive. They are competing for life. Life, then, is not play, but the outcome of play. Finite players play to live; they do not live their playing. Life is therefore deserved, bestowed, possessed, won. It is not lived.

Infinite players die. Since the boundaries of death are always part of the play, the infinite player does not die at the end of the play, but in the course of play.

The death of an infinite player is dramatic. It does not mean that the game comes to an end with death; on the contrary, infinite players offer their death as a way of continuing the play. For that reason they do not play for their own life; they live for their own play. But since that play is always with others, it is evident that infinite players both live and die for the continuing life of others.

Although infinite players choose mortality, they may not know when death comes, but we can always say of them that "they die at the right time" (Nietzsche).

Unheard silence does not necessarily mean the death of the player. Unheard silence is not the loss of listeners for that voice. It is an evil when the drama of a life does not continue in others for reason of their deafness, or ignorance.

It may appear that the prizes for winning are indispensable, that without them life is meaningless, perhaps even impossible. There are, to be sure, games in which the stakes seem to be life and death. In slavery, for example, or severe political oppression, the refusal to play the demanded role may be paid for with terrible suffering or death.

Our social existence has, therefore, an inescapably fluid character. This is not to say that we live in a fluid context, but that our lives are themselves fluid. As in the Zen image we are not the stones over which the stream of the world flows; we are the stream itself.

It is apparent to infinite players that wealth is not so much possessed as it is performed.

Infinite players die. Since the boundaries of death are always part of the play, the infinite player does not die at the end of play, but in the course of play.

The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.

If I accept death as inevitable, I do not struggle against mortality. I struggle as a mortal. All the limitations of finite play are self-limitations.

Poets cannot kill; they die. Metaphysics cannot die; it kills.

Vitality cannot be given, only found.

Infinite speakers are Plato's poietai taking their place in the historical. Storytellers enter the historical not when their speaking is full of anecdotes about actual persons, or when they appear as characters in their own tales, but when in their speaking we begin to see the narrative character of our lives. The stories they tell touch us. What we thought was an accidental sequence of experiences suddenly takes the dramatic shape of unresolved narrative.