Quotes About Life

The truth has to be melted out of our stubborn lives by suffering. Nothing speaks the truth, nothing tells us how things really are, nothing forces us to know what we do not want to know except pain. And this is how the gods declare their love.

When the black and mortal blood of man has fallen to the ground ... who then can sing spells to call it back again?

Unjustly men hate death, which is the greatest defence against their many ills.

A man dies not for the many wounds that pierce his breast, unless it be that life's end keep pace with death, nor by sitting on his hearth at home doth he the more escape his appointed doom.

For this our task hath Fate spun without fail to last for ever sure, that we on man weighed down with deeds of hate should follow till the earth his life immure. Nor when he dies can he boast of being truly free.

It would be better to die once and for all than to suffer pain for all one's life.

Death hath a fairer fame than a life of toil.

Night, o my mother, from whose womb I took my being.

For wherein is life sweet to him who suffers grief?

Old men, what are they? Fast fading the leaf, Three-footed they walk, yet frail as a child, As a dream set afloat in the daylight.

In the sinews of the dead there is no blood.

Yet though a man gets many wounds in breast, he dieth not, unless the appointed time, the limit of his life's span, coincide; nor does the man who by the hearth at home sits still, escape the doom that Fate decrees.

There's nothing certain in a man's life except this: That he must lose it.

Of all the gods only death does not desire gifts.

Death is easier than a wretched life and better never to have born than to live and fare badly.

O Death the Healer, scorn thou not, I pray, To come to me: of cureless ills thou art The one physician. Pain lays not its touch Upon a corpse.

For it would be better to die once and for all than to suffer pain for all one's life.

I gave them hope, and so turned away their eyes from death

Call no man happy till he is dead.

Forbear harping on what was of yore, for it is the common lot of mortals to sustain the ups and downs of fortune.

Every one is more or less master of his own fate.

Everybody has been young before, but not everybody has been old before.

How absurd to call youth the time of happiness - youth, the time of greatest vulnerability! - Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile

I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.