Quotes About Life

We do not live an equal life, but one of contrasts and patchwork; now a little joy, then a sorrow, now a sin, then a generous or brave actioî

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

Earth laughs in flower

Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day.

'Tis curious that we only believe as deeply as we live.

I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.

Life be not so short but that there is always time for courtesy.

Life is short but there is always time for courtesy.

Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one.

One thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour.

To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.

Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar's dinner, from a hundred charities?

A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.

The divine gift is ever the instant life, which receives and uses and creates, and can well bury the old in the omnipotency with which Nature decomposes all her harvest for recomposition.

A chief event in life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

Sooner of later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

What I must do is all that concerns me. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

The earth laughs in flowers.

It is not the length of life, but the depth.

The optimist is right. The pessimist is right. The one differs from the other as the light from the dark. Yet both are right. Each is right from his own particular point of view, and this point of view is the determining factor in the life of each. It determines as to whether it is a life of power or of impotence, of peace or of pain, of success or of failure.

The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works." Again, "I can of my own self do nothing." And he then speaks of his purpose, his aim: "I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly." A little later he adds: "The works that I do ye shall do also." Now again, these things mean something of a very definite nature, or they mean nothing at all.