Quotes About Life

Vaster is Man than his works.

Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it.

Every man has some favorite topic of conversation, on which, by a feigned seriousness of attention, he may be drawn to expatiate without end.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives.

The round of a passionate man's life is in contracting debts in his passion, which his virtue obliges him to pay. He spends his time in outrage and acknowledgment, injury and reparation.

Happiness is enjoyed only in proportion as it is known; and such is the state or folly of man, that it is known only by experience of its contrary.

Labor, if it were not necessary for existence, would be indispensable for the happiness of man.

Commonplace though it may appear, this doing of one's duty embodies the highest ideal of life and character. There may be nothing heroic about it; but the common lot of men is not heroic.

Fate rules the affairs of men, with no recognizable order.

One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states).

Books are not men and yet they are alive. They are man's memory and his aspiration, the link between his present and his past, the tools he builds with.

Books are not men and yet they are alive.

Could anything be absurder than a man? The animal who knows everything about himself--except why he was born and the meaning of his unique existence.

What men have thought about life in the past is less important than what you feel about it to-day.

The soul of Man must quicken to creation.

Every man is the hero of his own song.

Man is the only living being who has a developed self-awareness and death-awareness.

Death is as near to the young as to the old; here is all the difference: death stands behind the young man's back, before the old man's face.

The hearts of men are their books; events are their tutors; great actions are their eloquence.

Friend, hast thou considered the "rugged, all-nourishing earth," as Sophocles well names her; how she feeds the sparrow on the housetop, much more her darling man?

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.

In the lottery of life there are more prizes drawn than blanks, and to one misfortune there are fifty advantages. Despondency is the most unprofitable feeling a man can indulge in.

To Contemplation's sober eye. / Such is the race of Man.

I was an old man when I was 12; and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!