Quotes About Life

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us.

We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us. —William H. Gass, "Mr. Gaddis and His Goddamn Books" (2006)

This book is about the organization man. If the term is vague, it is because I can think of no other way to describe the people I am talking about…. They are the ones of our middle class who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life, and it is they who are the mind and soul of our great self-perpetuating institutions.

Time! where didst thou those years inter Which I have seene decease?

The heart of animals is the foundation of their life, the sovereign of everything within them, the sun of their microcosm.

The heart of animals is the foundation of their life, the sovereign of everything within them, the sun of their microcosm, that upon which all growth depends, from which all power proceeds.

The thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practice. The rest is affectation and imposture

Human life may be regarded as a succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back.

Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.

It is better to drink of deep griefs than to taste shallow pleasures.

No young man ever thinks he shall die.

The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.

I would like to spend the whole of my life traveling, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend at home.

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was time when we were not this gives us no concern -- why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be

The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be constantly wound up.

Reading is perhaps the greatest pleasure you will have in life; the one you will think of longest, and repent of least.

The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and endure very much

Is it possible to view life through such a non-dualistic consciousness, while continuing life as we live it today? Unity and A Course in Miracles both assure us that it is possible, and try to teach us this Truth, and to bring this Truth into our daily lives by retraining our minds.

Men may scoff, and men may pray, but they pay every pleasure with a pain.

I could yet always feel that it was infinitely better to be than not to be. THE

Life], electricity or fire. They are, all three, of the outer forces -- monsters of the void. Nothing we can do will create any one of them, our power is merely to be able, by providing the conditions, to make each one of them manifest to our physical senses. . . .

I do not think... that any man has the right to take life. When he thinks he has he is at his most dangerous.

Dostoevsky's...typically Russian emphasis on man as a collective being leads logically to his belief in our all-guilt; we are, again, in some mysterious manner, guilty of everybody's sins...Our own deeds, good or bad, are nothing but pebbles in the river of life that will be carried on and on until they somehow touch our remotest fellow man.