Quotes About Life

But I am not going to live for ever. And the more I know it, the more amazed I am by being here at all.

I don't know what the game was. I only know its name; they call it life. I'm not sure how it should be played. No one ever told me. No one ever tells anybody. I only know we must have played it wrong. We broke some rule or other along the way, and never knew it at the time. I don't know what the stakes are. I only know we've forfeited them, they're not for us. We've lost. That's all I know. We've lost, we've lost.

OUR MOST IMPORTANT CHOICE in life, according to Epictetus, is whether to concern ourselves with things external to us or things internal. Most people choose the former because they think harms and benefits come from outside themselves.

Nature breeds a vast oversupply of experiments and then sterilizes the failures by murdering them.

Honor Is Like the Hawk . . . For my own part, regret nothing. Have lived life, free from compromise . . . and step into the shadow now without complaint. —Rorschach's journal

Rorschach did not seek death; he didn't commit suicide by Manhattan. But he understood what the others did not. "It is better to sacrifice life than to forfeit morality. It is not necessary to live, but it is necessary that, so long as we live, we do so honourably."18

It is only when we live in accordance with the rule of God that our life is set in order," he declared a decade later; "apart from this ordering, there is nothing in human life but confusion.

Or in the words of Tennyson: There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O, earth, what changes hast thou seen! There where the long street roars, hath been The stillness of the central sea. The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement.

Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest, which co-mingle their roots in the darkness underground.

The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.

There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.

There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

Man lives for science as well as bread.

Religion… is a man's total reaction upon life.

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view.

As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

Consciousness… does not appear to itself chopped up in bits…. A "river" or a "stream" are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.

The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.

Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendship and intimacies, and soon their places will know them no more, and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of inertia.

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.