Quotes About Life

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

Not caring for their lives' is it? Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time.

Es mejor soñar una vida que vivirla, aunque vivirla siga siendo soñarla, pero menos misteriosamente y con menos claridad a la vez, con un sueño oscuro y pesado, similar al sueño disperso en la débil conciencia de los animales que rumian.

when a creature is so badly constituted (perhaps in nature that being is man) that he cannot love unless he suffers and that he must suffer to learn truth, the life of such a being becomes in the end very exhausting. The happy years are those that are wasted; we must wait for suffering to drive us to work.

It may be that I might have inferred from the pages that life teaches us to diminish the value of what we read, and shows us that the things which the writer commends to us were never worth very much; yet I might equally well have come to the opposite conclusion, that reading teaches us to place a higher value on life, a value which we did not know how to appreciate, and the true extent of which we come to realize only through the book.

I longed for nothing more than to behold a stormy sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as a momentary revelation of the true life of nature;

Truth and life are very difficult to fathom, and I retained of them, without really having got to know them, an impression in which sadness was perhaps actually eclipsed by exhaustion.

Our love of life is only an old liaison of which we do not know how to rid ourselves. Its strength lies in its permanence. But death which severs it will cure us of the desire for immortality.

So, by the working of a contradiction that was one only in appearance, it was at the very moment when I experienced an exceptional pleasure, when I sensed that my life could be one of fulfillment, and should therefore have seen it as having increased in value, that I felt liberated from the anxieties it had hitherto inspired in me, and was prepared to commit it without hesitation to the unsure hands of chance.

I was not unhappy, except one day at a time.

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them; they can inflict on them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies succeeding one another without interruption in the bosom of a family will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician.

Death is in truth an illness from which we recover

The laborious process of causation which sooner or later will bring about every possible effect, including, consequently, those which one believed to be least possible, naturally slow at times, is rendered slower still by our desire (which in seeking to accelerate only obstructs it), by our very existence, and comes to fruition only when we have ceased to desire, and sometimes ceased to live.

The theatre of the world is stocked with fewer settings than actors, and with fewer actors than situations.

Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before one's eyes, of the various events of one's life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables ones to resuscitate dead recollections, but even then, there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain for ever unverifiable.

The belief that a person has a share in an unknown life to which his or her love may win us admission is, of all the prerequisites of love, the one which it values most highly and which makes it set little store by all the rest.

We feel very strongly that our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off and we could like him to provide us with desires... That is the value of reading and is also its inadequacy. To make it into discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.

La mayoría de las personas que conocemos no nos inspiran más que indiferencia; de modo que cuando en un ser depositamos grandes posibilidades de pena o de alegría para nuestro corazón, se nos figura que pertenece a otro mundo, se envuelve en poesía, convierte nuestra vida en una gran llanura donde nosotros no apreciamos más que la distancia que de él nos separa.

the seaside life and the life of travel made me realise that the theatre of the world is stocked with fewer settings than actors, and with fewer actors than situations.

La vraie vie, la vie enfin découverte et éclaircie, la seule vie par conséquent pleinement vécue, c'est la littérature.

the idea that 'Life' contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.

The truth, even more, is that life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, and that these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the web, so that between any slightest point of our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us an almost infinite variety of communicating paths to choose from.

Life is a hard thing that presses us too tightly, forever hurting our souls. Upon feeling those restraints loosen for a moment, one can experience clear-sighted pleasures.

Were it not for habit, life would seem delightful to beings constantly under threat of dying, in other words to all humankind.