Quotes About Life

I have to admit that humans waste a lot of their time - almost all of it - with hypothetical stuff. I could be rich. I could be famous. I could have been hit by that bus. I could have been born with fewer moles and bigger breasts. I could have spent more of my youth learning foreign languages. They must exercise the conditional tense more than any other known life form.

I don't think your problem was stage fright. Or wedding fright. I think your problem was life fright.

The weird thing about depression is that, even though you might have more suicidal thoughts, the fear of death remains the same. The only difference is that the pain of life has rapidly increased. So when you hear about someone killing themselves it's important to know that death wasn't any less scary for them. It wasn't a 'choice' in the moral sense. To be moralistic about it is to misunderstand.

Bertrand Russell wrote that 'To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead'. Maybe that was her problem. Maybe she was just scared of living. But Bertrand Russell had more marriages and affairs than hot dinners, so perhaps he was no one to give advice.

It fascinated me how depression and anxiety overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder. Had we been through some trauma we didn't know about? Was the noise and speed of modern life the trauma for our caveman brains? Was I that soft? Or was life a kind of war most people didn't see?

One life of sadness was enough. What is the point of risking more?

The main advantage of books over life is that they can be redrafted and redrafted, whereas life, alas, is always a first draft.

That was the familiar lesson of time. Everything changes and nothing changes.

Life begins,' Sartre once wrote, 'on the other side of despair.

You shouldn't have been born. Your existence is as close to impossible as can be. To dismiss the impossible is to dismiss yourself.

Truth is a straight line you sometimes need to curve, you should know that by now.

Maybe that's what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty.

Flowers, after love, must have been the best advert planet Earth had going for it.

Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.

A quark is not the smallest thing. The smallest thing is the regret you will feel on your deathbed for not having worked more.

So he knew terrible things- even the most terrible things-couldn't stop the world from turning. Life went on. And he made a promise to himself that, when he grew older, he'd try to be like his mother. Colourful, and happy and kind and full of joy.

I looked at the transprent yellow liquid in the glass. I tasted it and tasted fermentation. In other words I tasted life on Earth. For everything that lives here ferments, ages, becomes diseased. But as things made their decline from ripeness they could taste wonderful, I realised

Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?

I slipped into a state beyond my usual grief and restlessness and anxiety and despair – one of not feeling anything at all. And when I felt nothing I almost became nostalgic for the grief; at least when you felt pain you knew you were still alive.

Life is like a chimney - you sometimes have to get through the dark before you see the light.

And death is the opposite of possibility.

You don't need to deny the reality of the present in order to have hope, you just need to know the future is uncertain, and that life contains light as well as dark.

Silence is pain. But it is a pain with an exit route. When we can't speak, we can write. When we can't write, we can read. When we can't read, we can listen. Words are seeds. Language is a way back to life. And it is sometimes the most vital comfort we have.

In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.