Quotes About Life

All life "colonizes." Everything that lives aspires to live infinitely. Nothing spontaneously limits itself. No harmony is the result of mutual respect or reciprocal restraint; harmony stems from hostile interventions and the temporary balance of forces.

Intelligent optimism is never faith in progress, but hope in a miracle. How can anyone live who does not hope for miracles?

The anonymity of the modern city is as intolerable as the familiarity of modern customs. Life should resemble a salon of people with good manners, where all know each other but where none hug each other.

Modern man's misfortune lies not in having to live a mediocre life, but in believing that he could live a life that is not mediocre.

The classical languages have educational value because they are safe from the vulgarity with which modern life corrupts languages in use.

Every civilization is a dialogue with death.

Maybe nothing has worried and embittered me so much like the fact that life apparently has no other purpose than life.

Wir müssen das Leben darum bitten, uns vegetieren zu lassen, denn nur so können wir Blüten treiben.

Physiology on one side, sociology on another, signed the partition of psychology. Personal life has been abolished, like the Polish Sejm.

Damit das Individuum interessant sei, muß die Ethik sein Leben komplizieren.

Nations have two noble modes of existence—ascent or decadence—and one vulgar mode—prosperity.

God ends up being a parasite in souls where ethics predominates. The religious life begins when we discover that God is not a postulate of ethics, but the only adventure in which it is worth the trouble to risk ourselves.

Natural inequalities would make the democrat's life bitter, if slander did not exist.

Men can be divided into those who make their life complicated to gain their soul and those who waste their soul to make their life easier.

It is enough for beauty to touch our tedium for our heart to be torn like silk between the hands of life.

With good humor and pessimism it is not possible to be either wrong or bored.

It is indecent, and even obscene, to speak to man of "progress," when every path winds its way up between funerary cypresses.

Die Intellektuelle Geschichte Deutschlands lehrt uns, daß der Geist mit Vorliebe in den Seelen weht, die ihre Größe durch ein Leben der eintönigen Routine erkämpfen.

Es genügt, daß die Schönheit unseren Überdruß streift, damit unser Herz wie Seide zwischen den Händen des Lebens zerreißt.

To live is modern man's only value. Even the modern hero does not die except in the name of life.

Worauf steuert die Welt zu? Auf dieselbe Vergänglichkeit, aus der sie kommt.

Observing life is too interesting to waste time living it.

Everything rolls toward death, but only what lacks value rolls toward nothingness.

Die Zeit ist weniger zu fürchten, weil sie tötet, als weil sie demaskiert.