Quotes About Life

maybe people did wear chains of their own forging, but often those chains were half complete before they'd added their own first heavy link. Maybe completing other people's work was the business of life.

Man starts thinking this late in life, no previous experience or proper guidance, there's no telling where it could lead.

The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up. Blame love.

Amazing, isn't it, when you think about it, how the world keeps on turning, no matter how fucked up things get?" In

The more he thought about it, life's truest meanings were all childhood meanings, childhood understandings of how things worked, what they were. Do we ever know as deeply as we know in childhood? Does adult life amount to anything more than a futile attempt to invalidate the deepest truths we know about ourselves and our world?

To see a life back to front, as everyone begins to do in middle age, is to strip it of its mystery and wrap it in inevitability, drama's enemy.

Sully grinned down at her. "We wear the chains we forge in life, old girl." Miss Beryl blinked. "Who'd have thunk it? A literary allusion from the lips of Donald Sullivan. I don't suppose you remember who said that." "You did," Sully reminded her. "All through eighth grade.

The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up. Blame love.

Does adult life amount to anything more than a futile attempt to invalidate the deepest truths we know about ourselves and our world?

Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man and one who'd been raised to accept life's mysteries—the Blessed Trinity, for one instance, a woman's reasoning, for another.

If you were going to be reckless in this life, you needed total commitment to the principle.

most people are trapped in a solitary existence, a life circumscribed by want and failures of imagination, limitations from which readers are exempt.

But I'll feel better about you in Connecticut. People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake. They can devote their whole lives to it.

Human life, for Nietzsche, is ultimately a part of a kind of vast game…[which] is, so to speak, the only game in town….The nature of the game, he holds, establishes a standard for the evaluation of everything falling within its compass. The availability of this standard places evaluation on footing that is as firm as that on which the comprehension of life and the world stands.

To accept life in its disjointed pieces is an adult experience of freedom, but still these pieces must lodge and embed themselves somewhere, hopefully in a place that allows them to grow and endure.

The past was in them, still disturbing but no longer a governing history; the trauma strengthened the convictions they possessed about how to lead their lives.

You are old, Father William—

The culture of modern humanism into which he had thus incorporated himself was to remain important to Hobbes for the rest of his life, though, as we shall see, he distanced himself from many of its specific elements, and in particular its openness to classical republicanism.

I earned good money,' he said. 'I was driving in good teams, I was winning races, I had pole positions … basically, not a lot to prove. So what is the point to take still the risk? That was my question to myself last week. But the other side is, what is the rest of your life?

When trying to write your way to a happier life, expressing gratitude is just the tip of the iceberg.

It made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.

a knowledge of how to live was a knowledge of how to die.

I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate. But to feel that there was feeling denied me, that the very breath of life itself was beyond my reach, that more than anything else hurt, wounded me. I had a new hunger.

How could one find out about life when one was about to die?