Quotes to inspire and reflect

Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life.

Life is little more than a loan shark: it exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes.

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

We never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.

In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.

Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.

Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.

The life force is vigorous. The delight that accompanies it counter-balances all the pains and hardships that confront men. It makes life worth living.

Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding.

No man is quick enough to enjoy life.

The best way to prepare for life is to begin to live.

The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.

Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot.

A just conception of life is too large a thing to grasp during the short interval of passing through it.

Life’s perhaps the only riddle / That we shrink from giving up.

Life’s a pudding full of plums.

All lives are interesting; no one life is more interesting than another. Its fascination depends on how much is revealed, and in what manner.

We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.

Irony and pity are two good counselors: one, in smiling, makes life pleasurable; the other, who cries, makes it sacred.

Life is a short affair; / We should try to make it smooth, and free from strife.

We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.

Alas!—but why Alas? / It is the lot of mortality we experience.

We do not live an equal life, but one of contrasts and patchwork; now a little joy, then a sorrow, now a sin, then a generous or brave action.

Life only avails* not the having lived.

When I consider life, tis all a cheat. / Yet fooled with hope, men favour the deceit.

A minute to smile and an hour to weep in, / A pint of joy to a peck of trouble, / And never a laugh but the moans come double; / And that is life!

We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf.

Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.

There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten before the end is told.

We mortals cross the ocean of this world / Each in his average cabin of a life; / The best’s not big, the worst yields elbowroom.

Life is not so much a riddle to be read as a Gordian knot that will get cut sooner or later.

I count life just a stuff /To try the soul s strength on.

How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ / All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!

Life is a toy made of glass; it appears to be of inestimable price, but in reality it is very cheap.

Men cling to life even at the cost of enduring great misfortune.

The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.

When we demand liberty of a person as a constitutional right, we are taking away from the officials their liberty to chop off people's heads.

The true charter of liberty is independence, maintained by force.

It must be admitted that liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.

Our government is based on the belief that a people can be both strong and free, that civilized men need no restraint but that imposed by themselves against abuse of freedom.

Liberty plucks justice by the nose; / The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart / Goes all decorum.

People demand freedom only when they have no power.

Liberty is the right to do what the laws permit.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one.

Martyred many times must be / Who would keep his country free.

Liberation is not deliverance.

Hereditary Bondsmen! know ye not / Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?