Quotes to inspire and reflect

As wise women and men in every culture tell us: The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us.

You cannot know a man’s life before the man / has died, then only can you call it good or bad.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

What most counts is not to live, but to live aright.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

Nothing is so false as human life, nothing so treacherous. God knows no one would have accepted it as a gift, if it had not been given without our knowledge.

Life is a task to be done. It is a fine thing to say defunctus est; it means that the man has done his task.

I he scenes of our life are like pictures done in rough mosaic. Looked at close, they produce no effect. There is nothing beautiful to be found in them, unless you stand some distance off.

It is the acme of life to understand life.

It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big. It is an indivisible point, drawn out and magnified by the powerful lenses of Time and Space.

Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.

From the first moment of life, men ought to begin learning to deserve to live.

Fate loves to invent patterns and designs. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

No man is quick enough to enjoy life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life’s a pudding full of plums.

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.

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.

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

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!

Life only avails* not the having lived.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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