Life

Sex begins before adolescence, and survives sterility; it is indeed coeval with our lives, although at the mating age its effects are more obvious to Society.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

Golf is like a love affair. If you don't take it seriously, it's no fun; if you do take it seriously, it breaks your heart.

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.

And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

 

I will drink Life to the lees.

 

There is scarcely any less bother in the running of a family than in that of an entire state. And domestic business is no less importunate for being less important.

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

 

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

 

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink

 

Since Life is but a Dream,

 

Life seems to me like a Japanese picture which our imagination does not allow to end with the margin. We aim at the infinite and when our arrow falls to earth it is in flames.

 

The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voice of friends and to say to one’s self: “The work is done.” But just as one says that, the answer comes: “The race is over, but the work never is done while the power to work remains.” The canter that brings you to a standstill need not be only coming to rest. It cannot be, while you still live. For to live is to function. That is all there is in living.

 

I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

 

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul.

 

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

 

Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire.

 

If your life at night is good, you think you have / Everything; but, if in that quarter things go wrong, / You will consider your best and truest interests /

Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay.

When I can look Life in the eyes, / Grown calm and very coldly wise, / Life will have given me the Truth, / And taken in exchange—my youth.

Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darknesses.

Now at last I have come to see what life is, / Nothing is ever ended, everything only begun, / And the brave victories that seem so splendid / Are never really won.

Life is a frail moth flying / Caught in the web of the years that pass.

Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of it.