Life

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.

 

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.

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.

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

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

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

To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

We are all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined in it.

We pay for security with boredom, for adventure with bother.

Art is the flower of life and, as seed, it gives back life.

In this life there’s nothing new in dying,

 

'I wish life was not so short,' he thought. 'Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.' J. R. R.

If thou should never see my face again, Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of.

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us.

The Future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

Each life makes its own imitation of immortality.

There's a very fine line between a groove and a rut a fine line between eccentrics and people who are just plain nuts.

Unable are the Loved to die For Love is Immortality.

The secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for.