Life

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,

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

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 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.

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.

Only the flow matters: live and let live, love and let love.