Life

Life is no `brief candle' to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I've got to hold up for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know that man is here for the sake of other men.

Life, they urge, would be intolerable if men were to be guided in all they did by reason and reason only.

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

He has achieved success who has worked well, laughed often, and loved much.

Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainty that just to be alive is a grand thing.

I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of Creation.

If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.

If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.

One's real life is often the life that one does not lead.

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.

Stuff your eyes with wonder . . . live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

But if a person has had the sense of the Call -- the feeling that there's an adventure for him -- and if he doesn't follow that, but remains in the society because it's safe and secure, then life dries up.

Let every man do that which is right, strive with all his might towards the goal which can never be obtained, develop to the last breath the gifts with which the gracious Creator has endowed him, and never cease to learn. For life is short, art eternal.

If Einstein has stopped doing physics in the year 1925 and gone fishing, he would be just as beloved, just as great, and it would not have made a damn bit of difference.

It is not ideal to be the wife of a genius. Your life does not belong to you. It seems to belong to everyone else. Nearly every minute of the day I give to my husband, and that means to the public.

Life is short, and the boulder against which one pushes with all one’s might moves from its spot only with long intermissions.

My life is a simple thing that would interest no one. It is a known fact that I was born, and that is all that is necessary.

To know the world, not love her, is thy point,

Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.