Life

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.

Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Do you want to know the great drama of my life? It’s that I have put my genius into my life; all I’ve put into my works is my talent.

Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?

Urge and urge and urge,

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.

It is not worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life … to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience.

Our life is frittered away by detail …

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

A man you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.

It was my thirtieth year to heaven.

There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.

Life is a gamble at terrible odds—if it was a bet, you wouldn’t take it.

I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can’t do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory—they’re all blood, you see.

Give to me the life I love,

There are many wonderful things, and nothing is more wonderful than man.

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

His life was gentle, and the elements

And come he slow, or come he fast,

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.