Life

What are days for?

Ah! que la vie est quotidienne.

The unbearable lightness of being.

An active line on a walk, moving freely without a goal. A walk for walk’s sake.

The mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, joy, set it free! The Story of My Life (1902) ch. 4

O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!

Sex and taxes are in many ways the same. Tax does to cash what males do to genes. It dispenses assets among the population as a whole. Sex, not death, is the great leveller.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.

Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero Pulsanda tellus.

Dum loquimur, fugerit invida

Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go … Life is nothing. Life is all. It is the hand with which we hold off death. It is the glow-worm that shines in the night-time and is black in the morning; it is the white breath of the oxen in winter; it is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset.

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Man wants but little here below,

How happy he who crowns in shades like these,

All theory, dear friend, is grey, but the golden tree of actual life springs ever green.

Your children are not your children.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.