Life

At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgement.

There are no second acts in American lives.

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he, alone among creatures, has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

Birth, and copulation, and death.

Yet we have gone on living,

We shall not cease from exploration

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.

How many roads must a man walk down

But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

Happy the man, and happy he alone,

He told me … that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found by long experience was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness.

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

They go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead.

From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.

There is grandeur in this view of life.

And a thousand thousand slimy things

Life is a horizontal fall.

A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

Without work, all life goes rotten, but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

To live is like to love—all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.