Life

As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for remedying the evil, I know notof such ways. They take too much time, and aman’s life will be gone. I have other affairs toattend to. I came into this world, not chiefly tomake this a good place to live in, but to live init, be it good or bad.

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.

Although reason were intended by Providenceto govern our passions, yet it seems that, in two points of the greatest moment to the being and continuance of the world, God hath intendedour passions to prevail over reason. The first is, the propagation of our species, since no wiseman ever married from the dictates of reason.The other is, the love of life, which, from the dictates of reason, every man would despise, and wish it at an end, or that it never had abeginning.

Why, Tom, we’re the people that live. They ain’t gonna wipe us out. Why, we’re the people—we go on.

In the time of your life, live—so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

Although human life is priceless, we always act as if something had an even greater price than life. . . . But what is that something?

Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.

Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie .

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

[ Socrates speaking :] Life without this sort of examination is not worth living.

[ On being told at a party that people were ducking for apples :] There, but for a typographical error, is the story of my life.

Worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one has been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.

Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Thus anything whatsoever may become the subject of a novel, provided only that it happens in this mundane life and not in some fairyland beyond our human ken.

I know what every colored woman in this country is doing. . . . Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.

Human beings . . . they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It’s kind of boring, isn’t it?

Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. . . . But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.

Life may not exactly be pleasant, but at least it is not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband’s clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.

Aye, toil as we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths.

And a rose, she lived as roses do, the space of a morn.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.