Life Quotes
Life is the aspect of existence that processes, acts, reacts, evaluates, and evolves through growth (reproduction and metabolism). The crucial difference between life and non-life (or non-living things) is that life uses energy for physical and conscious development. Life is anything that grows and eventually dies, i.e., ceases to proliferate and be cognizant. Can we say that viruses, for example, are cognizant? Yes, insofar as they react to stimuli; but they are alive essentially because they reproduce and grow. Computers are non-living because even though they can cognize, they do not develop biologically (grow), and cannot produce offspring. It is not cognition that determines life, then: it is rather proliferation and maturation towards a state of death; and death occurs only to living substances.
Or is the question, ‘What is the meaning (purpose) of life?’ That’s a real tough one. But I think that the meaning of life is the ideals we impose upon it, what we demand of it. I’ve come to reaffirm my Boy Scout motto, give or take a few words, that the meaning of life is to: Do good, Be Good, but also to Receive Good. The foggy term in this advice, of course, is ‘good’; but I leave that to the intuitive powers that we all share.
There are, of course, many intuitively clear examples of Doing Good: by retrieving a crying baby from a dumpster; by trying to rescue someone who’s drowning. Most of us would avoid murdering; and most of us would refrain from other acts we find intuitively wrong. So our natural intuitions determine the meaning of life for us; and it seems for other species as well, for those intuitions resonate through much of life and give it its purpose.
Tom Baranski, Somerset, New Jersey
The purpose of life is a life of purpose.
—Robin Sharma
He not busy being born is busy dying.
—Bob Dylan
Most of us spend our lives as if we had another one in the bank.
—Ben Irwin
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
—Anaïs Nin
What to do with your one life? The same thing you would do if you had two lives, and this were the second.
—Robert Brault
One’s only real life is the life one never leads.
—Oscar Wilde
When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a manner that when you die the world cries and you rejoice.
—Indian Saying
Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
—Jack London
We are always getting ready to live but never living.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
—O. Henry, The Gifts of the Magi
The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them.
—Bernard M. Baruch
Things happen in life that make us question our faith when perhaps they ought to make us question our life.
—Robert Brault
Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
—Jean Cocteau
A simple definition of life: The chance you’ve been waiting for.
—Robert Brault
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
—Annie Dillard
I think of life itself now as a wonderful play that I’ve written for myself, and so my purpose is to have the utmost fun playing my part.
—Shirley MacLaine
But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
—Albert Camus, a Happy Death
I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
—Diane Ackerman
There are but three events in a man’s life: birth, life, and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.
—Jean de la Bruyère
For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin—real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.
—Fr. Alfred D’Souza
You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted.
—Ruth E. Renkl
Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.
—Margaret Fuller
When one has a great deal to put into it, a day has a hundred pockets.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Fear not that life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a beginning.
—John Henry Cardinal Newman
But I am greedy for life. I do too much of everything all the time. Suddenly one day my heart will fail. The Iron Crab will get me as it got my father. But I am not afraid of The Crab. At least I shall have died from an honorable disease. Perhaps they will put on my tombstone “This Man Died from Living Too Much.”
—Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love
Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.
—William Hazlitt, On the Love of Life, 1815
If life has those moments—ecstasies of health, youth and peace...—treasure them.
—Byron Caldwell Smith, letter to Kate Stephens
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
—Author unknown
Live as you will wish to have lived when you are dying.
—Christian Furchtegott Gellert
If you believe in forever, then life is just a one-night stand.
—Righteous Brothers, “Rock & Roll Heaven”
Life is change.
—Heraclitus of Ephesus
Life is a series of tasks that you absolutely must get done before they don’t matter anymore.
—Robert Brault
Is there life before death?
—Author Unknown
May you live all the days of your life.
—Jonathan Swift
You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you’re going to live. Now.
—Joan Baez
Life, if well lived, is long enough.
—Seneca, De Ira
Who well lives, long lives; for this age of ours should not be numbered by years, days, and hours.
—Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, Divine Weeks and Works, 1578
Don’t ever save anything for a special occasion. Being alive is the special occasion.
—Author Unknown
Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.
—Thomas Merton
