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Life quotes

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“To be, or not to be, that is the Question” William Shakespeare, “Hamlet” - 1623

“Have regular hours for work and play, make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will be delightful, old age will bring few regrets, and life become a beautiful...” Louisa May Alcott, “Little Women” - 1868

“A light heart lives long.” William Shakespeare, “Love's Labour's Lost” - 1598

“People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book.” Malcolm X, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” - 1965

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism” - 1891

“If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.” Oscar Wilde, “The Importance of Being Earnest” - 1895

“It would seem, Adeimantus, that the direction in which education starts a man, will determine his future life.” Plato, “The Republic”

“A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.” Bertrand Russell, “The Conquest of Happiness” - 1930

“How good life is when one does something good and just!” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “The Brothers Karamazov” - 1880

“It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “This Side of Paradise” - 1920

“Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.” Eleanor Roosevelt, “The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt” - 1961

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” William Shakespeare, “The Tempest” - 1623

“Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.” Kurt Vonnegut, “Slaughterhouse-Five” - 1969

“There are darknesses in life, and there are lights. You are one of the lights.” Bram Stoker, “Dracula” - 1897

“Make a decision and watch your life move forward.” Oprah Winfrey, “What I Know For Sure” - 2014

“We live, as we dream—alone...” Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness” - 1899

“While you do not know life, how can you know about death?” Confucius, “Analects”

“Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.” Henry Adams, “The Education of Henry Adams” - 1906

“Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN.” Jack London, “White Fang” - 1906

“Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.” George R. R. Martin, “A Game of Thrones” - 1996

“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life” Marcel Proust, “Swann's Way” - 1913

“Misfortunes one can endure—they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults—ah!—there is the sting of life.” Oscar Wilde, “Lady Windermere's Fan” - 1893

“Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.” C. S. Lewis, “Mere Christianity” - 1952

“Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou livest live well; how long, or short, permit to Heaven: and now prepare thee for another sight.” John Milton, “Paradise Lost” - 1667

“I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live” Jonathan Safran Foer, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” - 2005

“human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but . . . life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” Gabriel García Márquez, “Love in the Time of Cholera” - 1985

“Without music life would be a mistake.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols” - 1889

“Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.” William James, “The Varieties of Religious Experience” - 1902

“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.” C. S. Lewis, “Mere Christianity” - 1952

“The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.” Chuck Palahniuk, “Diary” - 2003

“They laughed. Things were funny. They weren't afraid to care. There was no sense to life, to the structure of things.” Charles Bukowski, “Ham on Rye” - 1982

“Like the pulse of a perfect heart, life struck straight through the streets.” Virginia Woolf, “Mrs Dalloway” - 1925

“Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. People are working every minute. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.” Andy Warhol, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol” - 1975

“Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.” Oscar Wilde, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” - 1890

“Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there—I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life.” Andy Warhol, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol” - 1975

“Folk songs are evasive — the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that’s exactly the way we want it to be.” Bob Dylan, “Chronicles, Volume One” - 2004

“One Life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us forevermore!” Thomas Carlyle, “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History” - 1841

“How ridiculous and what a stranger he is who is surprised at anything which happens in life.” Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations” - c. 170 - 180

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.” Oscar Wilde, “The Importance of Being Earnest” - 1895

“But she—her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.” Gustave Flaubert, “Madame Bovary” - 1856

“Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life.” Hermann Hesse, “Siddhartha” - 1922

“With every experience, you build your life, thought by thought, choice by choice.” Oprah Winfrey, “What I Know For Sure” - 2014

“nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. For really to think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one's thoughts be diverted by anything, by meals, by a fly...” Albert Camus, “The Plague” - 1947

“my friends have made the story of my life.” Helen Keller, “The Story of My Life” - 1903

“Life is just chemicals. A drop here, a drip there, everything’s changed. A mere dribble of fermented juices and suddenly you’re going to live another few hours.” Terry Pratchett, “Guards! Guards!” - 1989

“All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase—'I love you.'” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Flappers and Philosophers” - 1920

“But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.” Oscar Wilde, “Lady Windermere's Fan” - 1893

“One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.” Henry Adams, “The Education of Henry Adams” - 1906

“Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances.” Victor Hugo, “Les Misérables” - 1862

“Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.” Edith Wharton, “The Age of Innocence” - 1920

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