The unexamined life is not worth living.
- SocratesLife
Life is the broadest theme in any collection of quotations and therefore the most uneven. The same heading holds Seneca's letter on the shortness of time and a sentence from a greetings card. The difference usually comes down to whether a line asks something of the reader or flatters them.
What the lasting ones share is that they do not try to explain everything. Ancient writers discussed life in relation to death, because neither means much alone; medieval writers in relation to duty; modern ones in relation to choice. None of these frames is complete, but each sees something. Reading this theme in sequence, the useful question is which world a line comes from, rather than whether it agrees with yours.
It is not the length of life, but the depth of life.
- Ralph Waldo EmersonTrue life is lived when tiny changes occur.
- Leo TolstoyDwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.
- Marcus AureliusTo live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
- Oscar WildeLife is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.
- Albert EinsteinDon't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
- Mark TwainLife appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.
- Charlotte BrontëI exist as I am, that is enough.
- Walt WhitmanI would rather die of passion than of boredom.
- Vincent van GoghFar and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
- Theodore RooseveltIt is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.
- SenecaThe best portion of a good man's life: his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.
- William WordsworthLive in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit.
- Henry David ThoreauAll the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
- William ShakespeareThe life given us by nature is short, but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.
- CiceroA person learns as long as they live.
- Croatian ProverbA room without books is like a body without a soul.
- CiceroClouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.
- Rabindranath TagoreBegin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.
- SenecaAll grown-ups were once children — but only few of them remember it.
- Antoine de Saint-ExupéryIn every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.
- Friedrich NietzscheThe price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
- Henry David ThoreauBeware the barrenness of a busy life.
- SocratesTo live without hope is to cease to live.
- Fyodor DostoevskyLife is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.
- Helen KellerThe soul is healed by being with children.
- Fyodor DostoevskyWhen you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive — to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.
- Marcus AureliusLife is long if you know how to use it.
- SenecaThe flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.
- Lao TzuA good laugh and a long sleep are the two best cures for anything.
- Irish ProverbAdventure is worthwhile in itself.
- Amelia EarhartSometimes even to live is an act of courage.
- SenecaWithout music, life would be a mistake.
- Friedrich NietzscheI am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.
- Charlotte BrontëAs long as you live, keep learning how to live.
- SenecaKeep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.
- Oscar WildeThe only constant in life is change.
- HeraclitusThe mountains are calling and I must go.
- John MuirLife can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
- Søren Kierkegaard