Quotes on Life

DIARY, n. A daily record of that part of one's life, which he can relate to himself without blushing.

LIFE, n. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay. We live in daily apprehension of its loss; yet when lost it is not missed.

ORPHAN, n. A living person whom death has deprived of the power of filial ingratitude . . .

PHONOGRAPH, n. An irritating toy that restores life to dead noises.

We do not go to bed in single pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents' lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies-all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.

"Do you know," Ivan Bunin recalls Anton Chekhov saying to him in 1899, near the end of his too-short life, "for how many years I shall be read? Seven." "Why seven?" Bunin asked. "Well," Chekhov answered, "seven and a half then."

It concerns us to know the purposes we seek in life, for then, like archers aiming at a definite mark, we shall be more likely to attain what we want.

The progress of life shows a man the stuff of which he is made.

Since a rational man's ambition is unlimited, since his pursuit and achievement of values is a life-long process — and the higher the values, the harder the struggle — he needs a moment, an hour or some period of time in which he can experience the sense of his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his values have been successfully achieved.

What is without us has no connection with happiness, only so far as the preservation of our lives and health depends upon it. . . . Happiness springs immediately from the mind.

Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favour of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life.

Upon hearing via Littlewood an exposition on the theory of relativity: To think I have spent my life on absolute muck.

The joy of life is made up of obscure and seemingly mundane victories that give us our own small satisfactions.

The Bourne Underneath the growing grass, Underneath the living flowers, Deeper than the sound of showers: There we shall not count the hours By the shadows as they pass. Youth and health will be but vain, Beauty reckoned of no worth: There a very little girth Can hold round what once the earth Seemed too narrow to contain.

He who knows the activities of Nature lives according to Nature.

Other relaxations are peculiar to certain times, places and stages of life, but the study of letters is the nourishment of our youth, and the joy of our old age. They throw an additional splendor on prosperity, and are the resource and consolation of adversity; they delight at home, and are no embarrassment abroad; in short, they are company to us at night, our fellow travelers on a journey, and attendants in our rural recesses.

To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.

Whoever does not detach himself from the ego never attains the Absolute and never deciphers life.

We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

Reverence for life . . . does not allow the scholar to live for his science alone, even if he is very useful . . . the artist to exist only for his art, even if he gives inspiration to many. . . . It refuses to let the business man imagine that he fulfills all legitimate demands in the course of his business activities. It demands from all that they should sacrifice a portion of their own lives for others.

This living, this living, this living Was never a project of mine.