Quotes about life

Would you that spangle of Existence spend

About the Secret — Quick about it, Friend!

A Hair perhaps divides the False and True —

And upon what, prithee, may life depend?

And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before

The Tavern shouted — "Open then the Door!

You know how little while we have to stay,

And, once departed, may return no more."

Dreaming when Dawn's Left Hand was in the Sky

I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry,

"Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup

Before Life's Liquor in its Cup be dry."

Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,

Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,

'''The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,

The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

Well, what was life but the difference between what you planned and what you got?

Life was what you got, not what you expected.

“Life is hard.” Rodriguez shrugged. “And after life is done, then you die.” He shrugged again. “What can anyone do?”

It was a good question. It was, when Pinkard thought about it, a very good question. If there were any better questions out there, he had no idea what they might be. “You do the best you can, is all,” he answered slowly, and then looked around at the hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere he was currently inhabiting. “If this here is the best I can do, I been doin’ somethin’ wrong up till now.”

Have not many of us, in the weary way of life, felt, in some hours, how far easier it were to die than to live?

The martyr, when faced even by a death of bodily anguish and horror, finds in the very terror of his doom a strong stimulant and tonic. There is a vivid excitement, a thrill and fervor, which may carry through any crisis of suffering that is the birth-hour of eternal glory and rest.

But to live, — to wear on, day after day, of mean, bitter, low, harassing servitude, every nerve dampened and depressed, every power of feeling gradually smothered, — this long and wasting heart-martyrdom, this slow, daily bleeding away of the inward life, drop by drop, hour after hour, — this is the true searching test of what there may be in man or woman.

Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together...

So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.

Seen from too remote a vantage, life begins to lose its particularity. All shipwrecks become the same shipwreck, all castaways the same castaway, sunburnt, lonely, clad in the skins of the beast he has slain.

There is, in short no end to the story of life. There are merely pauses. The end is the arbitrary intervention of the teller, but there can be no finality about the choice. Today’s end is, after all tomorrow’s beginning.