life

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

—Søren Kierkegaard

In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I love my melancholy.

—Søren Kierkegaard

I cannot live without books.

—Thomas Jefferson

I am very fond of the modest manner of life of those solitary owners of remote villages, who in Little Russia are commonly called old-fashioned, who are like tumbledown picturesque little houses, delightful in their simplicity and complete unlikeness to the new smooth buildings whose walls have not yet been discolored by the rain, whose roofs are not yet covered with green lichen, and whose porch does not display its bricks through the peeling stucco.

—Nikolai Gogol

Music is my life and my life is music. Anyone who does not understand this is not worthy of God.

—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Be indifferent to where you live.

—Miyamoto Musashi

Music is my life and my life is music.

—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

—Ernest Hemingway

Life well spent is long.

—Leonardo Da Vinci

It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life.

—Blaise Pascal

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately..

—Henry David Thoreau

Philosophy calls for simple living, not for doing penance, and the simple way of life need not be a crude one.

—Seneca

If God had granted all the silly prayers I’ve made in my life, where should I be now? – C.S. Lewis

Man cannot live without joy. That is why one deprived of spiritual joys goes over to carnal pleasures.

—Thomas Aquinas

When I read a good book I wish that life were 3000 years long.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is the proper task of life.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, & the world around us.

—Socrates

Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.

—Socrates

The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one’s destiny to do, and then do it.

—Henry Ford

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

—Seneca

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

—Leonardo Da Vinci

We make war that we may live in peace.

—Aristotle

You’ll find that life is still worthwhile, if you just smile.

—Charlie Chaplin

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

—Charles Darwin

My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.

—Charles Dickens

Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living.

—Carl Jung

I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.

—Plato

Work as if you’re going to live forever, and treat people as if you’re going to die at any second.

—Leo Tolstoy

However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. Where there’s life, there’s hope.

—Stephen Hawking