I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists.
And to know that the sun is there – that is living.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
Never believe that others can show you the way to a good life and that you can’t find it yourself. Pay attention to the inner voice of your reason alone and not to the orders and suggestions of others.
—Leo Tolstoy
Ah how we wander from goal to goal of our life, and often it seems as if one thread of consciousness did not tie the far parts together.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is a mystery.
It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time.
I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
The more compassion there is in a person the better and happier his life is.
—Leo Tolstoy
I never did a day’s work in my life, it was all fun.
—Thomas Edison
We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.
—Carl Jung
Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live.
When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory.
—Sun Tzu
Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
—Seneca
While we wait for life, life passes.
—Seneca
It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and -what will perhaps make you wonder more – it takes the whole of life to learn how to die.
—Seneca
It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. … The life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.
—Seneca
Often a very old man has no other proof of his long life than his age.
—Seneca
It is more civilized to make fun of life than to bewail it.
—Seneca
Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.
—Seneca
To be always fortunate, and to pass through life with a soul that has never known sorrow, is to be ignorant of one half of nature.
—Seneca
Life is like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.
—Seneca
What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.
—Seneca
Life is long if you know how to use it.
—Seneca
Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.
—Marcus Aurelius
The “sociable” man, always outside himself, is capable of living only in the opinions of others and, so to speak, derives the sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgment.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
—William Shakespeare
“To live is to think.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
—Henry David Thoreau
If you don’t have a dog–at least one–there is not necessarily anything wrong with you, but there may be something wrong with your life.
—Vincent Van Gogh
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.
—Plato
I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die.
—Leonardo Da Vinci
Life without love, is no life at all.
—Leonardo Da Vinci
As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.
—Leonardo Da Vinci
When men speak ill of thee, live so that nobody will believe them.
—Plato