life

Life is a beautiful magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish.

—Charlie Chaplin

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

—Leonardo Da Vinci

Life is full of troubles and vexations, that one must either rise above it by means of corrected thoughts, or leave it.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Life is a constant process of dying.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

They tell us that Suicide is the greatest piece of Cowardice… That Suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in this world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

Life begins on the other side of despair.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

You are — your life, and nothing else.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not ‘one thing in my life’ – not even the most important – because my life no longer belongs to me because…you are always me.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

Life has no meaning, the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.

—Marcus Aurelius

Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Don’t you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?

—Søren Kierkegaard

Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.

—Søren Kierkegaard

It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.

—Søren Kierkegaard

The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.

—Søren Kierkegaard

It is perhaps the misfortune of my life that I am interested in far too much but not decisively in any one thing; all my interests are not subordinated in one but stand on an equal footing.

—Søren Kierkegaard

Life can only be understood going backward, but must be lived going forward.

—Søren Kierkegaard

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 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