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
People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?
—Jean-Paul Sartre
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
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
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
Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.
—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
I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living and that one generation has no more right to bind another to it’s laws and judgments than one independent nation has the right to command another.
—Thomas Jefferson
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