Pearls of Wisdom : life

" 'We each of us have our own highway to hell,' the desperate woman intoned. 'Not me,' rejoined my dad, 'I'm a hitchhiker on someone else's highway to hell. Too much work paving my own.' "

"There is a deep, long, quiet sorrow in love, a pity for all dying things, and an awareness of our own life slipping down."

"I believe we should especially do things we suddenly decide to do when there's no good reason."

~Lisa Carver

"The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for."

~Allan K. Chalmers

"There is a time for all things, and a time to end all things."

~Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

"You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe."

to Dr. Franklin on "Babylon 5: A Late Delivery from Avalon"

~Marcus Cole

"Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do."

~R.G. Collinwood

"For life's not a paragraph, and death I think is no parentheses."

~E.E. Cummings
poet (1984—1962)

"Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret."

~Benjamin Disraeli

"Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today."

~John Dryden

"We should tackle reality in a slightly joking way... otherwise we miss its point."

~Lawrence Durrell

"As long as I am able to work I must not and will not complain, because work is the only thing which gives substance to life."

"There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

~Albert Einstein
physicist (1879—1955)

"It's never too late to be who you might have been."

~George Elliot

"Who so would be a man must first be a nonconformist."

~Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803—1882)

"There is just one life for each of us: our own."

~Euripides

"Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."

~Mahatma Gandhi
(1869—1848)

"And the best thing you've ever done for me
Is to help me take my life less seriously
Hey, it's only life after all."

"Closer to Fine"

~Indigo Girls

"It's too hard, and life is too short, to spend your time doing something because someone else has said that it's important. Your must feel the thing for yourself..."

~Isidor I. Rabi

"I sometimes rise late in the night beset by anxieties, thinking that my heart is about to stop beating; or a terrible storm is about to send lightning down upon me. I am convinced my talent has withered, and I have grown old and foolish; that women laugh cruelly when they speak of me; and all my careful investments have collapsed, leaving me a pauper. I imagine that a terrible war has begun that will sweep away all that we know, and silent lines of soldiers pass by in the night. I worry that lack of rest will bring my health to ruin.

And then, when I can bear it no more, the terrible, infinite depths of the night sky turn stone gray, and the sun rises again, lifting up above the horizon like a bright promise, and I realize the condition from which I suffer is but the human condition. Our solid lives are balanced on the edge of calamity, so much so that we do everything possible never to think of it, for contemplation drives one to despair. Despair that there is nothing we can do except promote the illusion that all is well, though we live with the secret knowledge that this is not so.

We wake in the grip of terror, the night telling us that we are utterly alone, our safe lives nothing but dreams. And our greatest fear of all—that we will be released from this world of anxiety and terror. The sun will not rise on the morrow."

Halden, in "Sea Without a Shore"

~Sean Russell
writer

"If only life were what it seemed, complications would not be so serious."

~Rachael Rynders

"I persist on praising not the life I lead, but that which I ought to lead. I follow it at a mighty distance, crawling."

"This is the reason we cannot complain of life: it keeps no one against his will."

"It is extreme evil to depart from the company of the living before you die."

"Non ille diu vixit, sed diu fuit."
He did not live a long time, but he lasted a long time.

"Ante senectutem curavi ut bene virerem; in senectute curo ut bene moriar."
Before old age I gave care to living a good life; in old age I give care to dying well.

~Lucius Annaeus Seneca
(ca. 4 BCE—65 CE)

"Life isn't about finding yourself, it's about creating yourself."

~George Bernard Shaw

"Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry."

"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."

~Samuel Langhome Clemens aka Mark Twain
(1835—1910)

"You can only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough."

~Unknown

"Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it."

~Alice Walker

"When you lay your dream to rest
you can get what's second best
but it's hard to get enough."

"Eye of a Hurricane"

~David Wilcox
musician

"I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose!"

Lord Darlington, "Lady Windermere's Fan"

~Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
poet, novelist, & playwright (1854—1900)

"While there is time, Let's go out and do everything."

"The Finer Things"

~Steve Winwood

"Life is the greatest of all bargains; you get it for nothing."

~Yiddish saying

"If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live."

~Lin Yutang

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