Definition of life

"life" in the noun sense

1. life

a characteristic state or mode of living

"social life"

"city life"

"real life"

2. life, living

the experience of being alive the course of human events and activities

"he could no longer cope with the complexities of life"

3. life

the course of existence of an individual the actions and events that occur in living

"he hoped for a new life in Australia"

"he wanted to live his own life without interference from others"

"get a life!" "he is trying to rebuild his life"

4. animation, life, living, aliveness

the condition of living or the state of being alive

"while there's life there's hope"

"life depends on many chemical and physical processes"

5. life, lifetime, life-time, lifespan

the period during which something is functional (as between birth and death

"the battery had a short life"

"he lived a long and happy life"

6. life

the period between birth and the present time

"I have known him all his life"

7. life

the period from the present until death

"he appointed himself emperor for life"

8. life

a living person

"his heroism saved a life"

9. liveliness, life, spirit, sprightliness

animation and energy in action or expression

"it was a heavy play and the actors tried in vain to give life to it"

10. life

living things collectively

"the oceans are teeming with life"

11. life

the organic phenomenon that distinguishes living organisms from nonliving ones

"there is no life on the moon"

12. biography, life, life story, life history

an account of the series of events making up a person's life

13. life

a motive for living

"pottery was his life"

14. life sentence, life

a prison term lasting as long as the prisoner lives

"he got life for killing the guard"

Source: WordNet® (An amazing lexical database of English)

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Quotations for life

At our wittes end. [ Heywood. Bread is the staff of life. [Swift ]

Life is a tragedy. [ Sir W. Raleigh ]

Life is a shuttle. [ William Shakespeare ]

Life is a carnival. [ E. Souvestre ]

My life is a battle. [ Voltaire ]

Poetry creates life. [ Fred. W. Robertson ]

Life is but thought. [ Coleridge ]

Life's race well run,
Life's work well done,
Life's crown well won,
Now comes rest. [ President Garfield's Epitaph ]

Death is another life. [ Bailey ]

Till death all is life. [ Proverb ]

Sorrow and an evil life,
Makes soon an old wife. [ Proverb ]

Life is short, art long. [ Hippocrates ]

Life is short, yet sweet. [ Euripides ]

'Tis life itself to love. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Anything for a quiet life. [ Proverb ]

There is life in a muscle. [ Proverb ]

Life is but a day at most. [ Burns ]

Death is the gate of life. [ Bailey ]

Death is Life's high meed. [ Keats ]

Bread is the staff of life. [ Swift ]

One must pay with his life. [ French Proverb ]

Religion is life essential. [ George MacDonald ]

Death is the crown of life. [ Young ]

Amid life's quests
That seems but worthy one -
to do men good. [ Bailey ]

I made my life my monument. [ Ben Jonson ]

Who loses a day loses life. [ Emerson ]

Kindness is wisdom.
There is none in life
But needs it and may learn. [ Bailey ]

Stronger than steel
Is the sword of the spirit;
Swifter than arrows
The life of the truth is;
Greater than anger
Is love, and subdueth. [ Longfellow ]

Long life hath long misery. [ Proverb ]

Life is the soul's nursery. [ Thackeray ]

Life is too short to waste.
It will soon be dark;
Up! mind thine own aim, and
God speed the mark! [ Emerson ]

Lose a leg rather than life. [ Proverb ]

Making their lives a prayer. [ Whittier ]

I learn life from the poets. [ Mme. de Stael ]

Light suppers mak' lang life. [ Scotch Proverb ]

Time is the Life of the Soul. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

Business is the salt of life. [ Proverb ]

The childhood of immortality. [ Goethe ]

He lives long that lives well. [ Thomas Fuller ]

Mirth and motion prolong life. [ Proverb ]

Life hath more awe than death. [ Bailey ]

A dog's life, hunger and ease. [ Proverb ]

Underneath this stone doth lie
As much beauty as could die;
Which in life did harbour give
To more virtue than doth live. [ Jonson, on Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland ]

Life and misery began together. [ Proverb ]

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began,
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die. [ Wordsworth ]

A long life hath long miseries. [ Proverb ]

Friendship is the wine of life. [ E. Young ]

I am conscious of eternal life. [ Theodore Parker ]

For life lives only in success. [ Bayard Taylor ]

Life is the offspring of death. [ Moses Harvey ]

I will be loyal during my life. [ Motto ]

Knowledge by suffering endureth,
And life is perfected by Death. [ Mrs. Browning ]

How pleasant is a life of peace. [ Udaijin ]

O God, how lovely still is life! [ Schiller ]

Life has surprises at every age. [ Alfred Mercier ]

Labor is life; thought is light. [ Victor Hugo ]

Where all life dies death lives. [ Milton ]

Life's no resting, but a moving;
Let thy life be deed on deed. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

The May of life only blooms once. [ Schiller ]

My life is one demd horrid grind. [ Dickens ]

Honor's a lease for life to come. [ Samuel Butler ]

He lives who lives to God alone,
And all are dead beside;
For other source than God is none
Whence life can be supplied. [ William Cowper ]

Youth is life's beautiful moment. [ Lacordaire ]

A good life is the only religion. [ Proverb ]

Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought! [ Longfellow ]

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,A Psalm Of Life ]

A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death? [ Wordsworth ]

The best of life is conversation. [ Emerson ]

Light suppers make long life days. [ Proverb ]

While there is life there is hope. [ Proverb ]

We shape ourselves the joy or fear
Of which the coming life is made,
And fill our Future's atmosphere
With sunshine or with shade. [ Whittier ]

An evil life is one kind of death. [ Ovid ]

Variety is the very spice of life. [ Cowper ]

I am sure care's an enemy to life. [ William Shakespeare ]

Life lies not in living by liking. [ Proverb ]

White winged angels meet the child
On the vestibule of life. [ Mrs. E. Oakes Smith ]

As a man's life is, so is the end. [ Motto ]

The life of a man is a winter way. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

The less routine the more of life. [ A. B. Alcott ]

Dark eyes - eternal soul of pride!
Deep life in all that's true!
Away, away to other skies!
Away over seas and sands!
Such eyes as those were never made
To shine in other lands. [ Leland ]

All my past life is mine no more,
The flying hours are gone
Like transitory dreams given over,
Whose images are kept in store,
By memory alone. [ Rochester ]

Liberty is life; slavery is death. [ A. Vinet ]

What an antiseptic is a pure life! [ Lowell ]

Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary. [ Longfellow ]

Yet all I've learnt from hours rife
With painful brooding here,
Is, that amid this mortal strife.
The lapse of every year
But takes away a hope from life.
And adds to death a fear. [ Hoffman ]

He liveth long who liveth well.
All else is life but flung away;
He liveth longest who can tell
Of true things truly done each day. [ Horatius Bonar ]

The life of poets - love and tears. [ Mme. Desbordes-Valmore ]

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream,
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem. [ Longfellow ]

Speak truly, and each word of thine
Shall be a fruitful seed;
Live truly, and thy life shall be
A great and noble creed. [ Horatius Bonar ]

O reputation! dearer far than life. [ Lowell ]

How light the touches are that kiss
The music from the chords of life! [ Coventry Patmore ]

Our life must answer for our faith. [ Thomas Wilson ]

Sorrow is a torch that lights life.

A day for toil, an hour for sport.
But for a friend is life too short. [ Emerson ]

Hopes and fears chequer human life. [ Proverb ]

Favor will as surely perish as life. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Life is as serious a thing as death. [ Bailey ]

Death is the origin of another life. [ Montaigne ]

Life lies most open in a closed eye. [ Quarles ]

The soul too soft its ills to bear.
Has left our mortal hemisphere.
And sought in better world the meed
To blameless life by heaven decreed. [ Scott ]

A fair death honours the whole life. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

The muffled drum's sad roll has beat
The soldier's last tattoo;
No more on Life's parade shall meet
The brave and fallen few.
On Fame's eternal camping-ground
Their silent tents are spread.
And Glory guards, with solemn round
The bivouac of the dead. [ Theodore O'Hara ]

Anxiety is the poison of human life. [ Blair ]

To be daily dying is a blessed life. [ Proverb ]

I've often wished that I had clear.
For life, six hundred pounds a year,
A handsome house to lodge a friend,
A river at my garden's end,
A terrace walk, and half a rood
Of land, set out to plant a wood. [ Swift ]

It is a great journey to Life's-end. [ Proverb ]

That star on life's tremulous ocean. [ Moore ]

There is no life without friendship. [ Cicero ]

Study is the apprenticeship of life. [ Fleury ]

There is a very life in our despair. [ Byron ]

Who more than he is worth does spend,
He makes a rope his life to end. [ Proverb ]

Life is a dream; death, an awakening. [ La Beaumelle ]

A useless life is but an early death. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Every form of human life is romantic. [ T. W. Higginson ]

For faith, and peace, and mighty love
That from the Godhead flow,
Show'd them the life of heaven above
Springs from the earth below. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Hail! Independence, hail!
Heaven's next best gift,
To that of life and an immortal soul! [ Thomson ]

O! the gallant fisher's life.
It is the best of any:
'Tis full of pleasure, void of strife
And 'tis beloved by many.
Other joys
Are but toys;
Only this,
Lawful is;
For our skill
Breeds no ill,
But content and pleasure. [ Izaak Walton ]

Religion is not a method, but a life. [ Amiel ]

A good life fears not life nor death. [ Proverb ]

The white flower of a blameless life. [ Tennyson ]

In the midst of life we are in death. [ Burial Service ]

Purpose is what gives life a meaning. [ Charles H. Parkhurst ]

Life is good, but not life in itself. [ Owen Meredith ]

Have you found your life distasteful?
My life did, and does, smack sweet.
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful?
Mine I saved and hold complete.
Do your joys with age diminish?
When mine fail me, I'll complain.
Must in death your daylight finish?
My sun sets to rise again. [ Browning ]

Earnestness alone makes life eternity. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

There is always life for a living one. [ Proverb ]

I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne, and yet must bear. [ Shelley ]

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit. [ Cowper ]

This sickness doth infect
The very life-blood of our enterprise. [ William Shakespeare ]

Home is the sacred refuge of our life. [ Dryden ]

The greatest pleasure of life is love. [ Sir W. Temple ]

Man lives only to shiver and perspire. [ Sydney Smith ]

Twist ye, twine ye! even so,
Mingle shades of joy and woe,
Hope, and fear, and peace, and strife,
In the thread of human life. [ Scott ]

Idle men are dead all their life long. [ Proverb ]

Fits life to love like rhyme to rhyme. [ Sidney Lanier, To Beethoven ]

As we sail through life towards death,
Bound unto the same port - heaven -
Friend, what years could us divide? [ D. M. Mulock ]

Ay, marriage is the life-long miracle,
The self-begetting wonder, daily fresh. [ Charles Kingsley ]

Life protracted is protracted woe,
Time hovers o'er, impatient to destroy,
And shuts up all the passages of joy. [ Johnson ]

Wouldst thou wisely, and with pleasure,
Pass the days of life's short measure,
From the slow one counsel take,
But a tool of him never make;
Ne'er as friend the swift one know,
Nor the constant one as foe. [ Schiller ]

Life is the art of being well-deceived. [ Hazlitt ]

The love of liberty with life is given. [ Dryden ]

To contemplation's sober eye.
Such is the race of man;
And they that creep, and they that fly.
Shall end where they began.
Alike the busy and the gay,
But flutter through life's little day. [ Gray ]

Like madness is the glory of this life. [ William Shakespeare ]

The cradle and the tomb, alas! so nigh. [ Prior ]

May you live all the days of your life. [ Swift ]

Life hath quicksands; life hath snares. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

Thou bringest the sailor to his wife.
And travell'd men from foreign lands,
And letters unto trembling hands;
And, thy dark freight, a vanish'd life. [ Tennyson ]

I wonder did you ever count
The value of one human fate;
Or sum the infinite amount
Of one heart's treasure, and the weight
Of life's one venture, and the whole
Concentrate purpose of a soul. [ Adelaide A. Procter ]

Life is less than nothing without love. [ Bailey ]

Good sense is the master of human life. [ Bossuet ]

Life counts not hours by joys or pangs;
But just by duties done. [ Dinah Muloch Craik ]

Life is the gift of God, and is divine. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease. [ John Dryden ]

Life only avails, not the having lived. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Our life is scarce the twinkle of a star
In God's eternal day. [ Bayard Taylor ]

Through every fibre of my brain,
Through every nerve, through every vein,
I feel the electric thrill, the touch
Of life, that seems almost too much. [ Henry W. Longfellow ]

For life is not to live, but to be well. [ Martial ]

Catch, then, O catch the transient hour;
Improve each moment as it flies;
Life's a short summer - man a flower -
He dies - alas! how soon he dies! [ Dr. Johnson ]

To know
That which before us lies in daily life,
Is the prime wisdom. [ Milton ]

When a man's life is under debate,
The judge can never too long deliberate. [ Dryden ]

Then fill each hour with what will last;
Buy up the moments as they go;
The life above, when this is past,
Is the ripe fruit of life below. [ Horatius Bonar ]

A man's life's no more than to say, One! [ William Shakespeare ]

Let every minute be a full life to thee. [ Jean Paul ]

Life without laughing is a dreary blank. [ Thackeray ]

Our life contains a thousand springs.
And dies if one be gone.
Strange! that a harp of thousand strings
Should keep in tune so long. [ Watts ]

Education is the apprenticeship of life. [ Willmott ]

Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name. [ Scott ]

He that cuts off twenty years of life
Cuts off so many years of fearing death. [ Horace ]

Happy that I can
Be crossed and thwarted as a man,
Not left in God's contempt apart,
With ghastly smooth life, dead at heart,
Tame in earth's paddock, as her prize. [ Browning ]

O, if so much beauty doth reveal
Itself in every vein of life and nature.
How beautiful must be the Source itself,
The Ever Bright One. [ Tegner ]

It lifts the boughs, whose shadows deep,
Are life's oblivion, the soul's sleep,
And kisses the closed eyes
Of him who slumbering lies. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Endymion ]

Time wasted is existence; used, is life. [ Young ]

What sweet delight a quiet life affords. [ Drummond ]

The soul, uneasy and confined from home.
Rests and expatiates in a life to come. [ Pope ]

A cheerful life is what the Muses love;
A soaring spirit is their prime delight. [ Wordsworth ]

One day with life and heart,
Is more than time enough to find a world. [ Lowell ]

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use,
As though to breathe were life. [ Alfred Tennyson ]

Praise day at night, and life at the end. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

After life's fitful fever he sleeps well. [ William Shakespeare, Macbeth ]

And the cold marble leapt to life, a god. [ Milman ]

Keep thy friend under thy own life's key. [ William Shakespeare ]

I slept and dreamed that life was Beauty;
I woke, and found that life was Duty -
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie? [ Ellen Sturgis Hooper ]

On life's vast ocean diversely we sail,
Reason the card, but passion is the gale. [ Pope ]

There is a kind of character in thy life,
That to the observer doth thy history
Fully unfold. [ William Shakespeare ]

It is liberty alone that gives the flower
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume;
And we are weeds without it. [ Cowper ]

Jest with life: for that only is it good. [ Voltaire ]

Disappointment is often the salt of life. [ Theodore Parker ]

Life, like a dome of many coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity. [ Shelley ]

Integrity of life is fame's best .friend. [ John Webster ]

Fame is a fancied life in others' breath. [ Pope ]

A good friend is life's best inheritance. [ Albert II. of Germany ]

To purchase Heaven has gold the power?
Can gold remove the mortal hour?
In life can love be bought with gold?
Are friendship's pleasures to be sold?
No - all that's worth a wish - a thought.
Fair virtue gives unbribed, unbought.
Cease then on trash thy hopes to bind,
Let nobler views engage thy mind. [ Dr. Johnson ]

While a sick man has life, there is hope. [ Proverb ]

We find in life exactly what we put in it. [ Emerson ]

Good cheer is no hindrance to a good life. [ Aristippus ]

She thought our good-night kiss was given.
And like a lily her life did close;
Angels uncurtain'd that repose,
And the next waking dawn'd in heaven. [ Gerald Massey ]

The ransom of a man's life are his riches. [ Bible ]

We sail the sea of life; a calm one finds.
And one a tempest; and, the voyage o'er,
Death is the quiet haven of us all. [ Wordsworth ]

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. [ William Shakespeare ]

The life of a wit is a warfare upon earth. [ Pope ]

A libertine life is not a life of liberty. [ Proverb ]

Fortune, not wisdom, human life doth sway. [ Cicero ]

The one prudence in life is concentration. [ Emerson ]

'Tis liberty alone that gives the flowers
Of fleeting life their luster and perfume.
And we are weeds without it. [ Cowper ]

While man is growing, life is in decrease;
And cradles rock us nearer to the tomb.
Our birth is nothing but our death begun. [ Young ]

Weariness of life; disgust with existence. [ Gell ]

My loss is such as cannot be repaired,
And to the wretched, life can be no mercy. [ Dryden ]

Be thou the rainbow to the storms of life. [ Byron ]

The law of the wise is a fountain of life. [ Bible ]

Happy the man who sees a God employed
In all the good and ill that chequer life! [ Cowper ]

Oh, how this spring of life resembleth
The uncertain glory of an April day.
Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,
And, by and by, a cloud takes all away! [ William Shakespeare ]

'Tis a stern and a startling thing to think
How often mortality stands on the brink
Of its grave without any misgiving;
And yet in this slippery world of strife,
In the stir of human bustle so rife.
There are daily sounds to tell us that Life
Is dying, and Death is living! [ Hood ]

The love of praise
Fills life with fine amenities. Not all
Who live have pleasant tempers, and not all
The gift of gracious manners, or the love
Of nobler motive higher meed than praise. [ J. G. Holland ]

Then marble, soften'd into life, grew warm. [ Pope ]

The life of spies is to know, not be known. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Superstition is part of the poetry of life. [ Goethe ]

Our lives are but our marches to the grave. [ Beaumont and Fletcher ]

Be wise to-day! 'tis madness to defer;
Next day, the fatal precedent will plead;
Thus on, till wisdom is pushed out of life.
Procrastination is the thief of time. [ Edward Young ]

I cannot tell what you and other men
Think of this life; but for my single self,
I had as lief not be as live to be
In awe of such a thing as I myself. [ William Shakespeare ]

Ah, what a sign it is of evil life,
Where death's approach is seen so terrible! [ William Shakespeare ]

We live not to ourselves, our work is life. [ Bailey ]

Curst be the gold and silver which persuade
Weak men to follow far fatiguing trade!
The lily peace outshines the silver store,
And life is dearer than the golden ore.
Yet money tempts us over the desert brown,
To every distant mart and wealthy town. [ Collins ]

That but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come. [ William Shakespeare, Macbeth ]

Do not trust nor contend,
Nor lay wagers nor lend,
And you will have peace to your life's end. [ Proverb ]

It is a great act of life to sell air well. [ Proverb ]

Life is a narrow road full of encumbrances. [ Soulary ]

One thought settles a life, an immortality. [ Bailey ]

Is there aught in sleep can charm the wise?
To lie in dead oblivion, losing half
The fleeting moments of too short a life;
Total extinction of the enlightened soul! [ James Thomson ]

Hope is love's happiness, but not its life. [ Miss L. E. Landon ]

'Tis life reveals to each his genuine worth. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Light without life is a candle in a tomb;
Life without love is a garden without bloom. [ Proverb ]

Old Age, a second child, by nature curst
With more and greater evils than the first.
Weak, sickly, full of pains: in every breath
Railing at life, and yet afraid of death. [ Churchill ]

Romances are not in books, they are in life.

Grief should be the instructor of the wise;
Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life. [ Byron ]

Life is the preface to the book of eternity. [ Loiseleur ]

You take my house, when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house; you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live. [ William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice ]

Let Observation, with extensive view,
Survey mankind from China to Peru;
Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife,
And watch the busy scenes of crowded life. [ Dr. Johnson ]

This life is but the passage of a day,
This life is but a pang and all is over;
But in the life to come which fades not away
Every love shall abide and every lover. [ Christina G. Rossetti ]

The longest life is but a parcel of moments. [ Proverb ]

Existence may be borne, and the deep root
Of life and sufferance make its firm abode
In bare and desolate bosoms: mute
The camel labors with the heaviest load.
And the wolf dies in silence: Not bestowed
In vain should such examples be; if they.
Things of ignoble or of savage mood,
Endure and shrink not, we of nobler clay
May temper it to bear - it is but for a day. [ Byron ]

Reason the hoary dotard's dull directress,
That loses all, because she hazards nothing;
Reason! the timorous pilot, that, to shun
The rocks of life, forever flies the port. [ Dr. Johnson ]

And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale. [ William Shakespeare ]

Stung by straitness of our life, made strait
On purpose to make sweet the life at large. [ Browning ]

Life's but a means unto an end; that end
Beginning, mean, and end to all things--God. [ Bailey ]

He that attends to his interior self,
That has a heart, and keeps it; has a mind
That hungers, and supplies it; and who seeks
A social, not a dissipated life,
Has business. [ Cowper ]

But can the noble mind forever brood,
The willing victim of a weary mood,
On heartless cares that squander life away,
And cloud young Genius brightening into day? [ Campbell ]

So weary with disasters tugged with fortune.
That I would set my life on any chance,
To mend, or be rid of it. [ William Shakespeare ]

The fates glide with linked hands over life. [ Richter ]

Death hath a thousand doors to let out life. [ Massinger ]

By medicine life may be prolonged, yet death
Will seize the doctor too. [ William Shakespeare ]

Indolence is stagnation, employment is life. [ Seneca ]

All life needs for life is possible to will. [ Tennyson ]

How short is human life; the very breath,
Which frames my words, accelerates my death. [ Hannah More ]

Life is probation: mortal man was made
To solve the solemn problem - right or wrong. [ John Quincy Adams ]

Whose life is a bubble, and in length a span. [ Wm. Browne ]

What makes life dreary is the want of motive. [ George Eliot ]

Woman's influence embraces the whole of life. [ Alexander Walker ]

Every moment of life is a step towards death. [ Corneille ]

Christian life consists in faith and charity. [ Luther ]

The fear of the Lord is the fountain of life. [ Bible ]

Life is half spent before we know what it is. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

By his life alone.
Gracious and sweet, the better way was shown. [ Whittier ]

Life passes through us; we do not possess it. [ Amiel ]

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And Cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness.
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God, who is our home.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
* * * * * *
At length the man perceives it die away.
And fade into the light of common day. [ Wordsworth ]

The feast of vultures, and the waste of life. [ Byron ]

Be thou assured, if words be made of breath,
And breath of life, I have no life to breathe
What thou hast said to me. [ William Shakespeare, Hamlet ]

The evening of life brings with it its lamps. [ Joubert ]

Each moment of life is one step nearer death. [ Corneille ]

Life's a reckoning we cannot make twice over. [ George Eliot ]

Look not on pleasures as they come, but go.
Defer not the least virtue; life's poor span
Make not an ell by trifling in thy woe.
If thou do ill, the joy fades, not the pains;
If well, the pain doth fade, the joy remains. [ George Herbert ]

Youth dreams a bliss on this side death.
It dreams a rest, if not more deep.
More grateful than this marble sleep;
It hears a voice within it tell:
Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well.
'Tis all perhaps which man acquires,
But 'tis not what our youth desires. [ Matthew Arnold ]

Life's a tumble-about thing of ups and downs. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]

The conscience of the dying belies their life. [ Vauvenargues ]

Duty is the inner soul, the life of education. [ Michelet ]

Gold is the strength, the sinews of the world;
The health, the soul, the beauty most divine;
A mask of gold hides all deformities;
Gold is heaven's physic, life's restorative. [ Decker ]

Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne,
In rayless majesty, now stretches forth
Her leaden sceptre over a slumbering world.
Silence, how dead! and darkness, how profound!
Nor eye, nor listening ear, an object finds;
Creation sleeps. 'Tis as the general pulse
Of life stood still, and nature made a pause;
An awful pause! prophetic of her end. [ Young ]

A woman without beauty knows but half of life. [ Mme. de Montaran ]

Tired he sleeps, and Life's poor play is over. [ Pope ]

Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more! It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. [ William Shakespeare, Macbeth ]

To know, to esteem, to love, and then to part,
Makes up life's tale to many a feeling heart. [ Coleridge ]

When all the blandishments of life are gone,
The coward sneaks to death, the brave live on. [ Dr. Sewell ]

There seems a life in hair, though it be dead. [ Leigh Hunt ]

Take away my good name, and take away my life. [ Proverb ]

Shall he who soars, inspired by loftier views.
Life's little cares and little pains refuse?
Shall he not rather feel a double share
Of mortal woe, when doubly armed to bear? [ Crabbe ]

Less base the fear of death than fear of life. [ Young ]

The happiest life consists in knowing nothing. [ Soph ]

Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day. [ Lyte ]

The man who consecrates his hours
By vigorous effort, and an honest aim.
At once he draws the sting of life and death;
He walks with nature; and her paths are peace. [ Young ]

Sculpture is more than painting. It is greater
To raise the dead to life than to create
Phantoms that seem to live. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

Death and life are in the power of the tongue. [ Bible ]

The drunkard continually assaults his own life. [ Proverb ]

Man is an organ of life, and God alone is life. [ Swedenborg ]

Never give up! or the burden may sink you,
Providence wisely has mingled the cup;
And in all trials and troubles bethink you,
The watchword of life should be, Never give up! [ M. F. Tupper ]

This narrow isthmus between two boundless seas,
The past, the future - two eternities. [ Moore ]

A religious life is a struggle, and not a hymn. [ Mme. de Stael ]

The best profession of religion is a good life. [ E. W ]

Assail'd by scandal and the tongue of strife,
His only answer was a blameless life;
And he that forged, and he that threw the dart,
Had each a brother's interest in his heart. [ Cowper ]

I live.
But live to die: and living, see no thing
To make death hateful, save an innate clinging,
A loathsome and yet all invincible
Instinct of life, which I abhor, as I
Despise myself, yet cannot overcome -
And so I live. [ Byron ]

The charm of eloquence - the skill
To wake each secret string,
And from the bosom's chords at will
Life's mournful music bring;
The overmastering strength of mind, which sways
The haughty and the free,
Whose might earth's mightiest ones obey
This charm was given to thee. [ Mrs. Embury ]

There is no Death! what seems so is transition:
This life of mortal breath
Is but a suburb of the life elysian
Whose portal we call Death. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

The seed dies into a new life, and so does man. [ George MacDonald ]

A guardian angel over his life presiding.
Doubling his pleasures, and his cares dividing. [ Samuel Rogers ]

Frame your mind to mirth and merriment.
Which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life. [ William Shakespeare ]

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows, and in miseries:
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures. [ William Shakespeare ]

Every day in thy life is a leaf in thy history. [ Arab. Proverb ]

For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight;
His can't be wrong whose life is in the right. [ Pope ]

Happiness is not the end of life; character is. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

How well he fell asleep!
Like some proud river, widening toward the sea;
Calmly and grandly, silently and deep,
Life joined eternity. [ S. T. Coleridge ]

Wealth in the gross is death, but life diffused;
As poison heals, in just proportion used;
In heaps, like ambergrise, a stink it lies,
But well dispersed, is incense to the skies. [ Pope ]

Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever;
Do noble things, not dream them, all day long:
And so make life, death and that vast forever,
One grand, sweet song. [ Charles Kingsley ]

With equal foot (rich friend), impartial Fate
Knocks at the cottage and the palace gate;
Life's span forbids thee to extend thy cares
And stretch thy hopes beyond thy destined years:
Night soon will seize, and you must quickly go
To storied ghosts and Pluto's house below. [ Horace ]

Life's enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim. [ Byron ]

From powerful causes spring the empiric's gains.
Man's love of life, his weakness, and his pains;
These first induce him the vile trash to try,
Then lend his name that other men may buy. [ Crabbe ]

Sense of pleasure we may well
Spare out of life perhaps, and not repine.
But live content, which is the calmest life;
But pain is perfect misery, the worst
Of evils, and excessive, overturns All patience. [ Milton ]

The world well tried, the sweetest thing in life
Is the unclouded welcome of a wife. [ Willis ]

Life without a friend is death with a vengeance. [ Proverb ]

Mighty Nature bounds as from her birth,
The sun is in the heavens, and life on earth;
Flowers in the valley, splendor in the beam,
Health on the gale, and freshness in the stream. [ Byron ]

What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue! [ Burke ]

Trade hardly deems the busy day begun,
Till his keen eye along the sheet has run;
The blooming daughter throws her needle by.
And reads her schoolmate's marriage with a sigh;
While the grave mother puts her glasses on.
And gives a tear to some old crony gone.
The preacher, too, his Sunday theme lays down,
To know what last new folly fills the town;
Lively or sad, life's meanest, mightiest things.
The fate of fighting cocks, or fighting kings. [ Sprague ]

What avails it that indulgent Heaven
From mortal eyes has wrapt the woes to come,
If we, ingenious to torment ourselves.
Grow pale at hideous fictions of our own?
Enjoy the present; nor with needless cares
Of what may spring from blind misfortune's womb,
Appal the surest hour that life bestows.
Serene, and master of yourself, prepare
For what may come; and leave the rest to Heaven. [ Armstrong ]

I would not live alway; I ask not to stay
Where storm after storm rises dark over the way. [ William A. Muhlenberg ]

Death cannot come
To him untimely who is fit to die;
The less of this cold world, the more of heaven;
The briefer life, the earlier immortality. [ Millman ]

And made youth younger, and taught life to live. [ Young ]

There is nothing can equal the tender hours
When life is first in bloom,
When the heart like a bee, in a wild of flowers,
Finds everywhere perfume;
When the present is all and it questions not
If those flowers shall pass away,
But pleased with its own delightful lot,
Dreams never of decay. [ Bohn ]

Nor love thy life nor hate; but what thou livest
Live well; how long or short permit to heaven. [ Milton ]

Experience is a question of instinct about life. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]

Think naught a trifle, though it small appear:
Small sands the mountain, moments make the year,
And trifles life. [ Edward Young ]

'T is the sunset of life gives us mystical lore. [ Campbell ]

Sleep, next to death, is the best thing in life. [ T. Gautier ]

Affection is the broadest basis of good in life. [ George Eliot ]

Life with all it yields of joy and woe,
And hope and fear,
Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love,
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is. [ Browning ]

Life is a combat, of which the palm is in heaven. [ Delavigne ]

It is the life in literature that acts upon life. [ Josiah Gilbert Holland (pseudonym Timothy Titcomb) ]

O, reputation! dearer far than life.
Thou precious balsam, lovely, sweet of smell.
Whose cordial drops once spilt by some rash hand,
Not all the owner's care, nor the repenting toil
Of the rude spiller, ever can collect
To its first purity and native sweetness. [ Sewell ]

Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. [ Congreve ]

These gems have life in them: their colors speak,
Say what words fail of. [ George Eliot ]

Life, unexplored, is hope's perpetual blaze
When past, one long, involved, and darksome maze:
But, that some mighty power controls the whole,
A secret intuition tells the soul. [ William Winter ]

Live thou! and of the grain and husk, the grape,
And ivy berry, choose; and still depart
From death to death thro' life and life, and find
Nearer and ever nearer Him, who wrought
Not Matter, nor the finite-infinite,
But this main miracle, that thou art thou,
With power on thine own act and on the world. [ Alfred Tennyson ]

For fate has wove the thread of life with pain,
And twins even from the birth are misery and man. [ Pope ]

In married life three is company and two is none. [ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ]

Life without a friend is death without a witness. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Seek your life's nourishment in your life's work. [ Phillips Brooks ]

The evening shows the day, and death crowns life. [ Webster ]

Suffering in human life is very widely vicarious. [ Ward Beecher ]

Death, so called, is a thing that makes men weep,
And yet a third of life is pass'd in sleep. [ Byron ]

In life you loved me not, in death you bewail me. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

It is fortune, not wisdom, that rules man's life. [ Cicero ]

That life is long which answers life's great end;
The tree that bears no fruit deserves no name;
The man of wisdom is the man of years. [ Edward Young ]

Art is indeed not the bread but the wine of life. [ Jean Paul Richter ]

Through life's dark road his sordid way he wends,
An incarnation of fat dividends. [ Sprague ]

That life is long which answers life's great end. [ Young ]

Life would be too smooth if it had no rubs in it. [ Proverb ]

What is fame? A fancied life in anothers' breath. [ Pope ]

She wept to feel her life so desolate,
And wept still more because the world had made it
So desolate: yet was the world her all;
She loathed it, but she knew it was her all. [ Dr. Walter Smith ]

Live on, brave lives, chained to the narrow round
Of Duty; live, expend yourselves, and make
The orb of Being wheel onward steadfastly
Upon its path--the Lord of Life alone
Knows to what goal of Good; work on, live on. [ Lewis Morris ]

Men know life too early, women know life too late. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

No scene of mortal life but teems with mortal woe. [ Sir Walter Scott ]

In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

The primary vocation of man is a life of activity. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

We must not look for a golden life in an iron age. [ Proverb ]

Oh! Why should the spirit of mortal be proud?
Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast flying cloud,
A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave,
Man passes from life to his rest in the grave. [ Wm. Knox ]

Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Belief in a future life is the appetite of reason. [ Landor ]

Life outweighs all things, if love lies within it. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Truth is the strong thing. Let man's life be true. [ Robert Browning ]

Life and religion are one, or neither is any thing. [ George MacDonald ]

Silence is learned by the many misfortunes of life. [ Seneca ]

Love with life is heaven; and life, unloving, hell. [ Tupper ]

A man must go forth to face life with its enmities. [ Friedrich Schiller ]

So may'st thou live, till like ripe fruit thou drop
Into thy mother's lap. [ Milton ]

Nothing in his life Became him like the leaving it. [ William Shakespeare ]

Genius! thou gift of Heaven! thou Light divine!
Amid what dangers art thou doom'd to shine!
Oft will the body's weakness check thy force,
Oft damp thy Vigour, and impede thy course;
And trembling nerves compel thee to restrain
Thy noble efforts, to contend with pain;
Or Want (sad guest!) will in thy presence come,
And breathe around her melancholy gloom:
To Life's low cares will thy proud thought confine,
And make her sufferings, her impatience, thine. [ Crabbe ]

His life is paralleled
Even with the stroke and line of his great justice;
He doth with holy abstinence subdue
That in himself which he spurs on his power
To qualify in others. [ William Shakespeare ]

He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend.
Eternity mourns that. 'Tis an ill cure
For life's worst ills to have no time to feel them. [ Sir Henry Taylor ]

The common ingredients of health and long life are:
Great temperance, open air,
Easy labor, little care. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

Poetry is always a personal interpretation of life. [ H. W. Mabie ]

Life is a crucible. We are thrown into it and tried. [ Chapin ]

And he that lives to live forever never fears dying. [ William Penn ]

Years steal
Fire from the mind, as vigour from the limb;
And life's enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim. [ Byron ]

Death, thou art infinite; it is life that is little. [ Bailey ]

To know life, a man must separate himself from life. [ Feuerbach ]

Look on the bee upon the wing among flowers;
How brave, how bright his life! then mark him hiv'd,
Cramp'd, cringing in his self-built, social cell,
Thus it is in the world-hive; most where men
Lie deep in cities as in drifts. [ Bailey ]

Love's history, as life's, is ended not by marriage. [ Bayard Taylor ]

That man lives twice that lives the first life well. [ Herrick ]

He kills a man, that saves not his life when he can. [ Proverb ]

Limiting of one's life always conduces to happiness. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]

Progress is the law of life - man is not man as yet. [ Browning ]

A gallant man rather despises death than hates life. [ Proverb ]

Revenge is sweeter than life itself. So think fools. [ Juvenal ]

I dreamt my lady came and found me dead.
(Strange dream! that gives a dead man leave to think)
And breath'd such life with kisses in my lips
That I reviv'd, and was an emperor. [ William Shakespeare ]

The finest day of life is that on which one quits it. [ Frederick the Great ]

The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself. [ Thales ]

Living requires but little life; doing requires much. [ Joubert ]

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last.
Shut thee from Heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]

The sleeping partner of life - a change of existence. [ Paul Chatfield ]

Behold, we live through all things, - famine, thirst,
Bereavement, pain; all grief and misery.
All woe and sorrow; life inflicts its worst
On soul and body, - but we cannot die.
Though we be sick, and tired, and faint, and worn, -
Lo, all things can be borne! [ Elizabeth Akers Allen ]

Knowledge, love, power, - there is the complete life. [ Amiel ]

We pass our life in deliberation, and we die upon it. [ Pasquier Quesnel ]

A handful of good life is worth a bushel of learning. [ George Herbert ]

You get in life what you have the courage to ask for. [ Oprah Winfrey ]

Our whole life is but a greater and longer childhood. [ Proverb ]

Not myself, but the truth that in life I have spoken,
Not myself, but the seed that in life I have sown.
Shall pass on to ages; all about me forgotten.
Save the truth I have spoken, the things I have done. [ Horatius Bonar ]

Repentance is heart sorrow, and a clear life ensuing. [ William Shakespeare ]

While we are reasoning concerning life, life is gone. [ Hume ]

Every step of life shows how much caution is required. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

An honorable death is better than a dishonorable life. [ Tacitus ]

Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive,
Half wishing they were dead to save the shame.
The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow;
They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats,
And flare up bodily, wings and all. [ E. B. Browning ]

The Alphabet Of Success

Attend carefully to details.
Be prompt in all things.
Consider well, then decide positively.
Dare to do right, fear to do wrong.
Endure trials patiently.
Fight life's battles bravely.
Go not into the society of the vicious.
Hold your integrity sacred.
Injure not another's reputation.
Join hands only with the virtuous.
Keep your mind free from evil thoughts.
Lie not for any consideration.
Make few special acquaintances.
Never try to appear what you are not.
Observe good manners.
Pay your debts promptly.
Question not the verity of a friend.
Respect the desires of your parents.
Sacrifice money rather than principle.
Touch not, taste not, handle not intoxicating drinks.
Use your leisure for improvement.
Venture not upon the threshold of wrong.
Watch carefully over your passions.
Xtend to everyone a kindly greeting.
Yield not to discouragement.
Zealously labor for the right, and success is certain. [ Ladies Home Journal ]

They may rail at this life - from the hour I began it,
I've found it a life full of kindness and bliss;
And until they can show me some happier planet.
More social and bright, I'll content me with this. [ Moore ]

The life of action is nobler than the life of thought. [ Dinah Muloch Craik ]

Better to work and fail than to sleep one's life away. [ J. K. Jerome ]

A death-like sleep, A gentle wafting to immortal life. [ Milton ]

The greatest business of life is to prepare for death. [ Proverb ]

We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best [ Bailey ]

Discontents are sometimes the better part of our life. [ Feltham ]

A short death is the sovereign good hap of human life. [ Pliny ]

To these tears we grant him life, and pity him besides. [ Virgil ]

Trifles make up the happiness or misery of mortal life. [ Alex. Smith ]

If a daughter you have, she's the plague of your life,
No peace shall you know though you've buried your wife!
At twenty she mocks at the duty you taught her -
Oh, what a plague is an obstinate daughter! [ Sheridan ]

The lamp of genius burns quicker than the lamp of life. [ Schiller ]

He who fears death has already lost the life be covets. [ Cato ]

Ennui shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light. [ Emerson ]

Atheism is rather in the life than in the heart of man. [ Bacon ]

O Life, an age to the miserable, a moment to the happy. [ Bacon ]

My son is my son till he have got him a wife,
But my daughter's my daughter all the days of her life. [ Proverb ]

Be good, sweet child, and let who will be clever,
Do noble things, not dream them all day long;
Thus shalt thou make life, death, and the vast forever. [ Charles Kingsley ]

An honourable death is better than an ignominious life. [ Tac ]

There is a period of life when we go back as we advance. [ Rousseau ]

I have lost my life, alas! in laboriously doing nothing. [ Grotius ]

A man has no more religion than he acts out in his life. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

Without earnestness there is nothing to be done in life. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things. [ Proverb ]

In the midst of early life, Snares of death surround us. [ Martin Luther ]

He lives the life of a hare, (i.e. always full of fear). [ Proverb ]

Every man derives his right to life and liberty from God. [ H. Bingham ]

There is nothing at all in life except what we put there. [ Mme. Swetchine ]

The greatest pleasure in life is the society of a friend. [ Mayo ]

Life is a mournful silence in which the heart ever calls. [ Lamartine ]

The highest elevation attainable by man is a heroic life. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]

On the stage man should stand a step higher than in life. [ Börne ]

There is no more beautiful life than that of the student. [ French Albrecht ]

All may have, if they dare try, a glorious life or grave. [ Herbert ]

We find nothing good in life but what makes us forget it. [ Mme. de Stael ]

Life is of little value unless it be consecrated by duty. [ Samuel Smiles ]

He rode sure indeed that never caught a fall in his life. [ Proverb ]

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink life to the lees. [ Tennyson ]

Riches are not an end of life, but an instrument of life. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

Life is an art in which too many remain only dilettantes. [ Elizabeth, Queen of Roumania ]

What is my life if I am no longer to be of use to others? [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy! [ Robert Browning ]

The life of great geniuses is nothing but a sublime storm. [ George Sand ]

Afflictions are but conductors to immortal life and glory. [ Aughey ]

The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time. [ Thomas Jefferson ]

Better die outright than be all one's life long in terror. [ Aesop ]

He that has led a wicked life is afraid of his own memory. [ Proverb ]

Home, in one form or another, is the great object of life. [ J. G. Holland ]

Every man's life is a fairy-tale written by God's fingers. [ Hans Christian Andersen ]

A true life is at once interpreter and proof of the gospel. [ Whittier ]

If 'twere not for my cat and dog, I think I could not live. [ Ebenezer Elliott ]

A handful of good life is better than a bushel of learning. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

'Twas a hand
White, delicate, dimpled, warm, languid, and bland
The hand of a woman is often, in youth.
Somewhat rough, somewhat red, somewhat graceless, in truth;
Does its beauty refine, as its pulses grow calm,
Or as sorrow has crossed the life line in the palm? [ Lord Lytton ]

The truest end of life is to know the life that never ends. [ William Penn ]

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life. [ Alexander Smith ]

Music washes away from the soul, the dust of everyday life. [ Berthold Auerbach ]

Earnest activity always reconciles us with life in the end. [ Jean Paul ]

Mark how there still has run, inwoven from above,
Through thy life's darkest woof, the golden thread of love. [ R. C. Trench ]

The life of man is a short blossoming and a long withering. [ Uhland ]

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living. [ Cicero ]

Take the sweet poetry of life away, and what remains behind? [ Wordsworth ]

Understanding is a wellspring of life unto him that hath it. [ Bible ]

Nature has given man no better thing than shortness of life. [ Pliny the Elder ]

As we advance in life, we learn the limits of our abilities. [ Froude ]

Daily life is more instructive than the most effective book. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Hope, deceitful as it is, carries us agreeably through life. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

Life, however short, is made still shorter by waste of time. [ Johnson ]

The grand question of life is, Is my name written in heaven? [ D. L. Moody ]

A nobleman who leads a degraded life is a monster in nature. [ Molière ]

There is more poverty in the human heart than misery in life. [ E. de Girardin ]

Man's fortune is usually changed at once; life is changeable. [ Plautus ]

Death hath nothing terrible in it but what life hath made so. [ Proverb ]

There is nothing half so sweet in life as love's young dream. [ Moore ]

In the short life of man, no time can be afforded to be lost. [ Proverb ]

Of him that speaks ill, consider the life more than the word. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

True blessedness consisteth in a good life and a happy death.

Grieve not that I die young.
Is it not well to pass away ere life has lost its brightness? [ Lady Flora Hastings ]

Whosoever values not his own Life, may be master of another's. [ Proverb ]

God has given to us eternal life; and this life is in His Son.

A life that is worth writing at all is worth writing minutely. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

Fair or foul the lot apportioned life on earth, we bear alike. [ Robert Browning ]

The thought of eternity consoles us for the shortness of life. [ Malesherbes ]

Doing good is the only certainly happy action of a man's life. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing.
Only a signal shewn and a distant voice in the darkness:
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another.
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

To be happy, one must ask neither the how nor the why of life.

The whole life of a philosopher is the meditation of his death. [ Cicero ]

In life, as in a promenade, woman must lean on a man above her. [ A. Karr ]

Twenty years in the life of a man is sometimes a severe lesson. [ Mme. de Stael ]

If there was no future life, our souls would not thirst for it. [ Richter ]

Gray, dear friend, is all theory, and green life's golden tree. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]

No nation can be destroyed while it possesses a good home life. [ J. G. Holland ]

The last pleasure in life is the sense of discharging our duty. [ Hazlitt ]

Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us. [ Sir T. Browne ]

Life in harmony with virtue is the only life safe from contempt. [ Edwin P. Whipple ]

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. [ William Shakespeare ]

Purity lives and derives its life solely from the Spirit of God. [ Colton ]

Love is the life of the soul. It is the harmony of the universe. [ William Ellery Channing ]

We should live each day as if it were the full term of our life. [ Source Unknown ]

Dividing the united, uniting the divided, is the life of Nature. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

By humility and the fear of the Lord are riches, honor, and life. [ Bible ]

Human life is a constant want, and ought to be a constant prayer. [ S. Osgood ]

The toil of life alone teaches us to value the blessings of life. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Death? Translated into the heavenly tongue, that word means life! [ Beecher ]

A good man has more hope in his death, than a wicked in his life. [ Proverb ]

Death but supplies the oil for the inextinguishable lamp of life. [ Coleridge ]

The highest happiness, the purest joys of life, wear out at last. [ Goethe ]

Thus ready for the way of life or death, I wait the sharpest blow. [ William Shakespeare ]

Life is a comedy to him who thinks and a tragedy to him who feels. [ Horace Walpole ]

I find that most people are made only for the common uses of life. [ John Foster ]

He is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man. [ Shakespeare ]

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Only actions give life strength; only moderation gives it a charm. [ Richter ]

At every stage of life he reaches, man finds himself but a novice. [ Chamfort ]

You live a true life if you make it your care to be what you seem. [ Horace ]

The heart is the seat of this life, and necessary to a future life. [ Egyptian ]

Spite and ill-nature are among the most expensive luxuries in life. [ Dr. Johnson ]

The lower a man descends in his love, the higher he lifts his life. [ W. R. Alger ]

Love's like the measles - all the worse when it comes late in life. [ Jerrold ]

He is ignoble that disgraces his brave ancestors by a vicious life. [ Proverb ]

Be purity of life the test, leave to the heart, to heaven the rest. [ Sprague ]

What is life except the knitting up of incoherences into coherence? [ Carlyle ]

Is any man free except the one who can pass his life as he pleases? [ Persius ]

Whoever has loved knows all that life contains of sorrow and of joy. [ George Sand ]

A taste for books, which is still the pleasure and glory of my life. [ Gibbon ]

On the brink of the waters of life and truth we are miserably dying. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Among the perils and dangers of life, solitude is none of the least. [ Proverb ]

Going out into life - that is dying. Christ is the door out of life. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

Life that is too short for the happy, is too long for the miserable. [ Proverb ]

This body is not a home, but an inn; and that only for a short time. [ Seneca ]

Half the ease of life oozes away through the leaks of unpunctuality. [ Anon ]

Such affection and unbroken faith as temper life's worst bitterness. [ Shelley ]

In the scenes of moral life the soul is at once actor and spectator. [ Degerando ]

Life often presents us with a choice of evils, rather than of goods. [ C. C. Colton ]

Respect for one's parents is the highest of the duties of civil life. [ Chinese Proverb ]

The labour of life alone teaches us to value the good things of life. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, gift of life. [ Lowell ]

Life itself is a bubble and a scepticism, and a sleep within a sleep. [ Emerson ]

Life, that ever needs forgiveness, has for its first duty to forgive. [ Edward Bulwer Lytton ]

But revenge is a blessing sweeter than life itself; so rude men feel. [ Juv ]

There occur cases in human life when it is wisdom not to be too wise. [ Friedrich Schiller ]

If I die tomorrow, my life will be somewhat the sweeter for knowledge. [ Owen Feltham ]

The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made. [ Browning ]

A fit of anger is as fatal to dignity as a dose of arsenic is to life. [ J. G. Holland ]

Truth is the root, but human sympathy is the flower of practical life. [ Chapin ]

Death is as the foreshadowing of life. We die that we may die no more. [ Hooker ]

Happiness is a bird that we pursue our life long, without catching it.

O Lord, that lends me life, lend me a heart replete with thankfulness. [ William Shakespeare ]

A man of parts may lie hid all his life, unless fortune calls him out. [ Proverb ]

Every day a little life, a blank to be inscribed with gentle thoughts. [ Rogers ]

There is nothing certain in man's life but this, that he must lose it. [ Owen Meredith ]

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. [ Thoreau ]

Great effort from great motives is the best definition of a happy life. [ William Ellery Channing ]

I have set my life upon a cast, and I will stand the hazard of the die. [ Shakespeare ]

Life resembles a cup of clear water which becomes muddy as we drink it. [ Mme. Dufresnoy ]

Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Life is a sleep, love is a dream; and you have lived if you have loved. [ Alfred de Musset ]

If man knew well what life is, he would not give it so inconsiderately. [ Mme. Roland ]

Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight. [ Alfred Tennyson ]

Marriage often unites for life two people who scarcely know each other. [ Balzac ]

Words are rather the drowsy part of poetry; imagination the life of it. [ Owen Feltham ]

Honor women! they entwine and weave heavenly roses in our earthly life. [ Schiller ]

What a force of illusion begins life with us, and attends us to the end! [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

To possess a good cognomen is a long way on the road of success in life. [ Chamfort ]

Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life. [ Bible ]

There is no shame in having led a wild life, but in not breaking it off. [ Horace ]

The old falls, the time changes, and new life blossoms out of the ruins. [ Friedrich Schiller ]

Every good writer has much idiom; it is the life and spirit of language. [ Landor ]

Age, that lessens the enjoyment of life, increases our desire of living. [ Goldsmith ]

The life of a miser is a play of which we applaud only the closing scene. [ Sanial-Dubay ]

Live virtuously, my lord, and you cannot die too soon, nor live too long. [ Lady Rachel Russell ]

The words of a friend joined with true affection, give life to the heart. [ Chilo ]

Observed duties maintain our credit, but secret duties maintain our life. [ Flavel ]

Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time. [ Victor Hugo ]

The earnestness of life is the only passport to the satisfaction of life. [ Theodore Parker ]

There should be such gladness and joy in life that all may partake of it. [ Lilian Whiting ]

Life is not the supreme good; but of all earthly ills the chief is guilt. [ Schiller ]

The duration of passion is no more in our power than the duration of life. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do. [ Carlyle ]

It will appear how impertinent that grief was which served no end of life. [ Jeremy Taylor ]

What is life but the choice of that good which contains the least of evil! [ B. R. Haydon ]

As hope and fear alternate chase Our course through life's uncertain race. [ Scott ]

To the old, long life and treasure; To the young, all health and pleasure. [ Ben Jonson ]

Our blessings are the least heeded, because the most common events of life. [ Hosea Ballou ]

Once true, still more twice true, in the life of the spirit is always true. [ Ed ]

I dislike clocks with second-hands; they cut up life into too small pieces. [ Mme. de Sevigne ]

Children increase the cares of life, but mitigate the remembrance of death. [ Proverb ]

Half the failures in life come from pulling one's horse when he is leaping. [ Thomas Hood ]

It is to live twice when we can enjoy the recollections of our former life. [ Martial ]

Yes, death - the hourly possibility of it - death is the sublimity of life. [ Mountford ]

Life is short. The sooner that a man begins to enjoy his wealth the better. [ Johnson ]

In heaven the trees of life ambrosial fruitage bear, and vines yield nectar. [ Milton ]

Love, which is such a little thing, is still the most serious thing in life. [ Lemontey ]

Pitch upon the best course of life, and custom will render it the most easy. [ Tillotson ]

The gods conceal from men the happiness of death, that they may endure life. [ Lucan ]

There is an hour wherein a man might be happy all his life could he find it. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Marriage has in it less of beauty, but more of safety, than the single life. [ Jeremy Taylor ]

Death is a certain remedy for the injuries of fortune and vexations of life. [ Proverb ]

There is no finite life except unto death; no death except unto higher life. [ Bunsen ]

Old age is the repose of life; the rest that precedes the rest that remains. [ Robert Collyer ]

The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly deceived. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

What is every year of a wise man's life but a censure or critic on the past? [ Pope ]

Can we not seek the author of life but in the obscure labyrinth of theology? [ Voltaire ]

It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken. [ Aristotle ]

The first step to a good name is a good life; and the next is good behaviour. [ Proverb ]

To become the spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale, vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man. [ William Shakespeare ]

The education of life perfects the thinking mind, but depraves the frivolous. [ Mme. de Stael ]

A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend. [ Henry D. Thoreau ]

He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Consideration for woman is the measure of a nation's progress in social life. [ Gregoire ]

Two thirds of life are spent in hesitating, and the other third in repenting. [ E. Souvestre ]

Friendship's the wine of life; but friendship new is neither strong nor pure. [ Young ]

Good deeds in this life are coals raked up in embers, to make a fire next day. [ Sir T. Overbury ]

Who knows that 'tis not life which we call death, and death our life on earth? [ Euripides ]

When a man says he has exhausted life one always knows life has exhausted him. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

It is not the disease but neglect of the remedy which generally destroys life. [ From the Latin ]

Age is a tyrant who forbids at the penalty of life all the pleasures of youth. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

Life, like the water of the seas, freshens only when it ascends toward heaven. [ Richter ]

Wealth is an imperious mistress; she requires the whole heart and life of man. [ Laboulaye ]

Habits formed in early life and early education press upon us as we grow older. [ U. S. Grant ]

One should absorb the color of life, but one should never remember its details. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]

That which renders life burdensome to us generally arises from the abuse of it. [ Rousseau ]

If one was to think constantly of death the business of life would stand still. [ Johnson ]

One must be serious about something if one wants to have any amusement in life. [ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ]

Honor women! They strew celestial roses on the pathway of our terrestrial life. [ Boiste ]

In politics, as in life, we must above all things wish only for the attainable. [ Heine ]

All the rarest hues of human life take radiance and are rainbowed out in tears. [ Massey ]

Benevolence rejuvenates the heart, exercise, the memory, and remembrance, life. [ Mme. de Lespinasse ]

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]

The fear of the Lord tendeth to life: and he that hath it shall abide satisfied. [ Bible ]

Fear is my vassal, when I frown he flies; A hundred times in life a coward dies. [ Marston ]

The bitterest satires and noblest eulogies in married life have come from poets. [ Whipple ]

Life is a mauvais quart d'heure (bad quarter hour) made up of exquisite moments. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

Wise friends are the best book of life, because they teach with voice and looks. [ Calderon ]

The enjoyments of this life are not equal to its evils, even if equal in number. [ Pliny ]

Life, like the waters of the seas, freshens only when it ascends towards heaven. [ J. Paul F. Richter ]

Better to know the darker sides of life, than to slumber in dangerous illusions. [ De Finod ]

The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happy married life. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]

Life is too short to spare an hour of it in the indulgence of this evil passion. [ Lamartine ]

Who would venture upon the journey of life, if compelled to begin it at the end? [ Mme. de Maintenon ]

Great is self-denial! Life goes all to ravels and tatters where that enters not. [ Carlyle ]

Pure felicity is reserved for the heavenly life; it grows not in an earthly soil. [ Chapin ]

The creed of the true saint is to make the best of life, and make the most of it. [ Chapin ]

The life of a solitary man will be certainly miserable, but not certainly devout. [ Johnson ]

In this theatre of man's life, it is reserved only for God and angels to look on. [ Pythagoras ]

Happy he who finds a friend; without that second self one lives but half of life. [ Chenedolle ]

Long life is denied us; therefore let us do something to show that we have lived. [ Cicero ]

True religion is a life unfolded within, not something forced on us from without. [ William Ellery Channing ]

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. [ Jesus ]

The long sleep of death closes our scars, and the short sleep of life our wounds. [ Jean Paul Richter ]

Satire lies about men of letters during their life, and eulogy after their death. [ Voltaire ]

Between the business of life and the day of death a space ought to be interposed. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Happy the man who sees a God employed in all the good and ills that checker life. [ Cowper ]

He that can read and meditate, need not think the evenings long, or life tedious. [ Proverb ]

How is it that the wretched have such an infatuated longing for life (the light)? [ Virgil ]

Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, chief nourisher in life's feast. [ William Shakespeare ]

There is no human life so poor and small as not to hold many a divine possibility. [ James Martineau ]

The sunshine of life is made up of very little beams that are bright all the time. [ Dr. John Aiken ]

If you wish to write well, study the life about you, - life in the public streets. [ Horace Mann ]

There is nothing so strong or safe, in any emergency of life, as the simple truth. [ Charles Dickens ]

Life is the triumph of our mouldering clay; death, of the spirit infinite! divine! [ Young ]

Only what we have wrought into our character during life can we take away with us. [ Humboldt ]

Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life. [ Southey ]

All our life goeth like Penelope's web, - what one hour effects the next destroys. [ St. Augustine ]

Neither is life long enough for friendship. That is a serious and majestic affair. [ Emerson ]

Digressions incontestably are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading. [ Sterne ]

Every unpunished murder takes away something from the security of every man's life. [ Danish Webster ]

Woman is the Sunday of man: not his repose only, but his joy; the salt of his life. [ Michelet ]

The gods from heaven survey the fatal strife, and mourn the miseries of human life. [ Dryden ]

Man must be prepared for every event of life, for there is nothing that is durable. [ Menander ]

Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear. [ George Eliot ]

Discretion is the perfection of reason, and a guide to us in all the duties of life. [ La Bruyère ]

Providence has given us hope and sleep as a compensation for the many cares of life. [ Francois M. A. de Voltaire ]

Life is no life without the blessing of a true, friendly, and edifying conversation. [ L'Estrange ]

In the elevated order of ideas, the life of man is glory; the life of woman is love. [ Balzac ]

There is nothing more nearly permanent in human life than a well established custom. [ Joseph Anderson ]

Without grace no book can live, and with it the poorest may have its life prolonged. [ Horace Walpole ]

A philosopher is a fool who torments himself during life, to be spoken of when dead. [ D'Alembert ]

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little enjoyed. [ Johnson ]

Of earth's goods, the best is a good wife; a bad, the bitterest curse of human life. [ Simonides ]

Friendship! mysterious cement of the soul! sweetener of life! and solder of society! [ H. Blair ]

There is no death. The thing that we call death is but another, sadder name for life. [ Stoddard ]

Real goodness does not attach itself merely to this life; it points to another world. [ Daniel Webster ]

There is no more delightful hour in life than that of an unconfessed but mutual love. [ E. Lynn Linto ]

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man. [ Carlyle ]

To husband out life's taper at the close, And keep the flames from wasting by repose. [ Goldsmith ]

Soon as man, expert from time, has found the key of life, it opes the gates of death. [ Young ]

Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason. [ Coke ]

It often falls, in course of common life, that right long time is overborne of wrong. [ Spenser ]

Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free. [ Lowell ]

Another life, if it were not better than this, would be less a promise than a threat. [ J. Petit-Senn ]

Year chases year, decay pursues decay; still drops some joy from withering life away. [ Dr. Johnson ]

One year of joy, another of comfort, the rest of content, make the married life happy. [ Proverb ]

Two ways are open for thee out of life; one conducts to the ideal, the other to death. [ Friedrich Schiller ]

Reason is not the only interpreter of life. The fountain of action is in the feelings. [ Henry T. Tuckerman ]

It is sweet to die young! It is sweet to render to God a life still full of illusions! [ A. Chenier ]

He is greedy of life who is not willing to die when the world is perishing around him. [ Seneca ]

Dost thou love life? then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of. [ Benjamin Franklin ]

The uncertainty of death is, in effect, the great support of the whole system of life. [ Johnson ]

In this theater of man's life, it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers-on. [ Pythagoras ]

What is mine, even to my life, is hers I love; but the secret of my friend is not mine! [ Sir P. Sidney ]

I take it to be a principal rule of life, not to be too much addicted to any one thing. [ Terence ]

A charmed life old goodness hath; the tares may perish, but the grain is not for death. [ Whittier ]

Machines cannot increase the possibilities of life, only the possibilities of idleness. [ John Ruskin ]

There is a time of life beyond which we cannot form a tie worth the name of friendship. [ Burns ]

Death makes no conquest of this conqueror; For now he lives in Fame, though not in life. [ William Shakespeare ]

Preceptive wisdom that has not been vivified by life has in itself no affinity for life. [ J. G. Holland ]

Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]

Economy is half the battle of life; it is not so hard to earn money as to spend it well. [ Rev. C. H. Spurgeon ]

Faith, amid the disorders of a sinful life, is like the lamp burning in an ancient tomb. [ Madame Swetchine ]

The heart is like an instrument whose strings steal nobler music from life's many frets. [ Gerald Massey ]

Earnestness in life, even when carried to an extreme, is something very noble and great. [ W. V. Humboldt ]

Let those who thoughtfully consider the brevity of life remember the length of eternity. [ Bishop Ken ]

Friendship is the shadow of the evening, which strengthens with the setting sun of life. [ La Fontaine ]

For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing, because our days upon earth are a shadow. [ Bible ]

Life is disease of which sleep relieves us; it is but a palliative: death is the remedy. [ Chamfort ]

Prayer is, the breath of a new-born soul, and there can be no Christian life without it. [ Rowland Hill ]

Life in itself is neither good nor evil, it is the scene of good or evil, as you make it. [ Montaigne ]

Genius easily hews out its figure from the block, but the sleepless chisel gives it life. [ Willmott ]

The end of life is to be like unto God; and the soul following God will be like unto Him. [ Socrates ]

A time there is when like a thricetold tale long-rifled life of sweets can yield no more. [ Young ]

To the covetous man life is a nightmare, and God lets him wrestle with it as best he may. [ Henry Ward Beechen ]

There is an hour in each man's life appointed to make his happiness, if then he seize it. [ Beaumont and Fletcher ]

My son is my son till he get a wife, my daughter is my daughter all the days of her life. [ Proverb ]

One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion. [ Henri Beyle ]

A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. [ Leonard Nimoy, Tweeted Feb. 22, 2015, five days before his death ]

Men drop so fast, ere life's mid stage we tread, Few know so many friends alive, as dead. [ Young ]

There are not good things enough in life to indemnify us for the neglect of a single duty. [ Madame Swetchine ]

How sweet, though lifeless, yet with life to lie; and without dying, oh, how sweet to die! [ John Wolcott ]

The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception necessary for both parties. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]

The sands are number'd, that make up my life; Here must I stay, and here my life must end. [ William Shakespeare ]

The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for iiis opportunity when it comes. [ Earl Of Beaconsfield ]

God is the poet; men are but the actors. The great dramas of earth were written in heaven. [ Balzac ]

I know not any season of life that is passed more agreeably than that of virtuous old age. [ Cicero ]

Life is a kind of sleep: old men sleep longest, nor begin to wake but when they are to die. [ De La Bruyere ]

Reason is as it were a light to lighten our steps and guide us through the journey of life. [ Cicero ]

O human beauty, what a dream art thou, that we should cast our life and hopes away on thee! [ Barry Cornwall ]

Happiness is an interior matter, an attitude toward life, depending on the individual soul. [ George Hodges ]

Hope, deceitful as she is, serves at least to conduct us through life by an agreeable path. [ Rochefoucauld ]

Superstition is the poesy of life, so that it does not injure the poet to be superstitious. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

There is a sweet little cherub that sits up aloft, to keep watch for the life of poor Jack. [ Dibdin ]

In adversity it is easy to despise life; he is truly brave who, can endure a wretched life. [ Martial ]

We love and live in power; it is the spirit's end. Mind must subdue; to conquer is its life. [ Bailey ]

When death gives us a long lease of life, it takes as hostages all those whom we have loved. [ Mme. Necker ]

Upon the common course of life must our thoughts and our conversation be generally employed. [ Johnson ]

Life is long enough for him who knows how to use it. Working and thinking extend its limits. [ Voltaire ]

A tight little bundle of wailing and flannel, Perplex'd with the newly found fardel of life. [ Fred. Locker ]

Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment uncertain, and judgment difficult. [ Hippocrates ]

Satire lies respecting literary men during their life, and eulogy does so after their death. [ Voltaire ]

The genius of life is friendly to the noble, and, in the dark, brings them friends from far. [ Emerson ]

Love, which is only an episode in the life of a man, is the entire history of a woman's life. [ Mme. de Staël ]

It is the privilege of genius that to it life never grows common-place, as to the rest of us. [ Lowell ]

All things are double, one against another. Good is set against evil, and life against death. [ Ecclus ]

We need the friendship of a man in great trials; of a woman in the affairs of every-day life. [ A. L. Thomas ]

Between us and hell or heaven there is nothing but life, which of all things is the frailest. [ Pascal ]

The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature. [ Ruskin ]

What a sublime doctrine it is, that goodness cherished now is eternal life already entered on! [ Channing ]

Gray hairs seem to my fancy like the light of a soft moon, silvering over the evening of life. [ Jean Paul ]

Without the way there is no going; without the truth, no knowing; without the life, no living. [ Thomas à Kempis ]

Religion is a higher and supernatural life, mystical in its roots and practical in its fruits. [ Amiel ]

I show you what you can do for yourself; the only path to a tranquil life lies through virtue. [ Juv ]

We are hampered, alas! in our course of life quite as much by what we do as by what we suffer. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

We hope to grow old, yet we dread old age; that is to say, we love life and shrink from death. [ La Bruyère ]

Time is a blooming field: nature is ever teeming with life; and all is seed, and all is fruit. [ Schiller ]

As we advance in life the circle of our pains enlarges, while that of our pleasures contracts. [ Madame Swetchine ]

Discretion is the salt, and fancy the sugar, of life; the one preserves, the other sweetens it. [ Bovee ]

Our bodies are but the anvils of pain and disease, and our minds the hives of unnumbered cares. [ Sir Walter Raleigh ]

A happy marriage is a new beginning of life, a new starting-point for happiness and usefulness. [ Dean Stanley ]

Whatever the number of a man's friends there will be times in his life when he has one too few. [ Bulwer ]

Covetousness, like jealousy, when it has once taken root, never leaves a man but with his life. [ Thomas Hughes ]

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

Life is a desert waste: to beguile the ennui of the journey across it, heaven gave us the kiss. [ S. Marichal ]

What was once to me mere matter of the fancy now has grown the vast necessity of heart and life. [ Tennyson ]

Time has been given only for us to exchange each year of our life with the remembrance of truth. [ St. Martin ]

The vanity of human life is like a river, constantly passing away, and yet constantly coming on. [ Pope ]

America has begun her career at the culminating point of life, as Adam did at the age of thirty. [ Mme. Swetchine ]

Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life. [ L. E. Landon ]

Mirth is the sweet wine of human life. It should be offered sparkling with zestful life unto God. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

He who has not forgiven an enemy has never yet tasted one of the most sublime enjoyments of life. [ Lavater ]

Great men do not play stage tricks with the doctrines of life and death; only little men do that. [ John Ruskin ]

A stray volume of real life in the daily packet of the postman. Eternal love and instant payment. [ Douglas Jerrold ]

In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]

The making of friends, who are real friends, is the best token we have of a man's success in life. [ Edward Everett Hale ]

Nature has planted passions in the heart of man for the wisest purposes both of religion and life. [ Fox ]

There are hours in life when the most trifling annoyances assume the proportions of a catastrophe. [ E. Souvestre ]

To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger; and danger has become so rare in modern life. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

Truth, such as is necessary to the regulation of life, is always found where it is honestly sought. [ Johnson ]

Woman's first duty in life is to her dressmaker. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]

Without woman the two extremities of life would be without succor, and the middle without pleasure.

By reading a man does, as it wore, antedate his life, and make himself contemporary with past ages. [ Jeremy Collier ]

Mistake not. Those pleasures are not pleasures that trouble the quiet and tranquillity of thy life. [ Jeremy Taylor ]

Resolved: Never to do any thing which I should be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life. [ JONATHAN EDWARDS ]

The most happy man is he who knows how to bring into relation the end and the beginning of his life. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

He that will make a good use of any part of his life must allow a large portion of it to recreation. [ Locke ]

Sentiment is all very well for a boutonniere, but a well-tied tie is the first serious step in life. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

My God, help me always resolutely to strive, and, through life and death, to force my way unto Thee. [ Christian Scriver ]

We should employ our passions in the service of life, not spend life in the service of our passions. [ Richard Steele ]

Power is detested, and miserable is the life of him who wishes rather to be feared than to be loved. [ Nepos ]

The last act of life is sometimes like the last number in a sum, ten times greater than all the rest. [ Collier ]

Superstition is the poesy of practical life; hence, a poet is none the worse for being superstitious. [ Goethe ]

Whatever crazy sorrow saith, no life that breathes with human breath has ever truly longed for death. [ Tennyson ]

Beauty deceives women in making them establish on an ephemeral power the pretensions of a whole life. [ Bignicourt ]

Hateful is the power and pitiable is the life of those who wish to be feared rather than to be loved. [ Nepos ]

I have been reasoning all my life, and find that all argument will vanish before one touch of Nature. [ Colman ]

The Golden Rule Of Three.

Three things to be - pure, just and honest.
Three things to govern - temper, tongue and conduct.
Three things to live - courage, affection and gentleness.
Three things to love - the wise, the virtuous and the innocent.
Three things to commend - thrift, industry and promptness.
Three things about which to think - life, death and eternity.
Three things to despise - cruelty, arrogance and ingratitude.
Three things to admire - dignity, gracefulness and intellectual power.
Three things to cherish - the true, the beautiful and the good.
Three things for which to wish - health, friends and contentment.
Three things for which to fight - honor, home and country.
Three things to attain - goodness of heart, integrity of purpose and cheerfulness of disposition.
Three things to give - alms to the needy, comfort to the sad and appreciation to the worthy.
Three things to desire - the blessing of God, an approving conscience and the fellowship of the good.
Three things for which to work - a trained mind, a skilled hand and a regulated heart.
Three things for which to hope - a haven of peace, a robe of righteousness and the crown of life. [ Beattie ]

Life may be given in many ways, and loyalty to truth be sealed as bravely in the closet as the field. [ Lowell ]

I am young; I have passed but the half of the road of life, and, already weary, I turn and look back! [ A. de Musset ]

If you will learn the seriousness of life, and its beauty also, live for your husband; make him happy. [ Fredrika Bremer ]

Oft in my way have I stood still, though but a casual passenger, so much I felt the awfulness of life. [ Wordsworth ]

To acquire a few tongues is the labor of a few years; but to be eloquent in one is the labor of life. [ Anonymous ]

That state of life is most happy where superfluities are not required and necessaries are not wanting. [ Plutarch ]

Life, like some cities, is full of blind alleys, leading nowhere; the great art is to keep out of them. [ Bovee ]

I will govern my life and my thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one, and to read the other. [ Seneca ]

The Spaniards have a saying that there is no man whom Fortune does not visit at least once in his life. [ Ik Marvel ]

If our souls be immortal, this makes amends for the frailties of life and the sufferings of this state. [ Tillotson ]

For life in general, there is but one decree: youth is a blunder, manhood a struggle, old age a regret. [ Benjamin Disraeli (Earl Beaconsfield) ]

For to cast away a virtuous friend, I call as bad as to cast away one's own life, which one loves best. [ Sophocles ]

In life, woman must wait until she is asked to love; as in a salon she waits for an invitation to dance. [ A. Karr ]

Even in social life, it is persistency which attracts confidence, more than talents and accomplishments. [ Whipple ]

I came from God, and I'm going back to God, and I won't have any gaps of death in the middle of my life. [ George MacDonald ]

Music is a prophecy of what life is to be, the rainbow of promise translated out of seeing into hearing. [ Mrs. L. M. Child ]

Knowledge, in truth, is the great sun in the firmament. Life and power are scattered with all its beams. [ Daniel Webster ]

Cheerfulness accompanies patience, which is one of the main conditions of happiness and success in life. [ Samuel Smiles ]

If the way of heaven be narrow, it is not long; and if the gate be straight, it opens into endless life. [ Bishop Beveridge ]

Life is a malady in which sleep soothes us every sixteen hours; it is a palliation; death is the remedy. [ Chamfort ]

Sentiment, in its broadest acceptation, is as essential to the true enjoyment and grace of life as mind. [ Henry T. Tuckerman ]

He who provides for this life, but takes no care for eternity, is wise for a moment, but a fool forever. [ Tillotson ]

It is important not to keep a business engagement if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life. [ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ]

Our character is but the stamp on our souls of the free choice of good or evil we have made through life. [ J. C. Geikie ]

We can't reach old age by another man's road. My habits protect my life, but they would assassinate you. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

The saddest failures in life are those that come from the not putting forth of power and will to succeed. [ Whipple ]

The cheerful live longest in life, and after it, in our regards. Cheerfulness is the offshot of goodness. [ Bovee ]

It is a brief period of life that is granted us by nature, but the memory of a well-spent life never dies. [ Cicero ]

Government and cooperation are in all things the laws of life; anarchy and competition, the laws of death. [ John Ruskin ]

The best portion of a good man's life, -- his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. [ William Wordsworth ]

When we reflect on the shortness and uncertainty of life, how despicable seem all our pursuits of happiness. [ Hume ]

The costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. Sin is the only real color-element left in modern life. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]

The great happiness of life, I find, after all, to consist in the regular discharge of some mechanical duty. [ Schiller ]

To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits. [ Amiel ]

He who climbs above the cares of this world and turns his face to his God, has found the sunny side of life. [ Spurgeon ]

It is from the level of calamities, not that of every-day life, that we learn impressive and useful lessons. [ Thackeray ]

Life is to be fortified by many friendships; to love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence. [ S. Smith ]

In experiencing the ills of nature, one despises death; in learning the evils of society, one despises life. [ Chamfort ]

The passions are the gales of life; and it is religion only that can prevent them from rising into a tempest. [ Dr. Watts ]

A taste for books is the pleasure and glory of my life; I would not exchange it for the riches of the Indies. [ E. Gibbon ]

Death is but another phase of life, which also is awful, fearful, and wonderful, reaching to heaven and hell. [ Carlyle ]

It is impossible to have a lively hope in another life, and yet be deeply immersed in the enjoyments of this. [ Atterbury ]

Be glad of life, because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars. [ Henry van Dyke ]

Persecution often does in this life what the last day will do completely - separate the wheat from the tares. [ Milner ]

Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, and in trembling for the future. [ Rivarol ]

In short, heaven is not to be looked upon only as the reward, but as the natural effect, of a religious life. [ Addison ]

But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day and the race a life. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]

There is scarcely any popular tenet more erroneous than that which holds that when time is slow, life is dull. [ Beaconsfield ]

We are haunted by an ideal life, and it is because we have within us the beginning and the possibility of it. [ Phillips Brooks ]

With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. [ Thoreau ]

The term of man's life is half wasted before he has done with his mistakes and begins to profit by his lessons. [ Jane Taylor ]

Life, as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence where it comes upon soundings. [ Holmes ]

Fame, they tell you, is air; but without air there is no life for any; without fame there is none for the best. [ Landor ]

Great results cannot be achieved at once; and we must be satisfied to advance in life as we walk, step by step. [ S. Smiles ]

Friends are as companions on a journey, who ought to aid each other to persevere in the road to a happier life. [ Pythagoras ]

He who trusts all things to chance makes a lottery of his life. He who wants content cannot find an easy chair. [ Proverb ]

Health is the soul that animates all enjoyments of life, which fade and are tasteless, if not dead, without it. [ Sir W. Temple ]

Death is dreadful to the man whose all is extinguished with his life; but not to him whose glory never can die. [ Cicero ]

The happiness of married life depends upon the power of making small sacrifices with readiness and cheerfulness. [ Selden ]

One should sympathize with the joy, the beauty, the color of life - the less said about life's sores the better. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

Actions are the first tragedies in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]

When we advance a little into life, we find that the tongue of man creates nearly all the mischief of the world. [ Paxton Hood ]

The pains we take in books or arts which treat of things remote from the necessaries of life is a busy idleness. [ Fuller ]

Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling of the fresh life within that withers and bursts the husk. [ George Macdonald ]

Every life has its actual blanks, which the ideal must fill up, or which else remain bare and profitless forever. [ Julia Ward Howe ]

Life was never a May-game for men; not play at all, but hard work, that makes the sinews sore and the heart sore. [ Carlyle ]

The sowing of wild oats is necessary in the life of a man. Libertinism is a leaven that ferments sooner or later. [ J. J. Rousseau ]

Nothing in life is more remarkable than the unnecessary anxiety which we endure and generally occasion ourselves. [ Beaconsfield ]

My own style is the result of downright hard work. This, and the experience of life, have been my chief teachers. [ Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Art Of Authorship, 1891 ]

There is no heart without remorse, no life without some misfortune, no one but what is something stained with sin. [ James Ellis ]

Have a purpose is life, and having it, throw into your work such strength of mind and muscle as God has given you. [ Carlyle ]

Life sues the young like a new acquaintance.... To us, who are declined in years, life appears like an old friend. [ Goldsmith ]

The perfection of conversational intercourse is when the breeding of high life is animated by the fervor of genius. [ Leigh Hunt ]

To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life. [ Johnson ]

Perfect life is ever in one's acts to deal with innocence, which proves itself in doing wrong to no one but itself. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Die two months ago, and not forgotten yet? Then there's hope a great man's memory may outlive his life half a year. [ William Shakespeare ]

In a sound sleep the soul goes home to recruit her strength, which could not else endure the wear and tear of life. [ Rahel ]

There is so much of the glare and grief of life connected with the stage that it fills me with most solemn thoughts. [ Henry Giles ]

Life is before you, - not earthly life alone, but life - a thread running interminably through the warp of eternity. [ J. G. Holland ]

Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life. [ Emerson ]

He whose life seems fair, if all his errors and follies were articled against him, would seem vicious and miserable. [ Jeremy Taylor ]

Long customs are not easily broken: he that attempts to change the course of his own life very often labors in vain. [ Johnson ]

In every man's memory, with the hours when life culminated are usually associated certain books which met his views. [ Emerson ]

Comedies acted on life's stage, behind the scenes, are much more spirited than those acted in sight of the audience. [ De Finod ]

We deem those happy who, from the experience of life, have learned to bear its ills, without being overcome by them. [ Juvenal ]

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life purpose. Labor is life. [ Carlyle ]

What are the aims which are at the same time duties in life? The perfecting of ourselves and the happiness of others. [ Jean Paul ]

As his wife has been given to man as his best half, so night is the half of life, and by far the better part of life. [ Goethe ]

Life was spread as a banquet for pure, noble, unperverted natures, and may be such to them, ought to be such to them. [ W. R. Greg ]

The realities of life are so repellent that few dare to look them in the face, and still fewer dare to speak of them. [ De Finod ]

Home should be an oratorio of the memory, singing to all our after life melodies and harmonies of old-remembered joy. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

These papers of the day have uses more adequate to the purposes of common life than more pompous and durable volumes. [ Dr. Johnson ]

We are either progressing or retrograding all the while; there is no such thing as remaining stationary in this life. [ James Freeman Clarke ]

If life be a pleasure, yet, since death also is sent by the hand of the same Master, neither should that displease us. [ Michael Angelo ]

Enthusiasm gives life to what is invisible, and interest to what has no immediate action on our comfort in this world. [ Mme. de Staël ]

The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]

Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. [ Jesus ]

Love is ever busy with his shuttle, is ever wearing into life's dull warp bright gorgeous flowers and scenes Arcadian. [ Longfellow ]

A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. [ Milton ]

Familiarity so dulls the edge of perception as to make us least acquainted with things forming part of our daily life. [ Julia Ward Howe ]

Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage. [ Beaconsfield ]

The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! [ Burke ]

We deem those happy who, from their experience of life, have learned to bear its ills without descanting on the burden. [ Juv ]

No idea can succeed except at the expense of sacrifices; no one ever escapes without a stain from the struggle of life. [ Renan ]

If you are about to strive for your life, take with you a stout heart and a clean conscience and trust the rest to God. [ J. Fenimore Cooper ]

To make good use of life, one should have in youth the experience of advanced years, and in old age the vigor of youth. [ Stanislaus ]

The love of reading enables a man to exchange the wearisome hours of life which come to every one for hours of delight. [ Montesquieu ]

If eminent men whose history has been written could return to life, how they would laugh at what has been said of them. [ De Finod ]

Life was intended to be so adjusted that the body should be the servant of the soul, and always subordinate to the soul. [ Josiah Gilbert Holland (pseudonym Timothy Titcomb) ]

Man ought always to have something which he prefers to life; otherwise life itself will appear to him tiresome and void. [ Seume ]

Of all the possessions of this life fame is the noblest; when the body has sunk into the dust the great name still lives. [ Schiller ]

He most lives who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best; and he whose heart beats the quickest lives the longest. [ James Martineau ]

Take heed and beware of covetousness; for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. [ Bible ]

The waves of life toss our destinies like seaweeds detached from the rock. Houses are ships which receive but passengers. [ E. Souvestre ]

To no man, whatever his station in life, or his power to serve me, have I ever paid a compliment at the expense of truth. [ Burns ]

Nothing in life is worthwhile unless you take risks. Fall forward. Every failed experiment is one step closer to success. [ Denzel Washington ]

When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

Every man is an original and solitary character. None can either understand or feel the book of his own life like himself. [ Cecil ]

The expectations of life depend upon diligence; and the mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools. [ Confucius ]

Heaven is endless longing, accompanied with an endless fruition - a longing which is blessedness, a longing which is life. [ Alexander Maclaren ]

In modern England the ordinary habits of life and modes of education produce great plainness of mind in middle-aged women. [ John Ruskin ]

In life, we shall find many men that are great, and some men that are good, but very few men that are both great and good. [ Colton ]

Criticism must never be sharpened into anatomy. The life of the imagination, as of the body, disappears when we pursue it. [ Willmott ]

He that would be a master must draw from the life as well as copy from originals, and join theory and experience together. [ Jeremy Collier ]

To continue eternally young is, as poets write, the highest bliss of life; wouldst thou attain to it, thou must die young. [ Rückert ]

Be wise today; 'tis madness to defer; Next day the fatal precedent will plead; Thus on, till wisdom is push'd out of life. [ Young ]

The instability of friendship fumishes one of the most melancholy reflections suggested by the contemplation of human life. [ R. A. Wilmott ]

Life is rather a state of embryo, - a preparation for life. A man is not completely born until he has passed through death. [ Franklin ]

The long sleep of death closes our scars, and the short sleep of life our wounds. Sleep is the half of time which heals us. [ Richter ]

The soul has, living apart from its corporeal envelope, a profound habitual meditation which prepares it for a future life. [ Hippel ]

There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love, the first fluttering of its silken wings. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

Philosophy consists not in airy schemes or idle speculations; the rule and conduct of all social life is her great province. [ Thomson ]

The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading while we are young. I have had as much of this pleasure perhaps as any one. [ Hazlitt ]

Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair or manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Life, upon the whole, is much more pleasurable than painful, otherwise we should not feel pain so impatiently when it comes. [ Leigh Hunt ]

To nil married men be this caution, which they should duly tender as their life: Neither to doat too much, nor doubt a wife. [ Massinger ]

Love's true function in the world is as the regenerator and restorer of social life, the reconciler and uniter of living men. [ Ed ]

There is no passion to be found in playing small, in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living. [ Nelson Mandela ]

Health is so necessary to all the duties as well as pleasures of life that the crime of squandering it is equal to the folly. [ Dr. Johnson ]

Etiquette is the ceremonial code of polite life, more voluminous and minute in each portion of society according to its rank. [ J. R. MacCulloch ]

Plunge boldly into the thick of life! each lives it, not to many is it known; and seize it where you will, it is interesting. [ Goethe ]

If thou marry beauty, thou bindest thyself all thy life for that which, perchance, will neither last nor please thee one year. [ Raleigh ]

Be thou the rainbow to the storms of life! the evening beam that smiles the clouds away and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray! [ Byron ]

The circle of life is cut up into segments. All lines are equal if they are drawn from the centre and touch the circumference. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

Degrees of happiness vary according to the degrees of virtue, and consequently, that life which is most virtuous is most happy. [ Norris ]

As for me, give me turtle or give me death. What is life without turtle? nothing. What is turtle without life? nothinger still. [ Artemus Ward ]

A friend gilds the scene of life with sunshine, seasons the cup of plenty, assuages fear, quickens hope, and animates pleasure. [ T. L. O'Beirne ]

If the calumniator bespatters and belies me, I will endeavor to convince him by my life and manners, but not by being like him. [ South ]

Those who attain any excellence commonly spend life in one common pursuit; for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms. [ Johnson ]

Cheerfulness ought to be the viaticum vita of their life to the old; age without cheerfulness is a Lapland winter without a sun. [ Colton ]

Let us not disdain glory too much - nothing is finer except virtue. The height of happiness would be to unite both in this life. [ Chateaubriand ]

Life is like a game of whist. I don't enjoy the game much; but I like to play my cards well, and see what will be the end of it. [ George Eliot ]

God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. [ Channing ]

They who minister to their neighbors exercise one of the normal human functions, and enter thereby into the joy of a larger life. [ George Hodges ]

Yet through all, we know this tangled skein is in the hands of One who sees the end from the beginning; He shall yet unravel all. [ Alexander Smith ]

It is a port where the storms of life never beat, and the forms that have been tossed on its chafing waves lie quiet forevermore. [ Chapin ]

Duty is the end and aim of the highest life; the truest pleasure of all is that derived from the consciousness of its fulfillment. [ Samuel Smiles ]

The reason why education is usually so poor among women of fashion is that it is not needed for the life which they elect to lead. [ Julia Ward Howe ]

Many believe the article of remission of sins, but they believe it without the condition of repentance or the fruits of holy life. [ Jeremy Taylor ]

Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

There is only one thing better than tradition, and that is the original and eternal life out of which all tradition takes its rise. [ Lowell ]

There are moments of intense joy and grief, which every one has, at least, once in his life, that illuminate his character at once. [ Lavater ]

The Soul is born old, but it grows young; that is the comedy of life. The Body is born young and grows old; that is Life's tragedy. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example, we will shine for everyone to follow. [ President Donald J. Trump, Presidential Inaugeration Speech, Jan 20, 2017 ]

He who learns the rules of wisdom, without conforming to them in his life, is like a man who labored in his fields, but did not sow. [ Saadi ]

Every period of life has its peculiar prejudices; whoever saw old age, that did not applaud the past, and condemn the present times? [ Montaigne ]

Nobody but you owes you anything. Accept it and move on. The canvas of your life is yours. It is what you make of it. Paint it well.

There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]

Social life is filled with doubts and vain aspirings; solitude, when the imagination is dethroned, is turned to weariness and ennui. [ Miss L. E. Landon ]

Without earnestness there is nothing to be done in life; yet among the people we name cultivated, little earnestness is to be found. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

One of the greatest pleasures of life is conversation, and the pleasures of conversation are enhanced by every increase of knowledge. [ Sydney Smith ]

Life, to be worthy of a rational being, must be always in progression: we must always purpose to do more or better than in time past. [ Johnson ]

Shun to seek what is hid in the Womb of the morrow, and set down as gain in life's ledger whatever time fate shall have granted thee. [ Horace ]

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence. [ Carlyle ]

No man can be brave who considers pain to be the greatest evil of life; nor temperate, who considers pleasure to be the highest good. [ Cicero ]

Birth into this life was the death of the embryo life that preceded, and the death of this will be birth into some new mode of being. [ Rev. Dr. Hedge ]

The greater portion of our lives is thrown away in fiction; it is only in maturer years that we awake to the stern realities of life. [ James Ellis ]

A noble life, crowned with heroic death, rises above and outlives the pride and pomp and glory of the mightiest empires of the earth. [ James A. Garfield ]

Without settled principle and practical virtue, life is a desert; without Christian piety, the contemplation of the grave is terrible. [ Sir William Knighton ]

Failures always overtake those who have the power to do, without the will to act, and who need that essential quality in life, energy. [ James Ellis ]

The true one of youth's love, proving a faithful helpmate in those years when the dream of life is over, and we live in its realities. [ Southey ]

Setting is preliminary to brighter rising; decay is a process of advancement; death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life. [ Chapin ]

Love is the eldest, noblest, and mightiest of the gods, and the chiefest author and giver of virtue in life and happiness after death. [ Plato ]

I would recommend the learned imitator to study closely his model in life and manners, and thence to draw his expressions to the life. [ Horace ]

It is indeed the boundary of life, beyond which we are not to pass; which the law of nature has pitched for a limit not to be exceeded. [ Montaigne ]

There are a good many real miseries in life that we cannot help smiling at, but they are the smiles that make wrinkles and not dimples. [ O. W. Holmes ]

No man can live half a life when he has genuinely learned that it is only half a life. The other half, the higher half, must haunt him. [ Philips Brooks ]

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature an impossibility. [ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ]

The life of many a man and woman is so filled with overmuch of good things that they have no time to enjoy the least of their treasures. [ Newell Dwight Hillis ]

A book may be compared to the life of your neighbor; if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early. [ Brooke ]

We make provisions for this life as if it were never to have an end, and for the other life as though it were never to have a beginning. [ Addison ]

The wretch that would wish the poetry of life and feeling to be extinct, let him forever dwell in flame, in frost, in ever-during night. [ Dante ]

If people would but provide for eternity with the same solicitude and real care as they do for this life, they could not fail of heaven. [ Tillotson ]

O gentle sleep! my welcome breath shall hail thee midst our mortal strife, who art the very thief of life, the very portraiture of death. [ Alonzo de Ledesma ]

Think how completely all the griefs of this mortal life will be compensated by one age, for instance, of the felicities beyond the grave. [ John Foster ]

Consider it to be the height of impiety to prefer life to honour, and, for the sake of merely living, to sacrifice the objects of living. [ Juv ]

If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. [ Longfellow ]

We sleep, but the loom of life never stops; and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up tomorrow. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

Laughing cheerfulness throws the light of day on all the paths of life; sorrow is more confusing and distracting than so-called giddiness. [ Jean Paul ]

To have a true idea of man or of life, one must have stood himself on the brink of suicide, or on the doorsill of insanity, at least once. [ Taine ]

Persevere in the fight, struggle on, do not let go, think magnanimously of man and life, for man is good and life is affluent and fruitful. [ Vauvenargues ]

Each thing lives according to its kind; the heart by love, the intellect by truth, the higher nature of man by intimate communion with God. [ Chapin ]

The nearest approximation to an understanding of life is to feel it - to realize it to the full - to be a profound and inscrutable mystery. [ Bovee ]

Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provisions of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction. [ Swift ]

Fix yourself upon the wealthy. In a word, take this for a golden rule through life: Never, never have a friend that is poorer than yourself. [ Douglas Jerrold ]

Philosophy is the art and law of life, and it teaches us what to do in all cases, and, like good marksmen, to hit the white at any distance. [ Seneca ]

From my father inherit I stature and the earnest conduct of life; from motherkin my cheerful disposition and pleasure in fanciful invention. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, of himself ]

Children sweeten labors, but they make misfortunes more bitter; they increase the cares of life, but they mitigate the remembrance of death. [ Bacon ]

Life is as a slate where all our sins are written: from time to time we rub the sponge of repentance over it, in order to begin to sin anew.

Repose without stagnation is the state most favorable to happiness. The great felicity of life, says Seneca, is to be without perturbations. [ Bovee ]

The weariest and most loathed worldly life that age, ache, penury, and imprisonment can lay on nature is a paradise to what we fear of death. [ William Shakespeare ]

Life often seems but a long shipwreck, of which the debris are friendship, glory, and love: the shores of our existence are strewn with them. [ Mme. de Stael ]

No greater misfortune can befall a man than to be the victim of an idea which has no hold on his life, still more which detaches him from it. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

The sweetest music is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaks from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

A friendship formed in childhood, in youth, - by happy accident at any stage of rising manhood becomes the genius that rules the rest of life. [ A. Bronson Alcott ]

Misfortunes one can endure - they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults - Ah ! there is the sting of life. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life, [ Marcus Aurelius ]

Let the current of your being set towards God, then your life will be filled and calmed by one master-passion which unites and stills the soul. [ Alexander Maclaren ]

Money and time are the heaviest burdens of life, and the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use. [ Johnson ]

One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves. [ George Eliot ]

Brethren, life is passing; youth goes, strength decays. But duty performed, work done for God - this abides forever, this alone is imperishable. [ Richard Fuller ]

If you ever discover that what you're seeing is a play within a play, just slow down, take a deep breath, and hold on for the ride of your life. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

It is to teach us early in life how to think, and to excite our infantile imagination, that prudent Nature has given to women so much chit-chat. [ La Bruyere ]

Refinement is the lifting of one's self upwards from the merely sensual; the effort of the soul to etherealize the common wants and uses of life. [ Beecher ]

Life is constantly weighing us in very sensitive scales, and telling every one of us precisely what his real weight is to the last grain of dust. [ Lowell ]

They who are most weary of life, and yet are most unwilling to die, are such who have lived to no purpose, - who have rather breathed than lived. [ Lord Clarendon ]

The business of life summons us away from useless grief, and calls us to the exercise of those virtues of which we are lamenting our deprivation. [ Dr. Johnson ]

With some life is exactly like a sleigh-drive, showy and tinkling, but affording just as little for the heart as it offers much to eyes and ears. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

The great lesson of biography is to show what man can be and do at his best. A noble life put fairly on record acts like an inspiration to others. [ Samuel Smiles ]

Life would be easy enough if we were not continually exerting ourselves to forge new chains, and invent absurd formalities which make it a burden.

Given the books of a man, it is not difficult. I think, to detect therein the personality of the man, and the station in life to which he was born. [ Stoddard ]

The casting away things profitable for the maintenance of man's life is an unthankful abuse of the fruits of God's good providence towards mankind. [ Hooker ]

Life at the greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humored and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over. [ Goldsmith ]

What man's life is not overtaken by one or more of those tornadoes that send us out of the course, and fling us on rocks to shelter as best we may? [ Thackeray ]

The grave is, I suspect, the sole commonwealth which attains that dead flat of social equality that life in its every principle so heartily abhors. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

The guardian angel of life sometimes flies so high that man cannot see it; but he always is looking down upon us, and will soon hover nearer to us. [ Richter ]

False friendship, like the ivy, decays and ruins the walls it embraces; but time friendship gives new life and animation to the object it supports. [ R. Burton ]

He only is advancing in life whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, and whose spirit is entering into living peace. [ John Ruskin ]

The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture; like a school-boy's holiday, with a task affixed to the tail of it. [ Charles Lamb ]

The life of a woman can be divided into three epochs: in the first she dreams of love, in the second she experiences it, in the third she regrets it. [ Saint-Prosper ]

Academical years ought by rights to give occupation to the whole mind. It is this time which, well or ill employed, affects a man's whole after-life. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

That state of life is alone suitable to a man in which and for which he was born, and he who is not led abroad by great objects is far happier at home. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

This span of life was lent for lofty duties, not for selfishness; not to be wiled away for aimless dreams, but to improve ourselves, and serve mankind. [ Sir Aubrey de Vere ]

Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is, of a state of progress and change. [ John Ruskin ]

In all societies it is advisable to associate if possible with the highest. In the grand theater of human life a box ticket takes you through the house. [ Colton ]

Love is life's end - an end, but never ending.... Love is life's wealth; ne'er spent, but ever spending.... Love's life's reward, rewarded in rewarding. [ Spenser ]

The happiest end of life is this: when the mind and the other senses being unimpaired, the same nature which put it together takes asunder her own work. [ Cicero ]

The poorer life or the rich one are but the larger or smaller (very little smaller) letters in which we write the apophthegms and golden sayings of life. [ Carlyle ]

This is one of the sad conditions of life, that experience is not transmissible. No man will learn from the suffering of another; he must suffer himself. [ Aughey ]

At the banquet of life, an unfortunate guest, I one day appeared; now, I am dying. Dying! and none there are to shed a tear over the tomb that awaits me! [ Gilbert ]

Old age is the night of life, as night is the old age of the day. Still, night is full of magnificence; and, for many, it is more brilliant than the day. [ Mme. Swetchine ]

The early and the latter part of human life are the best, or, at least, the most worthy of respect; the one is the age of innocence, the other of reason. [ Joubert ]

It is the first rule in oratory that a man must appear such as he would persuade others to be: and that can be accomplished only by the force of his life. [ Swift ]

There is nothing of evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that death is no evil; to know how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint. [ Montaigne ]

When a man gives proof that his heart is sound and that his life is sound, there is no divergence of opinion that should keep us from fellowship with him. [ Ward Beecher ]

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone. [ George Eliot ]

O, if we could tear aside the veil, and see but for one hour what it signifies to be a soul in the power of an endless life, what a revelation would it be! [ Horace Bushnell ]

Irresolution on the schemes of life which offer themselves to our choice, and inconstancy in pursuing them, are the greatest causes of all our unhappiness. [ Addison ]

To act the part of a true friend requires more conscientious feeling than to fill with credit and complacency any other station or capacity in social life. [ Sarah Ellis ]

The love of liberty that is not a real principle of dutiful behavior to authority is as hypocritical as the religion that is not productive of a good life. [ Bishop Butler ]

Look upon every day, O youth, as the whole of life, not merely as a section, and enjoy the present without wishing, through haste, to spring on to another. [ Jean Paul ]

We die every day; every moment deprives us of a portion of life and advances us a step toward the grave; our whole life is only a long and painful sickness. [ Massillon ]

Life must be lived on a higher plane. We must go up to a higher platform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there the whole aspect of things changes. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

What is life? A gulf of troubled waters, where the soul, like a vexed bark, is tossed upon the waves of pain and pleasure by the wavering breath of passions. [ Miss L. E. Landon ]

Home is the chief school of human virtue. Its responsibilities, joys, sorrows, smiles, tears, hopes, and solicitudes, form the chief interests of human life. [ Channing ]

My notions about life are much the same as they are about travelling; there is a good deal of amusement on the road, but, after all, one wants to be at rest. [ Southey ]

... they look up at the same night sky, they fill their heart with the same dreams, and they are infused with the breath of life by the same almighty creator. [ President Donald J. Trump, Presidential Inaugeration Speech, Jan 20, 2017 ]

Which of us that is thirty years old has not had his Pompeii? Deep under ashes lie life, youth, the careless sports, the pleasures and passions, the darling joy. [ William M. Thackeray ]

The post is the grand connecting link of all transactions, of all negotiations. Those who are absent, by its means become present; it is the consolation of life. [ Voltaire ]

There is but one misfortune for a man, when some idea lays hold of him which exerts no influence upon his active life, or still more, which withdraws him from it. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Nature glories in death more than in life. The month of departure is more beautiful than the month of coming.... Every green thing loves to die in bright colours. [ Ward Beecher ]

There must be work done by the arms, or none of us would live; and work done by the brains, or the life would not be worth having. And the same men cannot do both. [ John Ruskin ]

The head learns new things, but the heart forevermore practices old experiences. Therefore our life is but a new form of the way men have lived from the beginning. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

Depend upon it, my younger brethren, the bright, self-sacrificing enthusiasms of early manhood are among the most precious things in the whole course of human life. [ H. P. Liddon ]

We are members of one great body. Nature planted in us a mutual love, and fitted us for a social life. We must consider that we were born for the good of the whole. [ Seneca ]

Life, whether in this world or any other, is the sum of our attainment, our experience, our character. In what other world shall we be more surely than we are here? [ Chapin ]

How many of us have been attracted to reason, first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism. [ Lord Lytton ]

If the deepest and best affections which God has given us sometimes brood over the heart like doves of peace, - they sometimes suck out our life-blood like vampires. [ Mrs. Jameson ]

In youth, grief comes with a rush and overflow, but it dries up, too, like the torrent. In the winter of life it remains a miserable pool, resisting all evaporation. [ Madame Swetchine ]

Nature and art are too grand to go forth in pursuit of aims; nor is it necessary that they should, for there are relations everywhere, and relations constitute life. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Equality is the life of conversation; and he is as much out who assumes to himself any part above another, as he who considers himself below the rest of the society. [ Steele ]

Many a man lives a burden upon the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose for a life beyond life. [ Milton ]

Life is thickly sown with thorns. I know no other remedy than to pass rapidly over them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes the greater is their power to harm us. [ Voltaire ]

If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair. [ Johnson ]

Life is a sea; the soul the threatened ship; sin, Satan, and hell the dangers to be met; and Christ the great pilot, who will bring the soul into the heavenly harbor. [ J. Foster ]

A discursive student is almost certain to fall into bad company. Ten minutes with a French novel or a German rationalist have sent a reader away with a fever for life. [ Willmott ]

When I think back on all the blessings I have been given in my life, I can't think of a single one, unless you count that rattlesnake that granted me all those wishes. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

Wanting to have a friend is altogether different from wanting to be a friend. The former is a mere natural human craving, the latter is the life of Christ in the soul. [ J. R. Miller ]

Men of dissolute lives have little incentive to look forward to the hopes and glories of immortality. A due conception of these would be incompatible with such a life. [ Beecher ]

There is no man whom Fortune does not visit once in his life; but when she does not find him ready to receive her, she walks in at the door and flies out at the window. [ Cardinal Imperiali ]

Surely life, if it be not long, is tedious, since we are forced to call in the assistance of so many trifles to rid us of our time, of that time which can never return. [ Johnson ]

In human life there is a constant mutability; and it is unreasonable to expect an exemption from the common fate; life itself decays, and all things are daily changing. [ Plutarch ]

Life is arid and terrible; repose is a chimera; prudence useless; reason itself serves only to dry up the heart. There is but one virtue - the eternal sacrifice of self. [ George Sand ]

Is it not the realization of his enforced sufferings in this world that gives man the hope of a better life after death, as a just compensation for the miseries in this? [ De Finod ]

Grandeur of character lies wholly in force of soul; that is, in the force of thought, moral principle, and love; and this may be found in the humblest condition of life. [ William Ellery Channing ]

Coleridge cried, O God, how glorious it is to live! Renan asks, O God, when will it be worth while to live? In Nature we echo the poet; in the world we echo the thinker. [ Ouida ]

Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hands of the Angel of the Resurrection. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]

Among all the accomplishments of life none are so important as refinement; it is not, like beauty, a gift of Nature, and can only be acquired by cultivation and practice. [ James Ellis ]

Not to know what happened before we were born is always to remain a child; to know, and blindly to adopt that knowledge as an implicit rule of life, is never to be a man. [ Chatfield ]

Generosity during life is a very different thing from generosity in the hour of death; one proceeds from genuine liberality and benevolence, the other from pride or fear. [ Horace Mann ]

There is no employment in the world so laborious as that of making to one's self a great name; life ends before one has scarcely made the first rough draught of his work. [ Bruyere ]

Is not the mighty mind, that son of heaven! By tyrant life dethroned, imprisoned, pained? By death enlarged, ennobled, deifyed? Death but entombs the body; life the soul. [ Young ]

Reason exercises merely the function of preserving order, is, so to say, the police in the region of art. In life it is mostly a cold arithmetician summing up our follies. [ Heine ]

This is eternal life; a life of everlasting love, showing itself in everlasting good works; and whosoever lives that life, he lives the life of God, and hath eternal life. [ Charles Kingsley ]

O future ages, what will be your fate? Glory, like a shadow, has returned to heaven; Love no longer exists; life is devastated; and man, left alone, believes but in Death. [ A. de Musset ]

When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: Yes, he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them to life. [ Emerson ]

All the joys of earth will not assuage our thirst for happiness; while a single grief suffices to shroud life in a sombre veil, and smite it with nothingness at all points. [ Mme. Swetchine ]

The good pilot knows the whereabouts of every sunken rock in the harbor; how much of joy there would be in the world if all men knew the sunken rocks in the harbor of life. [ Catherine A. Atmould ]

God never pardons: the laws of His universe are irrevocable. God always pardons: sense of condemnation is but another word for penitence, and penitence is already new life. [ William Smith ]

No, a monosyllable, the easiest learned by the child, but the most difficult to practise by the man, contains within it the import of a life, the weal or woe of an eternity. [ Johnson ]

A female friend, amiable, clever, and devoted, is a possession more valuable than parks and palaces; and without such a muse, few men can succeed in life, none be contented. [ Beaconsfield ]

There are few who, either by extraordinary endowment or favour of fortune, have enjoyed the opportunity of deciding what mode of life in especial they would wish to embrace. [ Cicero ]

That youthful fervor, which is sometimes called enthusiasm, but which is a heat of imagination subsequently discovered to be inconsistent with the experience of actual life. [ Beaconsfield ]

Every year of my life I grow more convinced that it is wisest and best to fix our attention on the beautiful and good and dwell as little as possible on the dark and the base. [ Cecil ]

In human life there is a constant change of fortune; and it is unreasonable to expect an exemption from the common fate. Life itself decays, and all things are daily changing. [ Plutarch ]

Happy the man who, remote from busy life, is content, like the primitive race of mortals, to plough his paternal lands with his own oxen, freed from all borrowing and lending. [ Horace ]

Life is like one big Mardi Gras. But instead of showing your boobs, show people your brain, and if they like what they see, you'll have more beads than you know what to do with. [ Ellen DeGeneres ]

Think of living! Thy life, wert thou the pitifullest of all the sons of earth, is no idle dream, but a solemn reality. It is thy own; it is all thou hast to front eternity with. [ Carlyle ]

I long to believe in immortality. If I am destined to be happy with you here - how short is the longest life. I wish to believe in immortality - I wish to live with you forever. [ Keats ]

To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life. [ Swinburne ]

Life is a mission. Every other definition of life is false, and leads all who accept it astray. Religion, science, philosophy, all agree in this, that every existence is an aim. [ Mazzini ]

As you see in a pair of bellows, there is a forced breath without life, so in those that are puffed up with the wind of ostentation, there may be charitable words without works. [ Bishop Hall ]

Short is the life of those who possess great accomplishments, and seldom do they reach a good old age. Whatever thou lovest, pray that thou mayest not set too high a value on it. [ Martial ]

Eternal life does not depend upon our perfection; but because it does depend upon the grace of Christ and the love of the Spirit, that love shall prompt us to emulate perfection. [ William Adams ]

Words of praise, indeed, are almost as necessary to warm a child into a genial life as acts of kindness and affection. Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers. [ Bovee ]

As the shadow in early morning, is friendship with the wicked; it dwindles hour by hour; but friendship with the good increases, like the evening shadow, till the sun of life sets. [ Herder ]

When one has been tormented and fatigued by his sensitiveness, he learns that he must live from day to day, forget all that is possible, and efface his life from memory as it passes. [ Chamfort ]

National character varies as it fades under invasion or corruption; but if ever it glows again into a new life, that life must be tempered by the earth and sky of the country itself. [ John Ruskin ]

The old pool shooter has won many a game in his life. But now it was time to hang up the cue. When he did all the other cues came crashing to the floor. Sorry, he said with a smile. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained love will die at the roots. [ Hawthorne ]

The life of a woman is a long dissimulation. Candor, beauty, freshness, virginity, modesty - a woman has each of these but once. When lost, she must simulate them the rest of her life. [ Ritif de la Bretonne ]

Virginity of the heart, alas! so soon ravished! sweet dreams! expectations of happiness' and of love! fresh illusions of the morning of life! why do you not last till the end of the day! [ Gavarni ]

Who is it that does not voluntarily exchange his health, his repose, and his very life for reputation and glory? The most useless, frivolous, and false coin that passes current among us. [ Montaigne ]

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. [ Bible ]

The saddest of all failures is that of a soul, with its capabilities and possibilities, failing of life everlasting, and entering upon that night of death upon which morning never dawns. [ Robert Herrick ]

Pray for and work for fullness of life above everything; full red blood in the body; full honesty and truth in the mind; and the fullness of a grateful love for the Saviour in your heart. [ Phillips Brooks ]

Life may as properly be called an art as any other, and the great incidents in it are no more to be considered as mere accidents than the severest members of a fine statue or a noble poem. [ Fielding ]

Haste turns usually upon a matter of ten minutes too late, and may be avoided by a habit like that of Lord Nelson, to which he ascribed his success in life, of being ten minutes too early. [ Bovee ]

By reading a man does, as it were, antedate his life, and make himself contemporary with the ages past; and this way of running up beyond one's nativity is better than Plato's preexistence. [ Jeremy Collier ]

A belief in the Bible, the fruit of deep meditation, has served me as the guide of my moral and literary life. I have found it a capital safely invested, and richly productive of interest. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

My own firm conviction is that no education can make a writer. The heart must be hot behind the pen. Out of the abundance of life and its manifold experiences comes the power to touch life. [ Amelia E. Barr, The Art of Authorship, 1891 ]

Nobody can live by teaching any more than by learning; both teaching and learning are proper duties of human life, or pleasures of it, but have nothing whatever to do with the support of it. [ John Ruskin ]

If we were to live here always, with no other care than how to feed, clothe, and house ourselves, life would be a very sorry business. It is immeasurably heightened by the solemnity of death. [ Alexander Smith ]

After the sleep of death we are to gather up our forces again with the incalculable results of this life, a crown of shame or glory upon our heads, and begin again on a new level of progress. [ Hugh R. Haweis ]

It is a good and safe rule to sojourn in every place, as if you meant to spend your life there, never omitting an opportunity of doing a kindness, or speaking a true word, or making a friend. [ Ruskin ]

For from the crushed flowers of gladness on the road of life a sweet perfume is wafted over to the present hour, as marching armies often send out from heaths the fragrance of trampled plants. [ Richter ]

We protract the career of time by employment, we lengthen the duration of our lives by wise thoughts and useful actions. Life to him who wishes not to have lived in vain is thought and action. [ Zimmermann ]

Receive with a thankful hand every hour that God may have granted you, and defer not the comforts of life to another year; that in whatever place you are, you may say you have lived agreeably. [ Horace ]

Husband and wife have so many interests in common that when they have jogged through the ups and downs of life a sufficient time, the leash which at first galled often grows easy and familiar. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

We want more loving knowledge to enable us to enjoy life, and we require to cultivate the art of making the most of the common means and appliances of enjoyment which lie about us on every side. [ Samuel Smiles ]

Learn the lesson of your own pain - learn to seek God, not in any single event of past history, but in your own soul - in the constant verifications of experience, in the life of Christian love. [ Mrs. Humphry Ward ]

There never has been a nation that has not looked upon woman as the companion or the consolation of man, or as the sacred instrument of his life, and that has not honored her in those characters. [ A. de Musset ]

Far better, and more cheerfully, I could dispense with some part of the downright necessaries of life, than with certain circumstances of elegance and propriety in the daily habits of using them. [ De Quincey ]

Reflection makes men cowards. There is no object that can be put in competition with life, unless it is viewed through the medium of passion, and we are hurried away by the impulse of the moment. [ Hazlitt ]

The light of genius is sometimes so resplendent as to make a man walk through life amid glory and acclamation; but it burns very dimly and low when carried into the valley of the shadow of death. [ Mountford ]

Flowers are the bright remembrances of youth; they waft us back, with their bland, odorous breath, the joyous hours that only young life knows, ere we have learnt that this fair earth hides graves. [ Countess of Blessington ]

Sweet recreation barred, what doth ensue but moody and dull melancholy, kinsman to grim and comfortless despair; and at their heels, a huge infectious troop of pale distemperatures and foes to life. [ William Shakespeare ]

Imagining is in itself the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet paints. [ Dryden ]

As the cautious pilot steers the ship clear of the breakers, and brings the vessel safe to port, so should we steer our life-ship clear of the rocks and shoals of sin to the port of everlasting life. [ James Ellis ]

Duty is a power which rises with us in the morning, and goes to rest with us at night. It is the shadow that cleaves to us, go where we will, and which leaves us only when we leave the light of life. [ William Ewart Gladstone ]

There is so little to redeem the dry mass of follies and errors from which the materials of this life are composed that anything to love or to reverence becomes, as it were, the Sabbath for the mind. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc. [ Emerson ]

The stoical exemption which philosophy affects to give us over the pains and vexations of human life is as imaginary as the state of mystical quietism and perfection aimed at by some crazy enthusiast. [ Scott ]

God help us! it is a foolish little thing, this human life, at the best; and it is half ridiculous and half pitiful to see what importance we ascribe to it, and to its little ornaments and distinction? [ Jeffrey ]

Let us beware of losing our enthusiasms. Let us ever glory in something, and strive to retain our admiration for all that would ennoble, and our interest in all that would enrich and beautify our life. [ Phillips Brooks ]

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindnesses and small obligations, given habitually, are what win and preserve the heart, and secure comfort. [ Sir Humphry Davy ]

The day of life spent in honest and benevolent labor comes in hope to an evening calm and lovely; and though the sun declines, the shadows that he leaves behind are only to curtain the spirit unto rest. [ Henry Giles ]

Over all life broods Poesy, like the calm blue sky with its motherly, rebuking face. She is the great reformer, and where the love of her is strong and healthy, wickedness and wrong cannot long prevail. [ Lowell ]

The real science of political economy is that which teaches nations to desire and labour for the things that lead to life; and which teaches them to scorn and destroy the things that lead to destruction. [ John Ruskin ]

All life is surrounded by a great circumference of death; but to the believer in Jesus, beyond this surrounding death is a boundless sphere of life. He has only to die once to be done with death forever. [ James Hamilton ]

Nature has lent us life, as we do a sum of money; only no certain day is fixed for payment. What reason then to complain if she demands it at pleasure, since it was on this condition that we received it? [ Cicero ]

The shadows of the mind are like those of the body. In the morning of life they all lie behind us; at noon we trample them under foot; and in the evening they stretch long, broad, and deepening before us. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

What is grief? It is an obscure labyrinth into which God leads man, that he may be experienced in life, that he may remember his faults and abjure them, that he may appreciate the calm which virtue gives. [ Leopold Scheffer ]

Sow the seeds of life - humbleness, pure-heartedness, love; and in the long eternity which lies before the soul, every minutest grain will come up again with an increase of thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold. [ F. W. Robertson ]

If we can sleep without dreaming, it is well that painful dreams are avoided. If, while we sleep, we can have any pleasing dreams, it is as the French say, tant gagne, so much added to the pleasure of life. [ Franklin ]

Affability, mildness, tenderness, and a word which I would fain bring back to its original signification of virtue, - I mean good-nature, - are of daily use: they are the bread of mankind and staff of life. [ Dryden ]

He who would do some great thing in this short life, must apply himself to the work with such a concentration of his forces as to the idle spectators, who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity. [ John Foster ]

It is so possible to be glad in the gladness of other people ; and, too, it is possible so to extend one's own life into higher regions that his happiness shall not be altogether dependent upon other people. [ Lilian Whiting ]

Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it. [ Carlyle ]

The great moments of life are but moments like others. Your doom is spoken in a word or two. A single look from the eyes, a mere pressure of the hand, may decide it; or of the lips, though they cannot speak. [ Thackeray ]

Friendship is impossible between men of high social standing and men in the lower walks of life; very difficult between a young man and a young woman; between two beautiful women, it is but a poetic fiction.

Genius is intensity of life; an overflowing vitality which floods and fertilizes a continent or a hemisphere of being; which makes a nature many-sided and whole, while most men remain partial and fragmentary. [ Hamilton W. Mabie ]

The two most precious things on this side the grave are our reputation and our life. But it is to be lamented that the most contemptible whisper may deprive us of the one, and the weakest weapon of the other. [ Colton ]

God hides some ideal in every human soul. At some time in our life we feel a trembling, fearful longing to do some good thing. Life finds its noblest spring of excellence in this hidden impulse to do our best. [ Robert Collyer ]

In the whole course of our observation there is not so misrepresented and abused a personage as Death. The shortest life is long enough if it lead to a better, and the longest life is too short if it does not. [ Colton ]

There is something cordial in a fat man, everybody likes him, and he likes everybody. Food does a fat man good; it clings to him; it fructifies upon him; he swells nobly out, and fills a generous space in life. [ Henry Giles ]

Don't waste your life in doubts and fears: spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow it. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. [ Thomas Jefferson ]

What a man does with his wealth depends upon his idea of happiness. Those who draw prizes in life are apt to spend tastelessly, if not viciously; not knowing that it requires as much talent to spend as to make. [ Whipple ]

The great moments of life are but moments like the others. Your doom is spoken in a word or two. A single look from the eyes, a mere pressure of the hand, may decide it; or of the lips though they cannot speak. [ Thackeray ]

So we fall asleep in Jesus. We have played long enough at the games of life, and at last we feel the approach of death. We are tired out and we lay our heads back on the bosom of Christ, and quietly fall asleep. [ H. W. Beecher ]

Business is the salt of life, which not only gives a grateful smack to it, but dries up those crudities that would offend, preserves from putrefaction and drives off all those blowing flies that would corrupt it. [ Feltham ]

A man's longest purposes will be his best purposes. It is true, life is short and uncertain; but it is better to live on the short arc of a large circle than to describe the whole circumference of a small circle. [ Charles H. Parkhurst ]

For the short-lived bloom and contracted span of brief and wretched life is fast fleeting away! While we are drinking and calling for garlands, ointments, and women, old age steals swiftly on with noiseless step. [ Juvenal ]

In the germ, when the first trace of life begins to stir, music is the nurse of the soul; it murmurs in the ear, and the child sleeps; the tones are companions of his dreams - they are the world in which he lives. [ Bettina von Arnim ]

We adorn graves with flowers and redolent plants, just emblems of the life of man, which has been compared in the Holy Scriptures to those fading beauties whose roots, being buried in dishonor, rise again in glory. [ Evelyn ]

As flowers never put on their best clothes for Sunday, but wear their spotless raiment and exhale their odor every day, so let your righteous life, free from stain, ever give forth the fragrance of the love of God. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

It is a commonly observed fact that the enslavement of women is invariably associated with a low type of social life, and that, conversely, her elevation towards an equality with man uniformly accompanies progress. [ Herbert Spencer ]

I could write down twenty cases, wherein I wished God had done otherwise than He did; but which I now see, had I had my own will, would have led to extensive mischief. The life of a Christian is a life of paradoxes. [ Cecil ]

Rhyme is the elementary art of the poet; but at the same time he must possess that vehement passion for melody that buoys his speech into song, his footsteps into tune, and makes his life move in a melodious rhythm. [ Bentivoglio ]

It is harder to avoid censure than to gain applause; for this may be done by one great or wise action in an age. Rut to escape censure a man must pass his whole life without saying or doing one ill or foolish thing. [ Hume ]

I armed her against the censures of the world; showed her that books were sweet unreproaching companions to the miserable, and that if they could not bring us to enjoy life, they would at least teach us to endure it. [ Goldsmith ]

The more we can be raised above the petty vexations and pleasures of this world into the eternal life to come, the more shall we be prepared to enter into that eternal life whenever God shall please to call us hence. [ Dean Stanley ]

The capacity of apprehending what is high is very rare; and therefore, in common life a man does well to keep such things for himself, and only to give out so much as is needful to have some advantage against others. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

The misfortune in the state is that nobody can enjoy life in peace, but that everybody must govern, and in art, that nobody will enjoy what has been produced, but that every one wants to reproduce on his own account. [ Goethe ]

Plutarch has a fine expression, with regard to some woman of learning humility, and virtue; - that her ornaments were such as might be purchased without money, and would render any woman's life both glorious and happy. [ Sterne ]

To be always intending to live a new life, but never to find time to set about it; this is as if a man should put off eating and drinking and sleeping from one day and night to another, till he is starved and destroyed. [ Tillotson ]

All men need something to poetize and idealize their life a little; something which they value far more than for its use, and which is a symbol of their emancipation from the mere materialism and drudgery of daily life. [ Theodore Parker ]

Truth only is prolific. Error, sterile in itself, produces only by means of the portion of truth which it contains. It may have offspring, but the life which it gives, like that of the hybrid races, cannot be transmitted. [ Madame Swetchine ]

A friend whom you have been gaining during your whole life, you ought not to be displeased with in a moment. A stone is many years becoming a ruby; take care that you do not destroy it in an instant against another stone. [ Saadi ]

Diligence is the mistress of learning, without which nothing can either be spoken or done in this life with commendation, and without which it is altogether impossible to prove learned, much less excellent in any science. [ Madeleine Guerchois ]

Very few people know how to enjoy life. Some say to themselves: I do this or that, therefore I am amused: I have paid so many pieces of gold, hence I feel so much pleasure; and they wear away their lives on that grindstone. [ A. de Musset ]

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all. It sets the slave at liberty, carries the banished man home, and places all mortals on the same level, insomuch that life itself were a punishment without it. [ Seneca ]

Melancholy, or low spirits, is that hysterical passion which forces unbidden sighs and tears; it falls upon a contented life, like a drop of ink on white paper, which is not the less a stain that it carries no meaning with it. [ Sir W. Scott ]

If the assassination could trammel up the consequence, and catch, with his surcease, success; that but this blow might be the be-all and the end-all here - but here, upon this bank and shoal of time, we'd jump the life to come. [ William Shakespeare ]

Certainly the highest and dearest concerns of a temporal life are infinitely less valuable than those of an eternal; and consequently ought, without any demur at all, to be sacrificed to them, whenever they come in competition. [ South ]

And this is woman's fate: all her affections are called into life by winning flatteries, and then thrown back upon themselves to perish; and her heart, her trusting heart, filled with weak tenderness, is left to bleed or, break. [ L. E. Landon ]

It is not ease, but effort - not facility, but difficulty, that makes men. There is, perhaps, no station in life in which difficulties have not to be encountered and overcome before any decided measure of success can be achieved. [ Samuel Smiles ]

How would that excellent mystery, wedded life, irradiate the world with its blessed influences, were the generous impulses and sentiments of courtship but perpetuated in all their exuberant fullness during the sequel of marriage! [ Frederic Saunders ]

The idea you have once spoken, if even it were an idea, is no longer yours; it is gone from you, so much life and virtue is gone, and the vital circulations of yourself and your destiny and activity are henceforth deprived of it. [ Carlyle ]

The happiness of life may be greatly increased by small courtesies in which there is no parade, whose voice is too still to tease, and which manifest themselves by tender and affectionate looks, and little kind acts of attention. [ Sterne ]

Poetry, like truth, is a common flower. God has sown it over the earth like daisies, sprinkled with tears, or glowing in the sun, even as he places the crocus and the March frosts together, and beautifully mingles life and death. [ Ebenezer Elliott ]

There are strange coincidences in life: they occur so a propos that the strongest minds are impressed, and ask if that mysterious and inexorable fatality in which the ancients believed, is not really the law that governs the world. [ Alfred Mercier ]

He may justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to recur habitually to the mind. [ Johnson ]

Try for yourselves what you can read in half-an-hour, ... and consider what treasures you might have laid by at the end of the year; and what happiness, fortitude and wisdom they would have given you during all the days of your life. [ John Morley ]

Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach to correctness. [ J. S. Mill ]

In the life of a nation ideas are not the only things of value. Sentiment also is of great value; and the way to foster sentiment in a people, and to develop it in the young, is to have a well-recorded past, and to be familiar with it. [ Joseph Anderson ]

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million, count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. [ Henry D. Thoreau ]

Another underlying condition of contentment is not to take one's self, or even the affairs of life, too seriously. In looking back, every one can see how much unhappiness has been derived from an over-weening sense of one's importance. [ Henry D. Chapin ]

Like a morning dream, life becomes more and more bright the longer we live, and the reason of everything appears more clear. What has puzzled us before seems less mysterious, and the crooked path looks straighter as we approach the end. [ Richter ]

As he that lives longest lives but a little while, every man may be certain that he has no time to waste. The duties of life are commensurate to its duration; and every day brings its task, which, if neglected, is doubled on the morrow. [ Dr. Johnson ]

There are many arts among men, the knowledge of which is acquired bit by bit by experience. For it is experience that causes our life to move forward by the skill we acquire, while want of experience subjects us to the effects of chance. [ Plato ]

I pick up favourite quotations and store them in my mind as ready armour, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence. Of these there is a very favourite one from Thomson: Attach thee firmly to the virtuous deeds
And offices of life; to life itself,
With all its vain and transient joys, sit loose. [ Burns ]

By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to appear without. [ Adam Smith ]

The pleasantest part of a man's life is generally that which passes in courtship, provided his passion be sincere, and the party beloved kind with discretion. Love, desire, hope, all the pleasing emotions of the soul, rise in the pursuit. [ Addison ]

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life; although the spirit be not master of that which it creates through music, yet it is blessed in this creation, which, like every creation of art, is mightier than the artist. [ Beethoven ]

O Truth! pure and sacred virgin, when wilt thou be worthily revered? O Goddess who instructs us, why didst thou put thy palace in a well? When will our learned writers, alike free from bitterness and from flattery, faithfully teach us life? [ Voltaire ]

Abridge your hopes in proportion to the shortness of the span of human life; for while we converse, the hours, as if envious of our pleasure, fly away. Enjoy, therefore, the present time, and trust not too much to what tomorrow may produce. [ Horace ]

If these little sparks of holy fire which I have thus heaped up together do not give life to your prepared and already enkindled spirit, yet they will sometimes help to entertain a thought, to actuate a passion, to employ and hallow a fancy. [ Jeremy Taylor ]

There is nothing like youth. The middle aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Every one is born a king, and most people die in exile, like most kings. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

It is not easy to surround life with any circumstances in which youth will not be delightful; and I am afraid that, whether married or unmarried, we shall find the vesture of terrestrial existence more heavy and cumbrous the longer it is worn. [ Steele ]

Secrets from other people's wives are a necessary luxury in modern life, but no man should have a secret from his own wife. She invariably finds out. Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]

Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life, of the times, of the manners, of the merriment, of the dress, the pleasure, the laughter, the ridicules of society. The old times live again. Can the heaviest historian do more for me? [ Thackeray ]

Without woman, man would be rough, rude, solitary, and would ignore all the graces which are but the smiles of love. Woman weaves about him the flowers of life, as the vines of the forest decorate the trunk of the oak with their fragrant garlands. [ Chateaubriand ]

No unity can last, in married life, unless the fellowship of hearts is accompanied by the fellowship of minds. As a woman loses the charms of her youth, her husband must perceive that her mind is developing, and love must be perpetuated by esteem. [ Dupanloup ]

Superstition is related to this life, religion to the next; superstition allies itself to fatality, religion to virtue; it is by the vitality of earthly desires we become superstitious, and by the sacrifice of these desires that we become religious. [ Mme. de Staël ]

Welfare requires one or two companions of intelligence, probity, and grace, to wear out life with, - persons with whom we can speak a few reasonable words every day, by whom we can measure ourselves, and who shall hold us fast to good sense and virtue. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

It seems as if all classes and conditions in life might learn to get more happiness out of their work. To accomplish this, more sentiment and less worry must be put into our efforts, which must also be viewed in their larger relations and possibilities. [ Henry D. Chapin ]

Why does the evening, does the night, put warmer love in our hearts? Is it the nightly pressure of helplessness? or is it the exalting separation from the turmoils of life - that veiling of the world in which for the soul nothing then remains but souls? [ Richter ]

We proudly say we are equal. In the largest sense before God we are, but in every other sense we are not. No two persons have the same gifts, the same tastes, the same habits. One must complement the other. It is a mutual life we lead in a mutual world. [ Caroline Hazard ]

The golden hour of invention must terminate like other hours; and when the man of genius returns to the cares, the duties, the vexations, and the amusements of life, his companions behold him as one of themselves, - the creature of habits and infirmities. [ Isaac Disraeli ]

A few years hence and he will be beneath the sod; but those cliffs will stand, as now, facing the ocean, incessantly lashed by its waves, yet unshaken, immovable; and other eyes will gaze on them for their brief day of life, and then they, too, will close. [ H. P. Liddon ]

There are certain events which to each man's life are as comets to the earth, seemingly strange and erratic portents; distinct from the ordinary lights which guide our course and mark our seasons, yet true to their own laws, potent in their own influences. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

The grave is a sacred workshop of nature! a chamber for the figure of the body; death and life dwell here together as man and wife. They are one body, they are in union; God has joined them together, and what God hath joined together let no man put asunder. [ Hippel ]

When we think of the tenderness, of the solicitude, of the protection, of the grace, of the charm, of the happiness, or at least of the consolation that woman brings to the life of man, one is tempted to speak to her only with uncovered head, and bowed knee. [ L. Desnoyers ]

Christ and His cross are not separable in this life, howbeit Christ and His cross part at heaven's door, for there is no house-room for crosses in heaven. One tear, one sigh, one sad heart, one fear, one loss, one thought of trouble cannot find lodging there. [ Rutherford ]

How many who, after having achieved fame and fortune, recall with regret the time when - ascending the hills of life in the sun of their twentieth year - they had nothing but courage, which is the virtue of the young, and hope, which is the treasure of the poor! [ H. Murger ]

If life has not made you by God's grace, through faith, holy - think you, will death without faith do it? The cold waters of that narrow stream are no purifying bath in which you may wash and be clean. No! no! as you go down into them, you will come up from them. [ Alexander Maclaren ]

As we look up into these glorious culminations, how grand life becomes! To be forever with the Lord, and forever changing into His likeness, and, still more, forever deepening in the companionship of His thought and bliss, from glory to glory - could we desire more? [ Bishop R. S. Foster ]

Unconsciousness belongs to pure unmixed life; consciousness, to a diseased mixture and conflict of life and death; unconsciousness is the sign of creation; consciousness, at best, that of manufacture. So deep, in this existence of ours, is the significance of mystery. [ Carlyle ]

As the rose-tree is composed of the sweetest flowers, and the sharpest thorns; as the heavens are sometimes overcast — alternately tempestuous and serene — so is the life of man intermingled with hopes and fears, with joys and sorrows, with pleasures and with pains. [ Burton ]

There is nothing like fun, is there? I haven't any myself, but I do like it in others. O, we need it! We need all the counterweights we can muster to balance the sad relations of life. God has made many sunny spots in the heart; why should we exclude the light from them? [ Haliburton ]

There is a false gravity that is a very ill symptom: and it may be said, that as rivers, which run very slowly, have always the most mud at the bottom: so a solid stiffness in the constant course of a man's life, is a sign of a thick bed of mud at the bottom of his brain. [ Saville ]

It would not be more unreasonable to transplant a favorite flower out of black earth into gold dust than it is for a person to let money-getting harden his heart into contempt, or into impatience, of the little attentions, the merriments and the caresses of domestic life. [ Mountford ]

He that can keep handsomely within rules, and support the carriage of a companion to his mistress, is much more likely to prevail than he who lets her see the whole relish of his life depends upon her. If possible, therefore, divert your mistress rather than sigh for her. [ Steele ]

Just to be good, to keep life pure from degrading elements, to make it constantly helpful in little ways to those who are touched by it, to keep one's spirit always sweet and avoid all manner of petty anger and irritability, - that is an ideal as noble as it is difficult. [ Edward Howard Griggs ]

Life has no smooth road for any of us; and in the bracing atmosphere of a high aim, the very roughness only stimulates the climber to steadier and steadier steps, till that legend of the rough places fulfills itself at last, per aspera ad astra, over steep ways to the stars. [ Bishop W. C. Doane ]

Bright and illustrious illusions! Who can blame, who laugh at the boy, who not admire and commend him, for that desire of a fame outlasting the Pyramids by which he insensibly learns to live in a life beyond the present, and nourish dreams of a good unattainable by the senses? [ Bulwer-Lytton ]

The birds of the air die to sustain thee; the beasts of the field die to nourish thee; the fishes of the sea die to feed thee. Our stomachs are their common sepulchre. Good God! with how many deaths are our poor lives patched up! how full of death is the life of momentary man! [ Quarles ]

Life has no smooth road for any of us; and in the bracing atmosphere of a high aim, the very roughness only stimulates the climber to steadier and steadier steps, till that legend of the rough places fulfills itself at last, "per aspera ad astra", over steep ways to the stars. [ Bishop W. C. Doane ]

Every man must think in his own way; for on his own pathway he always finds a truth, or a measure of truth, which is helpful to him in his life; only he must not follow his own bent without restraint; he must control himself; to follow mere naked instinct does not beseem a man. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

From the year 1789 to the year 1860 no nation has ever known a more unbounded prosperity, a fuller space of happiness. In the short space of seventy years, within the turn of a single life, the nation, poor, weak and despised, raised itself to the pinnacle of power and of glory. [ Robert C. Winthrop ]

Civilized society feels that manners are of more importance than morals, and the highest respectability is of less value than the possession of a good chef. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for cold entrees, nor an irreproachable private life for a bad dinner and poor wines. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]

People who love once in their lives are really shallow people. What they call their loyalty and their fidelity is either the lethargy of custom or lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what constancy is to the intellectual life, simply a confession of failure. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]

Young women, the glory of your life is to do something, and to be something. You may have formed the idea that ease and personal enjoyment are the ends of your life. This is a terrible mistake. Development, in the broadest sense and in the highest direction, is the end of your life. [ J. G. Holland, Pseudonym: Timothy Titcomb ]

Every man ought to be in love a few times in his life, and to have a smart attack of the fever. You are better for it when it is over: the better for your misfortune, if you endure it with a manly heart; how much the better for success, if you win it and a good wife into the bargain! [ Thackeray ]

In the use of the tongue God hath distinguished us from beasts, and by the well or ill using it we are distinguished from one another; and therefore, though silence be innocent as death, harmless as a rose's breath to a distant passenger, yet it is rather the state of death than life. [ Jeremy Taylor ]

Pride counterbalances all our miseries, for it either hides them, or, if it discloses them, boasts of that disclosure. Pride has such a thorough possession of us, even in the midst of our miseries and faults, that we are prepared to sacrifice life with joy, if it may but be talked of. [ Pascal ]

My May of life is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf; and that which should accompany old age, as honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have; but in their stead, curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honor, breath which the poor heart would fain deny and dare not. [ William Shakespeare ]

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified. He that labors in any great or laudable undertaking has his fatigues first supported by hope and afterwards rewarded by joy. [ Dr. Johnson ]

Liberty is one of the choicest gifts that heaven hath bestowed upon man, and exceeds in value all the treasures which the earth contains within its bosom, or the sea covers. Liberty, as well as honor, man ought to preserve at the hazard of his life, for without it life is insupportable. [ Cervantes ]

If I were to pray for a taste which should stand me in stead under every variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me through life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss, and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading. [ Sir John Herschel ]

We have often thought it strange that moralists should have written and spoken of the mutability of human life as if it were a thing to be dreaded and mourned over; to our mind, mutability is the soul of poetry, and the source of nearly all the most delightful and sacred pleasures of life. [ Stubbs ]

To continue love in marriage is a science. It requires so little to kill those sweet emotions, those precious illusions, which form the charm of life; and it is so difficult to maintain a man at the height on which an exalted passion has placed him, especially when that man is one's husband! [ Mme. Reybaud ]

When you take the wires of the cage apart, you do not hurt the bird, but help it. You let it out of its prison. How do you know that death does not help me when it takes the wires of my cage down? - that it does not release me, and put me into some better place, and better condition of life? [ Bishop Randolph S. Foster ]

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. [ Thoreau ]

The difference between a parable and an apologue is that the former, being drawn from human life, requires probability in the narration, whereas the apologue, being taken from inanimate things or the inferior animals, is not confined strictly to probability. The fables of Aesop are apologues. [ Fleming ]

Love to make others happy; yes, surely at all times, so far as you can. But at bottom that is not the aim of any life. Do not think that your life means a mere searching in gutters for fallen creatures to wipe and set up.... In our life there is no meaning at all except the work we have done. [ Carlyle ]

When Anaxagoras was told of the death of his son, he only said, I knew he was mortal. So we in all casualties of life should say I knew my riches were uncertain, that my friend was but a man. Such considerations would soon pacify us, because all our troubles proceed from their being unexpected. [ Plutarch ]

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature, if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you, know that the morning and spring of your life are past. [ Thoreau ]

The education which has, however, made me a writer has been a living one. I have not only read much, I have seen much, and enjoyed much, and, above all, I have sorrowed much. God has put into my hands every cup of life, sweet and bitter, and the bitter has often become sweet, and the sweet bitter. [ Amelia E. Barr, The Art of Authorship, 1891 ]

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life. [ R. L, Stevenson ]

Talent is something, but tact is everything. It is not a seventh sense, but is the life of all the five. It is the open eye, the quick ear, the judging taste, the keen smell, and the lively touch; it is the interpreter of all riddles, the surmounter of all difficulties, the remover of all obstacles. [ W. P. Scargill ]

It may be too much to expect that nations should be governed in their relations towards each other by the precepts of Christian morality, but surely it is not too much to ask that they should conform to the code of courtesy and good breeding recognized among gentlemen in the intercourse of social life. [ Geo. S. Hillard ]

A literary career is a more thorny path than that which leads to fortune. If you have the misfortune not to rise above mediocrity, you feel mortified for life; and if you are successful, a host of enemies spring up against you. Thus you find yourself on the brink of an abyss between contempt and hatred. [ Voltaire ]

Praise consists in the love of God, in wonder at the goodness of God, in recognition of the gifts of God, in seeing God in all things He gives us, ay, and even in the things that He refuses to us; so as to see our whole life in the light of God; and seeing this, to bless Him, adore Him, and glorify Him. [ Manning ]

A woman's life can be divided thus: the age when she dances but does not dare to waltz - it is the spring; the age when she dances and dares to waltz - it is summer; the age when she dances but prefers to waltz - it is autumn; finally, when she dances no longer - it is winter, that rigorous winter of life. [ Mme. de Girardin ]

Did you ever hear of a man who had striven all his life faithfully and singly towards an object, and in no measure obtained it? If a man constantly aspires, is he not elevated? Did ever a man try heroism, magnanimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advantage in them, - that it was a vain endeavor? [ Thoreau ]

Remember always in painting, as in eloquence, the greater your strength the quieter will be your manner and the fewer your words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of life, the secret of high success will be found, not in a fretful and various excellence, but in a quiet singleness of justly chosen aim. [ Ruskin ]

The business of the biographer is often to pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and display the minute details of daily life, where exterior appendages are cast aside, and men excel each other only by prudence and virtue. [ Dr. Johnson ]

We may be sure that cheerful beliefs about the unseen world, framed in full harmony with the beauty of the visible universe, and with the sweetness of domestic affections and joys, and held in company with kindred and friends, will illuminate the dark places on the pathway of earthly life and brighten all the road. [ Charles W. Eliot ]

There are certain times in our life when we find ourselves in circumstances, that not only press upon us, but seem to weigh us down altogether. They give us, however, not only the opportunity, but they impose on us the duty of elevating ourselves, and thereby fulfilling the purpose of the Divine Being in our creation. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Among all the accomplishments of youth there is none preferable to a decent and agreeable behavior among men, a modest freedom of speech, a soft and elegant manner of address, a graceful and lovely deportment, a cheerful gravity and good-humor, with a mind appearing ever serene under the ruffling accidents of human life. [ Watts ]

After the fever of life - after wearinesses, sicknesses, fightings and despondings, languor and fretfulness, struggling and failing, struggling and succeeding - after all the changes and chances of this troubled and unhealthy state, at length comes death - at length the white throne of God - at length the beatific vision. [ Newman ]

Wise, cultivated, genial conversation is the best flower of civilisation, and the best result which life has to offer us--a cup for gods, which has no repentance. Conversation is our account of ourselves. All we have, all we can, all we know is brought into play, and as the reproduction, in finer form, of all our havings. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

What if a man save my life with a draught that was prepared to poison me? The providence of the issue does not at all discharge the obliquity of the intent. And the same reason holds good even in religion itself. It is not the incense, or the offering that is acceptable to God, but the purity and devotion of the worshipper. [ Seneca ]

Anxiety is the poison of human life. It is the parent of many sins, and of more miseries. In a world where everything is doubtful, where you may be disappointed, and be blessed in disappointment, what means this restless stir and commotion of mind? Can your solicitude alter the cause or unravel the intricacy of human events? [ Blair ]

Might I give counsel to any young hearer, I would say to him, try to frequent the company of your betters. In books and life is the most wholesome society; learn to admire rightly; the great pleasure of life is that. Note what the great men admire, - they admired great things; narrow spirits admire basely, and worship meanly. [ Thackeray ]

At almost every step in life we meet with young men from whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, after careful inquiry, we never hear another word. Like certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely on their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect after washing day. [ Hawthorne ]

It unfortunately happens that no man believes that he is likely to die soon. So every one is much disposed to defer the consideration of what ought to be done on the supposition of such an emergency; and while nothing is so uncertain as human life, so nothing is so certain as our assurance that we shall survive most of our neighbors. [ Aughey ]

To be a finite being is no crime, and to be the Infinite is not to be a creditor. As man was not consulted he does not find himself a party in a bargain, but a child in the household of love. Reconciliation, therefore, is not the consequence of paying a debt, or procuring atonement for an injury, but an organic process of the human life. [ John Weiss ]

Never teach false modesty. How exquisitely absurd to teach a girl that beauty is of no value, dress of no use! Beauty is of value; her whole prospects and happiness in life may often depend upon a new gown or a becoming bonnet; if she has five grains of commonsense she will find this out. The great thing is to teach her their proper value. [ Sydney Smith ]

As it often happens that the best men are but little known, and consequently cannot extend the usefulness of their examples a great way, the biographer is of great utility, as, by communicating such valuable patterns to the world, he may perhaps do a more extensive service to mankind than the person whose life originally afforded the pattern. [ Fielding ]

The maxim of Cleobulus, Mediocrity is best, has been long considered a universal principle, extending through the whole compass of life and nature. The experience of every age seems to have given it new confirmation, and to show that nothing, however specious or alluring, is pursued with propriety or enjoyed with safety beyond certain limits. [ Dr. Johnson ]

Humor implies a sure conception of the beautiful, the majestic, and the true, by whose light it surveys and shapes their opposites. It is an humane influence, softening with mirth the ragged inequalities of existence, prompting tolerant views of life, bridging over the spaces which separate the lofty from the lowly, the great from the humble. [ E. P. Whipple ]

The study of art possesses this great and peculiar charm, that it is absolutely unconnected with the struggles and contests of ordinary life. By private interests, by political questions, men are deeply divided, and set at variance; but beyond and above all such party strifes, they are attracted and united by a taste for the beautiful in art. [ Guizot ]

A wound in the friendship of young persons, as in the bark of young trees, may be so grown over as to leave no scar; the case is very different in regard to old persons and old timber. The reason of this may be accountable from the decline of the social passions, and the prevalence of spleen, suspicion, and rancor toward the latter part of life. [ Shenstone ]

It is the close observation of little things which is the secret of success in business, in art. in science, and in every pursuit in life. Human knowledge is but an accumulation of small facts made by successive generations of men - the little bits of knowledge and experience carefully treasured up by them growing at length into a mighty pyramid. [ Samuel Smiles ]

The only thing that has been taught successfully to women is to wear becomingly the fig-leaf they received from their first mother. Everything that is said and repeated for the first eighteen or twenty years of a woman's life is reduced to this: My daughter, take care of your fig-leaf; your fig-leaf becomes you; your fig-leaf does not become you. [ Diderot ]

Founders and senators of states and cities, lawgivers, extirpers of tyrants, fathers of the people, and other eminent persons in civil government, were honored but with titles of worthies or demigods; whereas such as were inventors and authors of new arts, endowments, and commodities towards man's life, were ever consecrated among the gods themselves. [ Bacon ]

The joy resulting from the diffusion of blessings to all around us is the purest and sublimest that can ever enter the human mind, and can be conceived only by those who have experienced it. Next to the consolations of divine grace, it is the most sovereign balm to the miseries of life, both in him who is the object of it, and in him who exercises it. [ Bishop Porteus ]

The study of the mathematics cultivates the reason; that of the languages at the same time the reason and the taste. The former gives power to the mind; the latter, both power and flexibility. The former, by itself, would prepare us for a state of certainties, which nowhere exists; the latter, for a state of probabilities, which is that of common life. [ T. Godfrey ]

Facts are to the mind the same thing as food to the body. On the due digestion of facts depends the strength and wisdom of the one, just as vigour and health depend on the other. The wisest in council, the ablest in debate, and the most agreeable in the commerce of life, is that man who has assimilated to his understanding the greatest number of facts. [ Burke ]

The contemplation of night should lead to elevating rather than to depressing ideas. Who can fix his mind on transitory and earthly things, in presence of those glittering myriads of worlds; and who can dread death or solitude in the midst of this brilliant, animated universe, composed of countless suns and worlds, all full of light and life and motion? [ Richter ]

Mirth is God's medicine. Everybody ought to bathe in it. Grim care, moroseness, anxiety, - all this rust of life, ought to be scoured off by the oil of mirth. It is better than emery. Every man ought to rub himself with it. A man without mirth is like a wagon without springs, in which one is caused disagreeably to jolt by every pebble over which it runs. [ Beecher ]

The dramatist, like the poet, is born, not made. There must be inspiration back of all true and permanent art, dramatic or otherwise, and art is universal: there is nothing national about it. Its field is humanity, and it takes in all the world; nor does anything else afford the refuge that is provided by it from all troubles and all the vicissitudes of life. [ William Winter ]

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change - that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out. [ Robert Louis Stevenson ]

There are three wicks you know to the lamp of a man's life: brain, blood, and breath. Press the brain a little, its light goes out, followed by both the others. Stop the heart a minute, and out go all three of the wicks. Choke the air out of the lungs, and presently the fluid ceases to supply the other centers of flame, and all is soon stagnation, cold, and darkness. [ O. W. Holmes ]

Men that look no further than their outsides, think health an appurtenance unto life, and quarrel with their constitutions for being sick; but I that have examined the parts of man, and know upon what tender filaments that fabric hangs, do wonder that we are not always so; and considering the thousand doors that lead to death, do thank my God that we can die but once. [ Sir Thomas Browns ]

When the first time of love is over, there comes a something better still; then comes that other love; that faithful friendship which never changes, and which will accompany you with its calm light through the whole of life; it is only needful to place yourself so that it may come, and then it comes of itself; and then everything turns and changes itself for the best. [ Frederika Bremer ]

It was the saying of a great man, that if we could trace our descents, we should find all slaves to come from princes, and all princes from slaves; and fortune has turned all things topsy-turvy in a long series of revolutions; beside, for a man to spend his life in pursuit of a title, that serves only when he dies to furnish out an epitaph, is below a wise man's business. [ Seneca ]

When I consider what some books have done for the world, and what they are doing, how they keep up our hope, awaken new courage and faith, soothe pain, give an ideal life to those whose hours are cold and hard, bind together distant ages and foreign lands, create new worlds of beauty, bring down truth from heaven; I give eternal blessings for this gift, and thank God for books. [ James Freeman Clarke ]

The mother begins her process of training with the infant in her arms. It is she who directs, so to speak, its first mental and spiritual pulsations; she conducts it along the impressible years of childhood and youth, and hopes to deliver it to the rough contests and tumultuous scenes of life, armed by those good principles which her child has received from maternal care and love. [ D. Webster ]

A beautiful eye makes silence eloquent, a kind eye makes contradiction an assent, an enraged eye makes beauty deformed. This little member gives life to every other part about us; and I believe the story of Argus implies no more than that the eye is in every part; that is to say, every other part would be mutilated were not its force represented more by the eye than even by itself. [ Joseph Addison ]

We frequently fall into error and folly, not because the true principles of action are not known, but because for a time they are not remembered; he may, therefore, justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences that may early be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to occur habitually to the mind. [ Johnson ]

Surely no man can reflect, without wonder, upon the vicissitudes of human life arising from causes in the highest degree accidental and trifling. If you trace the necessary concatenation of human events a very little way back, you may perhaps discover that a person's very going in or out of a door has been the means of coloring with misery or happiness the remaining current of his life. [ Lord Greville ]

Some men of a secluded and studious life have sent forth from their closet or their cloister rays of intellectual light that have agitated courts and revolutionized kingdoms; like the moon which, though far removed from the ocean, and shining upon it with a serene and sober light, is the chief cause of all those ebbings and flowings which incessantly disturb that restless world of waters. [ Colton ]

Never! never has one forgotten his pure, right educated mother. On the blue mountains of our dim childhood, toward which we ever turn and look, stand the mothers, who marked out to us from thence our life; the most blessed age must be forgotten ere we can forget the warmest heart. You wish, O women! to be ardently loved, and forever, even till death! Be, then, the mothers of your children. [ Richter ]

A pair of bright eyes with a dozen glances suffice to subdue a man; to enslave him, and inflame; to make him even forget; they dazzle him so that the past becomes straightway dim to him; and he so prizes them that he would give all his life to possess them. What is the fond love of dearest friends compared to his treasure? Is memory as strong as expectancy, fruition as hunger, gratitude as desire? [ Thackeray ]

Music may be classed into natural, social, sacred, and martial; it is the twin sister of poetry, and like it has the power to sway the feelings and command the mind; in devotion it breathes the pure spirit of inspiration and love; in martial scenes it rouses the soul to fearless deeds of daring and valor, while it alleviates the cares, and enhances the innocent and cheerful enjoyments of domestic life. [ Acton ]

What a lesson, indeed, is all history and all life to the folly and fruitlessness of pride! The Egyptian kings had their embalmed bodies preserved in massive pyramids, to obtain an earthly immortality. In the seventeenth century they were sold as quack medicines, and now they are burnt for fuel! The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise. [ Whipple ]

No man was ever endowed with a judgment so correct and judicious, in regulating his life, but that circumstances, time and experience would teach him something new, and apprize him that of those things with which he thought himself the best acquainted he knew nothing; and that those ideas which in theory appeared the most advantageous were found, when brought into practice, to be altogether inapplicable. [ Terence ]

O God, whom the world misjudges, and whom everything declares! listen to the last words that my lips pronounce! If I have wandered, it was in seeking Thy law. My heart may go astray, but it is full of Thee! I see, without alarm, eternity appear; and I can not think that a God who has given me life, that a God who has poured so many blessings on my days, will, now that my days are done, torment me for ever! [ The last prayer of Voltaire ]

Almost all men are over-anxious. No sooner do they enter the world than they lose that taste for natural and simple pleasures so remarkable in early life. Every hour do they ask themselves what progress they have made in the pursuit of wealth or honor; and on they go as their fathers went before them, till, weary and sick at heart, they look back with a sigh of regret to the golden time of their childhood. [ Rogers ]

We acquire the love of people who, being in our proximity, are presumed to know us; and we receive reputation or celebrity, from such as are not personally acquainted with us. Merit secures to us the regard of our honest neighbors, and good fortune that of the public. Esteem is the harvest of a whole life spent in usefulness; but reputation is often bestowed upon a chance action, and depends most on success. [ G. A. Sala ]

A composition which dazzles at first sight by gaudy epithets, or brilliant turns of expression, or glittering trains of imagery, may fade gradually from the mind, leaving no enduring impression. Words which flow fresh and warm from a full heart, and which are instinct with the life and breath of human feeling, pass into household memories, and partake of the immortality of the affections from which they spring. [ Whipple ]

The misery of human life is made up of large masses, each separated from the other by certain intervals. One year the death of a child; years after, a failure in trade; after another longer or shorter interval, a daughter may have married unhappily; in all - but the singularly unfortunate, the integral parts that compose the sum-total of the unhappiness of a man's life are easily counted and distinctly remembered. [ Coleridge ]

Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feeling, revives the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the springtime of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human nature, by vivid delineations of its tenderest and softest feelings, and, through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life. [ Channing ]

Opportunities do not come with their values stamped upon them. Everyone must be challenged. A day dawns, quite like other days; in it a single hour comes, quite like other hours; but in that day and in that hour the chance of a lifetime faces us. To face every opportunity of life thoughtfully and ask its meaning bravely and earnestly, is the only way to meet the supreme opportunities when they come, whether open-faced or disguised. [ Maltbie Babcock ]

Art, not less eloquently than literature, teaches her children to venerate the single eye. Remember Matsys. His representations of miser-life are breathing. A forfeited bond twinkles in the hard smile. But follow him to an altar-piece. His Apostle has caught a stray tint from his usurer. Features of exquisite beauty are seen and loved; but the old nature of avarice frets under the glow of devotion. Pathos staggers on the edge of farce. [ Willmott ]

Courage, by keeping the senses quiet, and the understanding clear, puts us in a condition to receive true intelligence, to make just computations upon danger, and pronounce rightly upon that which threatens us. Innocence of life, consciousness of worth, and great expectations, are the best foundations of courage. These ingredients make a richer cordial than youth can prepare. They warm the heart at eighty, and seldom fail in operation. [ Collier ]

Business is religion, and religion is business. The man who does not make a business of his religion has a religious life of no force, and the man who does not make a religion of his business has a business life of no character.
The world is God's workshop; the raw materials are His; the ideals and patterns are His; our hands are "the members of Christ," our reward His recognition. Blacksmith or banker, draughtsman or doctor, painter or preacher, servant or statesman, must work as unto the Lord, not merely making a living, but devoting a life. This makes life sacramental, turning its water into wine. This is twice blessed, blessing both the worker and the work. [ Maltbie Babcock ]

Eyes are bold as lions, roving, running, leaping, here and there, far and near. They speak all languages; they wait for no introduction; they are no Englishmen; ask no leave of age or rank; they respect neither poverty nor riches, neither learning nor power, nor virtue, nor sex, but intrude, and come again, and go through and through you in a moment of time. What inundation of life and thought is discharged from one soul into another through them! [ Emerson ]

Legitimately produced, and truly inspired, fiction interprets humanity, informs the understanding, and quickens the affections. It reflects ourselves, warns us against prevailing social follies, adds rich specimens to our cabinets of character, dramatizes life for the unimaginative, daguerreotypes it for the unobservant, multiplies experience for the isolated or inactive, and cheers age, retirement and invalidism with an available and harmless solace. [ Tuckerman ]

In the hands of genius, the driest stick becomes an Aaron's rod, and buds and blossoms out in poetry. Is he a Burns? the sight of a mountain daisy unseals the fountains of his nature, and he embalms the bonny gem in the beauty of his spirit. Is he a Wordsworth? at his touch all nature is instinct with feeling; the spirit of beauty springs up in the footsteps of his going, and the darkest, nakedest grave becomes a sunlit bank empurpled with blossoms of life. [ H. N. Hudson ]

We see a world of pains taken and the best years of life spent in collecting a set of thoughts in a college for the conduct of life, and after all the man so qualified shall hesitate in his speech to a good suit of clothes, and want commonsense before an agreeable woman. Hence it is that wisdom, valour, justice and learning cannot keep a man in countenance that is possessed with these excellencies, if he wants that inferior art of life and behaviour called good-breeding. [ Steele ]

Among the smaller duties of life, I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due. Reputation is one of the prizes for which men contend: it is, as Mr. Burke calls it, the cheap defense and ornament of nations. It produces more labor and more talent than twice the wealth of a country could ever rear up. It is the coin of genius, and it is the imperious duty of every man to bestow it with the most scrupulous justice and the wisest economy. [ Sydney Smith ]

Love is the river of life in this world. Think not that ye know it who stand at the little tinkling rill, the first small fountain. Not until you have gone through the rocky gorges, and not lost the stream; not until you have gone through the meadow, and the stream has widened and deepened until fleets could ride on its bosom; not until beyond the meadow you have come to the unfathomable ocean, and poured your treasures into its depths - not until then can you know what love is. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

It is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God's heaven as a God-made man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations. [ Carlyle ]

Business in a certain sort of men is a mark of understanding, and they are honored for it. Their souls seek repose in agitation, as children do by being rocked in a cradle. They may pronounce themselves as serviceable to their friends as troublesome to themselves. No one distributes his money to others, but every one therein distributes his time and his life. There is nothing of which we are so prodigal as of those two things, of which to be thrifty would be both commendable and useful. [ Montaigne ]

If we wish to know the political and moral condition of a state, we must ask what rank women hold in it; their influence embraces the whole of life; a wife! - a mother! - two magical words, comprising the sweetest source of man's felicity; theirs is a reign of beauty, of love, of reason, - always a reign! a man takes counsel with his wife, he obeys his mother; he obeys her long after she has ceased to live; and the ideas which he has received from her become principles stronger even than his passions. [ Aime Martin ]

Though no participator in the joys of more vehement sport, I have a pleasure that I cannot reconcile to my abstract notions of the tenderness due to dumb creatures, in the tranquil cruelty of angling. I can only palliate the wanton destructiveness of my amusement by trying to assure myself that my pleasure does not spring from the success of the treachery I practice toward a poor little fish, but rather from that innocent revelry in the luxuriance of summer life which only anglers enjoy to the utmost. [ Bulwer-Lytton ]

Always the idea of unbroken quiet broods around the grave. It is a port where the storms of life never beat, and the forms that have been tossed on its chafing waves lie quiet forever more. There the child nestles as peacefully as ever it lay in its mother's arms, and the workman's hands lie still by his side, and the thinker's brain is pillowed in silent mystery, and the poor girl's broken heart is steeped in a balm that extracts its secret woe, and is in the keeping of a charity that covers all blame. [ Chapin ]

The grandest operations, both in nature and in grace, are the most silent and imperceptible. The shallow brook babbles in its passage, and is heard by every one; but the coming on of the seasons is silent and unseen. The storm rages and alarms, but its fury is soon exhausted, and its effects are partial and soon remedied; but the dew, though gentle and unheard, is immense in quantity, and the very life of large portions of the earth. And these are pictures of the operations of grace in the church and in the soul. [ Cecil ]

A newspaper, like a theatre, must mainly owe its continuance in life to the fact that it pleases many persons; and in order to please many persons it will, unconsciously perhaps, respond to their several tastes, reflect their various qualities, and reproduce their views. In a certain sense it is evolved out of the community that absorbs it, and, therefore, partaking of the character of the community, while it may retain many merits and virtues, it will display itself, as in some respects ignorant, trivial, narrow, and vulgar. [ William Winter ]

He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery. [ Hazlitt ]

Threescore years and ten! It is the Scriptural statute of limitations. After that, you owe no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: You have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out. You are become an honorary member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions are not for you, nor any bugle-tail but lights out. You pay the time-worn duty bills if you choose, or decline if you prefer - and without prejudice - for they are not legally collectable. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

What is more pleasing than the sight of the affectionate mother, watching with untiring devotion over her helpless child? Who can contemplate her devotion to the object of her love, enduring his waywardness, forgiving his faults, relieving his pains, and enjojdng his pleasures; pouring incessantly into his opening soul the mature wisdom of her counsels, and following him with her untiring prayers, as he finally goes forth to battle with the temptations and trials of life, without feeling that the true mother's heart is the noblest of heaven's gifts? [ H. Winslow ]

Today it is all of sixty years since I began to smoke the limit. I have never bought cigars with life-belts around them. I early found that those were too expensive for me: I have always bought cheap cigars - reasonably cheap, at any rate. Sixty years ago they cost me four dollars a barrel, but my taste has improved, latterly, and I pay seven, now. Six or seven. Seven, I think. Yes; it's seven. But that includes the barrel. I often have smoking-parties at my house; but the people that come have always just taken the pledge. I wonder why that is? [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

Gentlemen, do you know what is the finest speech that I ever in my life heard or read? It is the address of Garibaldi to his Roman soldiers, when he told them: Soldiers, what I have to offer you is fatigue, danger, struggle and death; the chill of the cold night in the free air, and heat under the burning sun; no lodgings, no munitions, no provisions, but forced marches, dangerous watchposts and the continual struggle with the bayonet against batteries; - those who love freedom and their country may follow me. That is the most glorious speech I ever heard in my life. [ Kossuth ]

The first being that rushes to the recollection of a soldier or a sailor, in his heart's difficulty, is his mother; she clings to his memory and affection in the midst of all the f orgetf ulness and hardihood induced by a roving life; the last message he leaves is for her; his last whisper breathes her name. The mother, as she instills the lessons of piety and filial obligation into the heart of her infant son, should always feel that her labor is not in vain. She may drop into the grave, but she has left behind her influences that will work for her. The bow is broken, but the arrow is sped, and will do its ofiice. [ A. H. Motte ]

True hope is based on energy of character. A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope, because it knows the mutability of human affairs and how slight a circumstance may change the whole course of events. Such a spirit, too, rests upon itself, it is not confined to partial views, or to one particular object. And if at last all should be lost, it has saved itself, its own integrity and worth. Hope awakens courage, while despondency is the last of all evils, it is the abandonment of good, the giving up of the battle of life with dead nothingness. He who can implant courage in the human soul is the best physician. [ Von Knebel (German), Translated by Mrs. Austin ]

I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. I have no other restriction as regards smoking. I do not know just when I began to smoke, I only know that it was in my father's lifetime, and that I was discreet. He passed from this life early in 1847, when I was a shade past eleven; ever since then I have smoked publicly. As an example to others, and - not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake. It is a good rule. I mean, for me; but some of you know quite well that it wouldn't answer for everybody that's trying to get to be seventy. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

Once when I was in Hawaii, on the island of Kauai, I met a mysterious old stranger. He said he was about to die and wanted to tell someone about the treasure. I said, Okay, as long as it's not a long story. Some of us have a plane to catch, you know. He started telling his story, about the treasure and his life and all, and I thought: This story isn't too long. But then, he kept going, and I started thinking, Uh-oh, this story is getting long. But then the story was over, and I said to myself: You know, that story wasn't too long after all. I forget what the story was about, but there was a good movie on the plane. It was a little long, though. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their soul into ours. God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levellers; they give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man, though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live. [ W. E. Channing ]

With whatever respect and admiration a child may regard a father, whose example has called forth his energies, and animated him in his various pursuits, he turns with greater affection and intenser love to a kind-hearted mother; the same emotion follows him through life; and when the changing vicissitudes of after years have removed his parents from him, seldom does the remembrance of his mother occur to his mind, unaccompanied by the most affectionate recollections. Show me a man, though his brow be furrowed, and his hair grey, who has forgotten his mother, and I shall suspect that something is going on wrong within him; either his memory is impaired, or a hard heart is beating in his bosom. [ Mogridge ]

Why has the beneficent Creator scattered over the face of the earth such a profusion of beautiful flowers? Why is it that every landscape has its appropriate flowers, every nation its national flowers, every rural home its home flowers? Why do flowers enter and shed their perfume over every scene of life, from the cradle to the grave? Why are flowers made to utter all voices of joy and sorrow in all varying scenes? It is that flowers have in themselves a real and natural significance; they have a positive relation to man; they correspond to actual emotions; they have their mission - a mission of love and mercy; they have their language, and from the remotest ages this language has found its interpreters. [ Henrietta Dumont ]

This is my seventieth birthday, and I wonder if you all rise to the size of that proposition, realizing all the significance of that phrase, seventieth birthday. The seventieth birthday! It is the time of life when you arrive at a new and awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have oppressed you for a generation and stand unafraid and unabashed upon your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach--unrebuked. You can tell the world how you got there. It is what they all do. You shall never get tired of telling by what delicate arts and deep moralities you climbed up to that great place. You will explain the process and dwell on the particulars with senile rapture. I have been anxious to explain my own system this long time, and now at last I have the right. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

Mother! How many delightful associations cluster around that word! The innocent smiles of infancy, the gambols of boyhood, and the happiest hours of riper years! When my heart aches and my limbs are weary travelling the thorny path of life, I sit down on some mossy stone, and closing my eyes on real scenes, send my spirit back to the days of early life; I feel afresh my infant joys and sorrows, till my spirit recovers its tone, and is willing to pursue its journey. But in all these reminiscences my mother rises; if I seat myself upon my cushion, it is at her side; if I sing, it is to her ear; if I walk the walls or the meadows, my little hand is in my mother's, and my little feet keep company with hers; when my heart bounds with its best joy, it is because at the performance of some task, or the recitation of some verses, I receive a present from her hand. There is no velvet so soft as a mother's lap, no rose so lovely as her smile, no path so flowery as that imprinted with her footsteps. [ Bishop Thomson ]

In the matter of diet - which is another main thing - I have been persistently strict in sticking to the things which didn't agree with me until one or the other of us got the best of it. Until lately I got the best of it myself. But last spring I stopped frolicking with mince-pie after midnight; up to then I had always believed it wasn't loaded. For thirty years I have taken coffee and bread at eight in the morning, and no bite nor sup until seven-thirty in the evening. Eleven hours. That is all right for me, and is wholesome, because I have never had a headache in my life, but headachy people would not reach seventy comfortably by that road, and they would be foolish to try it. And I wish to urge upon you this - which I think is wisdom - that if you find you can't make seventy by any but an uncomfortable road, don't you go. When they take off the Pullman and retire you to the rancid smoker, put on your things, count your checks, and get out at the first way station where there's a cemetery. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

life in Scrabble®

The word life is playable in Scrabble®, no blanks required.

Scrabble® Letter Score: 7

Highest Scoring Scrabble® Play In The Letters life:

FILE
(33)
 

All Scrabble® Plays For The Word life

LIFE
(24)
LIFE
(24)
LIFE
(21)
LIFE
(21)
LIFE
(21)
LIFE
(21)
LIFE
(16)
LIFE
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LIFE
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LIFE
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LIFE
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LIFE
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LIFE
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LIFE
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LIFE
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LIFE
(9)
LIFE
(9)
LIFE
(9)
LIFE
(9)
LIFE
(8)
LIFE
(8)
LIFE
(8)
LIFE
(7)

The 101 Highest Scoring Scrabble® Plays For Words Using The Letters In life

FILE
(33)
LIFE
(24)
LIFE
(24)
FILE
(24)
FILE
(22)
LIFE
(21)
FILE
(21)
LIFE
(21)
LIFE
(21)
FILE
(21)
LIFE
(21)
FILE
(21)
FILE
(21)
ELF
(18)
ELF
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ELF
(18)
FILE
(16)
LIFE
(16)
LIFE
(16)
IF
(15)
LIFE
(15)
IF
(15)
FILE
(15)
EF
(15)
EF
(15)
FILE
(14)
FILE
(14)
LIFE
(14)
LIFE
(14)
FILE
(14)
FILE
(14)
LIFE
(14)
ELF
(14)
LIFE
(14)
IF
(13)
EF
(13)
ELF
(12)
ELF
(12)
FILE
(12)
ELF
(12)
LIFE
(12)
LIFE
(11)
FILE
(11)
ELF
(11)
EF
(10)
IF
(10)
IF
(10)
ELF
(10)
EF
(10)
LIE
(9)
FILE
(9)
LIE
(9)
LIFE
(9)
FILE
(9)
LIFE
(9)
LIFE
(9)
IF
(9)
LIFE
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FILE
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EF
(9)
FILE
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LIE
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FILE
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FILE
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LIFE
(8)
ELF
(8)
LIFE
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FILE
(8)
ELF
(8)
LIFE
(8)
EF
(7)
LIFE
(7)
ELF
(7)
IF
(7)
ELF
(7)
FILE
(7)
IF
(6)
LIE
(6)
LIE
(6)
ELF
(6)
LIE
(6)
EL
(6)
EF
(6)
EL
(6)
IF
(5)
LIE
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EF
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LIE
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LIE
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LIE
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EL
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EL
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LIE
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EL
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EL
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LIE
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LIE
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EL
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LIE
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EL
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EL
(2)

life in Words With Friends™

The word life is playable in Words With Friends™, no blanks required.

Words With Friends™ Letter Score: 8

Highest Scoring Words With Friends™ Play In The Letters life:

FILE
(48)
 

All Words With Friends™ Plays For The Word life

LIFE
(36)
LIFE
(30)
LIFE
(24)
LIFE
(24)
LIFE
(24)
LIFE
(24)
LIFE
(20)
LIFE
(20)
LIFE
(18)
LIFE
(16)
LIFE
(16)
LIFE
(16)
LIFE
(16)
LIFE
(16)
LIFE
(14)
LIFE
(12)
LIFE
(12)
LIFE
(12)
LIFE
(11)
LIFE
(10)
LIFE
(10)
LIFE
(10)
LIFE
(10)
LIFE
(9)
LIFE
(9)
LIFE
(8)

The 109 Highest Scoring Words With Friends™ Plays Using The Letters In life

FILE
(48)
LIFE
(36)
LIFE
(30)
FILE
(30)
LIFE
(24)
LIFE
(24)
LIFE
(24)
FILE
(24)
LIFE
(24)
FILE
(24)
FILE
(24)
FILE
(24)
FILE
(24)
ELF
(21)
ELF
(21)
ELF
(21)
LIFE
(20)
LIFE
(20)
FILE
(20)
FILE
(18)
LIFE
(18)
ELF
(17)
FILE
(16)
FILE
(16)
LIFE
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LIFE
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FILE
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FILE
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FILE
(16)
LIFE
(16)
LIFE
(16)
LIFE
(16)
IF
(15)
EF
(15)
ELF
(15)
IF
(15)
EF
(15)
FILE
(14)
LIFE
(14)
ELF
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ELF
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ELF
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EF
(13)
FILE
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IF
(13)
FILE
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LIE
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LIFE
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LIFE
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FILE
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FILE
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IF
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IF
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ELF
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Words containing the sequence life

Word Growth involving life

Shorter words in life

if

Longer words containing life

afterlife afterlifes

birdlife

folklife

halflife halflifes

lifebelt lifebelts

lifeblood

lifeboat lifeboatmen

lifeboat lifeboats

lifebuoy lifebuoys

lifecycle

lifeform lifeforms

lifegiving

lifeguard lifeguards

lifeinsurance

lifejacket lifejackets

lifeless lifelessly

lifeless lifelessness

lifelike unlifelike

lifeline lifelines

lifelong

lifeplan lifeplans

lifer alkaliferous

lifer amygdaliferous

lifer canaliferous

lifer capsuliferous

lifer celliferous

lifer coralliferous

lifer corolliferous

lifer crystalliferous

lifer cupuliferous

lifer flagelliferous

lifer fossiliferous nonfossiliferous

lifer fossiliferous unfossiliferous

lifer glanduliferous

lifer liferaft liferafts

lifer lifers midlifers

lifer lifers nonlifers

lifer metalliferous nonmetalliferous

lifer midlifer midlifers

lifer nickeliferous

lifer nonlifer nonlifers

lifer papilliferous papilliferously

lifer papuliferous

lifer proliferate overproliferate overproliferated

lifer proliferate overproliferate overproliferates

lifer proliferate proliferated overproliferated

lifer proliferate proliferated reproliferated

lifer proliferate proliferates overproliferates

lifer proliferate proliferates reproliferates

lifer proliferate reproliferate reproliferated

lifer proliferate reproliferate reproliferates

lifer proliferating overproliferating

lifer proliferating reproliferating

lifer proliferation nonproliferation

lifer proliferation overproliferation overproliferations

lifer proliferation proliferations overproliferations

lifer proliferation proliferations reproliferations

lifer proliferation reproliferation reproliferations

lifer proliferative lymphoproliferative nonlymphoproliferative

lifer proliferative myeloproliferative

lifer proliferator proliferators

lifer proliferous proliferously

lifer raduliferous

lifer stipuliferous

lifer styliferous

lifer tantaliferous

lifes afterlifes

lifes halflifes

lifes lifesaver lifesavers

lifes lifesaving lifesavings

lifes lifesize lifesized

lifes lifeskill lifeskills

lifes lifespan lifespans

lifes lifestyle lifestyler lifestylers

lifes lifestyle lifestyles

lifes lowlifes

lifes nightlifes

lifethreatening

lifetime lifetimes

lifework lifeworks

lovelife

midlife midlifer midlifers

nightlife nightlifes

nonlife nonlifer nonlifers

sealife

shelflife

waterlife

wildlife