The Quotes canon
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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Lucretius2 quotes
Life is one long struggle in the dark. — Lucretius · 55 BCAnd life is given to none freehold, but it is leasehold for all. — Lucretius · 55 BCAbraham Cowley1 quote
Life is an incurable disease. — Abraham Cowley · 1656Alan Watts1 quote
The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless. — Alan Watts · 1982Allen Saunders1 quote
Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans. — Allen Saunders · 1957Benjamin Disraeli1 quote
What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens. — Benjamin Disraeli · 1837Benjamin Franklin1 quote
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that's the stuff life is made of. — Benjamin Franklin · 1746Bob Dylan1 quote
Life is more or less a lie, but then again, that's exactly the way we want it to be. — Bob Dylan · 2004Carl Jung1 quote
The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive. — Carl Jung · 1944Crowfoot1 quote
A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we came, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in winter time. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. — Crowfoot · 1890Derek Parfit1 quote
Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may be only just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine. In Nietzsche’s words, there has never been such a new dawn and clear horizon, and such an open sea. — Derek Parfit · 2017F. Scott Fitzgerald1 quote
The wise and tragic sense of life. By this I mean...the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not "happiness and pleasure" but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle. — F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1940H. Rider Haggard1 quote
Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go... Life is nothing. Life is all. It is the hand with which we hold off death. It is the glow-worm that shines in the night-time and is black in the morning; it is the white breath of the oxen in the winter; it is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset. — H. Rider Haggard · 1885Italo Svevo1 quote
One need only remind oneself of all that we expect from life to see how very strange it is, and to arrive at the conclusion that man has found his way into it by mistake and does not really belong there. — Italo Svevo · 1923Jacques Barzun1 quote
If it were possible to talk to the unborn, one could never explain to them how it feels to be alive, for life is washed in the speechless real. — Jacques Barzun · 1959James Jeans1 quote
Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties. — James Jeans · 1930Jean Cocteau1 quote
Life is a horizontal fall. — Jean Cocteau · 1930Jesse1 quote
Life's hard. It's suppose to be. If we didn't suffer, we wouldn't learn a thing, you know? — Jesse · 2004Joan Didion1 quote
We never reach a point at which our lives lie before us as a clearly marked open road, never have and never should expect a map to the years ahead, never do close those circles that seem, at thirteen and fourteen and nineteen, so urgently in need of closing. — Joan Didion · 1992Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1 quote
One lives but once in this world. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1774John Mellencamp1 quote
Oh yeah, life goes on long after the thrill of livin' is gone. — John Mellencamp · 1982Jules Laforgue1 quote
Oh, what a day-to-day business life is. — Jules Laforgue · 1885Lewis Carroll1 quote
Life, what is it but a dream? — Lewis Carroll · 1871Lord Byron1 quote
When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation),—sleep, eating, and swilling—buttoning and unbuttoning—how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse. — Lord Byron · 1813Malcolm1 quote
Life, uh, finds a way. — Malcolm · 1993Mason Sr.1 quote
You don't want the bumpers. Life doesn't give you bumpers. — Mason Sr. · 2014Michael Crichton1 quote
The history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way. — Michael Crichton · 1953Natalia (Before Midnight)1 quote
It’s just like our life, we appear and we disappear. We are so important to some, but we are just…passing through. — Natalia (Before Midnight) · 2013O. Henry1 quote
Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating. — O. Henry · 1905Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.1 quote
Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1911Pedro Calderon de la Barca1 quote
What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction. And the greatest good is of slight worth, as all life is a dream, and dreams are dreams. — Pedro Calderon de la Barca · 1635