Life Quotes And Sayings

Here are some selected life quotes and sayings, including proverbs, phrases, and quotations for various aspects and occasions in your life. Some are funny, some are serious, some take some thought, some wake us up, and some are just meant to teach us a lesson.

Choose as many as you like.

Pick a couple quotes that speak to you, and a couple that irritate you or seem to have deeper meaning.

Figure out what they mean to you.

Then figure out how you can use the quotes or sayings or their meaning to improve your life.

Life Sayings And Proverbs

"Life is a sexually transmitted disease."
-Graffito marked on the London Underground

"Life is an incurable disease."
-Abraham Cowley, "To Dr. Scarborough" [1656]

"A live dog is better than a dead lion."
-Saying from the late 14th century, often referring to a lesser person taking the place of a greater one who has died.

From the Bible (Ecclesiastes) "A living dog is better than a dead lion."

"Be happy while y'er leevin,
For y'er a lang time deid."
-Scottish motto for a house

"Man cannot live by bread alone."
-Late 19th century saying
According to The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase, Saying, and Quotation, 2nd Edition:

"late 19th century, meaning that one needs spiritual as well as physical sustenance; after the Bible (Matthew) 'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God'"

"The early bird catches the worm."
-Mid 17th century saying. An experience in being disorganized brought the message of this proverbial saying home to me.

Phrases

We continue with more life quotes and sayings in the form of phrases about life and living (with some associated quotations and references).

"The elixir of life"
-A drug or substance capable of prolonging life forever. An immortality potion. (Medieval Latin: elixir vitae)

As in...

"Knowledge enormous makes a God of me.
Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions,
Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,
Creations and destroyings, all at once
Pour into the wide hollows of my brain,
And deify me, as if some blithe wine
Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk,
And so become immortal."
-John Keats
Poems. Hyperion: A Fragment, III, l. 113

"all human life is there"
Meaning all possible human experience.

"Cats and monkeys - monkeys and cats - all human life is there!"
-Henry James, The Madonna of the Future [1879]

"life's rich pageant"
Referring to the wide variety of human experience.
-Arthur Marshall, The Games Mistress [1937]

"mouse and man"
Refers to all types of animal life.

"all flesh"
Referring to corporeal existence.

From the Bible (Peter)...

"All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away."

Quotations

"All that a man hath will he give for his life."
-From the Bible (Job)

"Not to be born is, past all prizing, best."
-Sophocles, Oedipus Coloneus

"Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away."
-William Butler Yeats, "Oedipus at Colonus," st. 3

"And life is given to none freehold, but it is leasehold for all."
-Lucretius, De Rerum Natura

"Life well spent is long."
-Leonardo da Vinci
Edward McCurdy (ed.) Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks [1906]

"'Such,' he said, 'O King, seems to me the present life of men on earth, in comparison with that time which to us is uncertain, as if when on a winter's night you sit feasting with your ealdormen and thegns, -a single sparrow should fly swiftly into the hall, and coming in at one door, instantly fly out through another.'"
-The Venerable Bede
Ecclesiastical History of the English People

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages."
-William Shakespeare As You Like It [1599]

"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 [1838]

From the Bible (Genesis), "For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

"Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forwards."
-Soren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers [1843]

"And life is Colour and Warmth and Light
And a striving evermore for these;
And he is dead, who will not fight;
And who dies fighting has increase."
-Julian Grenfell, "Into Battle" [1915]

"Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end."
-Virginai Woolf, The Common Reader [1925]

"Life is a horizontal fall."
-Jean Cocteau, Opium [1930]

"Life is just a bowl of cherries."
-Lew Brown, song title [1931]

"All that matters is love and work."
-Attributed to Sigmund Freud

"To live at all is miracle enough."
-Mervyn Peake, The Glassblower [1950]

"Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it."
Tom Lehrer, "We Will All Go Together When We Go" [1953 song]

"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being."
-Carl Gustav Jung, Erinnerungen, Traume, Gedanken [1962]

"Life, you know, is rather like opening a tin of sardines. We are all of us looking for the key. And, I wonder, how many of you here tonight have wasted years of your lives looking behind the kitchen dressers of this life for that key."
-Alan Bennett, Beyond the Fringe [1961 revue] "Take a Pew"

"The Answer to the Great Question Of... Life, the Universe and Everything... Forty-two.
-Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy [1979]

More Life Quotes And Sayings

Below are more life quotes and sayings in various areas.

General

Ten more inspirational quotes about life

Courage

Quotes, sayings, and proverbs about courage

More quotes and quotations on courage

Happiness

Quotes about happiness

Recommended Resources

Life Poems of Inspiration
Discover the wise messages hidden within these engaging poems about life picked especially to motivate, inspire and enlighten your mind to a world of possibilities.

Photo credit: Book of inspiration and ideas / CC 2.0

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