* All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?
- Robert Louis Stevenson in "Aes Triplex" (1878)
 

* Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.
- Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic, ‘A free Man's Worship’

* I compare human life to a large mansion of many apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me.
- John Keats, letter to J. H. Reynolds, 3rd May 1818

  * The sea is only beautiful if there's a shore. Life is like the sea. There'll be a direction to follow even if you sail more than one day or one life... the promise of a new land is your guide, because you know that the sea is a huge world that's beautiful only if there's a shore.
- Patricky Field, as quoted in Beautiful if there's a shore (2008) song by Patricky Field

* To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
- Robert Louis Stevenson in Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882)

 

    * Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
-> Claimed by Erica Frandsen in Kochmer, Casey;
* Life is the distance between dreams and reality.
- Leonid S. Sukhorukov, All About Everything (2005)

* Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
-John Lennon, in "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)" (1980)

* Living should be perpetual and universal benediction.
o Wei Wu Wei in Why Lazarus Laughed : The Essential Doctrine, Zen — Advaita — Tantra (2003)

 * Life as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence when it comes upon soundings.
o Oliver Wendall Holmes

* Life is before you,— not earthly life alone, but life— a thread running interminably through the warp of eternity.
o Josiah Gilbert Holland

* O thou child of many prayers!
Life hath quicksands, Life hath snares!
Care and age come unawares!
o Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

* We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it.
- Anaïs Nin, entry for February 1954, in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5 as quoted in Woman as Writer (1978) by Jeannette L. Webber and Joan Grumman-