masterwordsmith-unplugged

One word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love.
SOPHOCLES, Oedipus at Colonus



All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces.
BLAISE PASCAL, Pensees

How small a porton of our life it is that we really enjoy. In youth we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age, we are looking backwards to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day, when we have time.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon

In the chequered area of human experience the seasons are all mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the green cluster and another treads the wine-press. Nay, in each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until Death himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields.
GEORGE ELIOT, Daniel Deronda

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
HENRY ADAMS, The Education of Henry Adams

Football is a team game. So is life.
JOE NAMATH

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES, Leisure

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life — It goes on.
ROBERT FROST, as quoted in William Nichols' A New Treasury of Words to Live By

So it is with all life. A tedium that includes the expectation of nothing but more tedium; a regret, right now, for the regret I'll have tomorrow for having felt regret today.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet

Life is one long process of getting tired.
SAMUEL BUTLER, Note Books

The secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously!
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, The Joyful Wisdom

Life is made up of marble and mud.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, The House of the Seven Gables

Life is hard. After all, it kills you!
KATHARINE HEPBURN, Susan Crimp's Katharine Hepburn Once Said...


We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility.
Malcolm Gladwell



Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.
JOANNE HARRIS, Chocolat

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.
JACK LONDON, The Call of the Wild

Life is a dream in the night, a fear among fears,
A naked runner lost in a storm of spears.
ARTHUR SYMONS, "In the Wood of Finvara"

You're alive. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change.
NEIL GAIMAN, The Graveyard Book

To what can one compare our life on earth?
To a flock of geese
Waddling about in the snow
Leaving a faint trace of their passage.
SU SHI, "Remembrance"

I have not wasted life, but life hath wasted me.
BHARTRHARI, "Against the Desire of Worldly Things"

Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.
GEORGE ELIOT, Felix Holt

The road is life.
JACK KEROUAC, On the Road

Life packed a clever one-two punch: cruelty and absurdity.
DEAN KOONTZ, Velocity

Store well Life's sheaves, the grains of thought--
Your harvest will be good,
If sheaves are bound by ties of love,
And evil you've withstood.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON, "Gathering of the Sheaves"

Life is hard, but it's harder if you're stupid.
MICHAEL CRICHTON, Next

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

Living is a hazardous profession.
TOBSHA LEARNER, The Witch of Cologne

God is found in this Life ... to wait for another is folly.
DAN SIMMONS, Lovedeath

There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, Where the Blue Begins

You must learn to deal with the odd and even in life, as well as in figures.
GEORGE ELIOT, Adam Bede