Life is the only art that we are required to practise without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere beginner.
Magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life.
Man arrives as a novice at each age of his life.
Man wants but little here below nor wants that little long.
Oh for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts.
Our insignificance is often the cause of our safety.
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio.
Real life is to most men, a long second best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.
Sometimes I wish life had a fast-forward button.
St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.
The character of human life, like the character of the human condition, like the character of all life, is "ambiguity": the inseparable mixture of good and evil, the true and false, the creative and destructive forces - both individual and social.
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate and is sometimes equally convenient.
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is the example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
The great business of life is to be, to do, to do without and to depart.
The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone - but never hustled.
The loveliest of trees, the cherry now is hung with bloom along the bough, and stands about the woodland ride wearing white for Eastertide.
The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over.
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
The vanity of human life is like a river, constantly passing away, and yet constantly coming on.
