Life Sayings and Quotes

Life is an adventure filled with unexpected highs and lows. While there isn't a single handbook to help you navigate life's ups and downs, wisdom passed through the ages sure helps. Below you'll find a collection of the finest inspirational, thoughtful, and humorous life quotes we could find.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. Oscar Wilde
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. Allen Saunders
To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else. Emily Dickinson
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well. Jack London
Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live. Anna Quindlen
Many of life's failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. Thomas Edison
Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you can hardly catch it going. Tennessee Williams
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. Mark Twain
Life is like walking through Paradise with peas in your shoes. Charles Edward Jerningham
Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it. Emily Dickinson
The only thing I regret about my life is the length of it. If I had to live my life again I’d make all the same mistakes—only sooner. Tallulah Bankhead
If A is success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut. Albert Einstein
Life is a gamble at terrible odds—if it was a bet, you wouldn’t take it. Tom Stoppard
We are not unhappy today because of the complexities of life. We are unhappy because we miss its underlying simplicities. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler
Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over a pond and a stand of pines. Anna Quindlen
Life is way wilder than I am comfortable with, way farther out, as we used to say, more magnificent, more deserving of awe and, I would add, more benevolent—well-meaning, kindly. Ann Lamott
Life is something to do when you can’t get to sleep. Fran Lebowitz
Brought up in the provinces in the forties and fifties one learned early the valuable lesson that life is generally something that happens elsewhere. Alan Bennett
Much of what life hands us comes without prelude of fear and worry. Our fears don’t stop death, they stop life. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler
The understanding gained in examining a life itself comes to permeate that life and direct its course. To live an examined life is to make a self-portrait. Robert Nozick
To pay attention and to mostly accept your life, inside and out and around your body, is to be halfway home. Ann Lamott
Life means God / Life means perennially unending / Life means more. Nikhil Parekh
Real life is walking back and dreaming / Real life is entering the picture and achieving / Real life is a fight Deci Hernandez
Life has many ways of testing a person's will, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen at once. Paulo Coelho
The most important thing is to enjoy your life -- to be happy -- it's all that matters. Audrey Hepburn
Mellow doesn't always make for a good story, but it makes for a good life. Anne Hathaway
Work like you don't need the money, love like you've never been hurt and dance like no one is watching. Randall G Leighton
There comes a time when you have to choose between turning the page and closing the book. Josh Jameson
Life is a progress, and not a station. Ralph Waldo Emerson