Quotes
Quotes about Life
Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,--
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret.
Oh death in life, the days that are no more!
My own dim life should teach me this
That life shall live for evermore.
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life.
Ring in the nobler modes of life
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
What use to brood? This life of mingled pains
And joys to me,
Despite of every Faith and Creed, remains
The Mystery.
Whate'er thy joys, they vanish with the day:
Whate'er thy griefs, in sleep they fade away,
To sleep! to sleep!
Sleep, mournful heart, and let the past be past:
Sleep, happy soul, all life will sleep at last.
A good woman is a wondrous creature, cleaving to the right and to the good under all change: lovely in youthful comeliness, lovely all her life long in comeliness of heart.
A sacred burden is this life ye bear:
Look on it, lift it, bear it solemnly,
Stand up and walk beneath it steadfastly.
Fail not for sorrow, falter not for sin,
But onward, upward, till the goal ye win.
Better trust all, and be deceived,
And weep that trust and that deceiving,
Than doubt one heart, that if believed
Had blessed one's life with true believing.
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!
There is that glorious epicurean paradox uttered by my friend the historian,in one of his flashing moments: "Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries." To this must certainly be added that other saying of one of the wittiest of men:"Good Americans when they die go to Paris."
Ay, soon upon the stage of life,
Sweet, happy children, you will rise,
To mingle in its care and strife,
Or early find the peaceful skies.
Then be it yours, while you pursue
The golden moments, quick to haste
Some noble work of love to do,
Nor suffer one bright hour to waste.
Then sing as Martin Luther sang,
As Doctor Martin Luther sang,
"Who loves not wine, woman and song,
He is a fool his whole life long."
The true pleasure of life is to live with your inferiors.
My life is one demd horrid grind.
Progress is
The law of life: man is not Man as yet.
Say not "a small event!" Why "small"?
Costs it more pain that this ye call
A "great event" should come to pass
From that? Untwine me from the mass
Of deeds which make up life, one deed
Power shall fall short in or exceed!
How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!
How he lies in his rights of a man!
Death has done all death can.
And absorbed in the new life he leads,
He recks not, he heeds
Nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike
On his senses alike,
And are lost in the solemn and strange
Surprise of the change.
A people is but the attempt of many
To rise to the completer life of one;
And those who live as models for the mass
Are singly of more value than they all.
I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on.
For life, with all it yields of joy and woe,
And hope and fear (believe the aged friend),
Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love,--
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is.
The ultimate, angels' law,
Indulging every instinct of the soul
There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing!
Fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face.
.......
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,
The heroes of old;
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness, and cold.
White shall not neutralize the black, nor good
Compensate bad in man, absolve him so:
Life's business being just the terrible choice.
