Short Sayings

The miracle is not to fly in the air, or to walk on the water, but to walk on the earth.  ~Chinese Proverb

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world.  This makes it hard to plan the day.  ~Elwyn Brooks White

Life is simple, it’s just not easy.  ~Author Unknown

A life without cause is a life without effect.  ~Barbarella

Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished.  If you’re alive, it isn’t.  ~Richard Bach

Life’s not always fair.  Sometimes you can get a splinter even sliding down a rainbow.  ~Terri Guillemets

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it.  ~Jack Handey

Life is a foreign language:  all men mispronounce it.  ~Christopher Morley, Thunder on the Left

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee,
And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.
~Robert Frost, "Cluster of Faith," 1962

Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor. ~Ogden Nash

I do like a little bit of butter to my bread. ~A.A. Milne, When We Were Very Young

Life may be defined to be the power of self-augmentation or assimilation, not of self-nurture; for then a steam-engine over a coal-pit might be made to live. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars. ~Henry Van Dyke

People find it hard to be both comic and serious, though life manages it easily enough. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966

Shall I redirect my life’s journey because down some side road might be some trifle I’m entitled to? ~Robert Brault,

Life is a long lesson in humility. ~James M. Barrie

In life, as in restaurants, we swallow a lot of indigestible stuff just because it comes with the dinner. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

Life seems nothing more than a quick succession of busy nothings." ~From the movie Mansfield Park

Reason and justice tell me there’s more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism. ~Anton Chekhov

He who hesitates is sometimes saved.

He who laughs last didn’t get it.

Honesty is the best image.

It takes a long time to grow old

Let it be known, that without love and compassion the heart seizes to beat Romantic.

Love is the enchanted dawn of every heart.

Love, deeply and compassionately: you may get hurt, but it’s the only way to live life
completely!

My best friend is someone who brings out the best of me.

Never explain yourself. Your friends don’t need it and your enemies won’t believe it.

One, who finds a faithful friend, finds a treasure.

I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here, and what the question might mean.  I might think about it a little bit, but if I can’t figure it out, then I go on to something else.  But I don’t have to know an answer….  I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly.  It doesn’t frighten me.  ~Richard Phillips Feynman

Life is just a series of trying to make up your mind.  ~Timothy Fuller

The history of man for the nine months preceding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting and contain events of greater moment than all the three score and ten years that follow it.  ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Perhaps we are looking at this from a wrong perspective; this search for the truth, the meaning of life, the reason of God.  We all have this mindset that the answers are so complex and so vast that it is almost impossible to comprehend.  I think, on the contrary, that the answers are so simple; so simple that it is staring us straight in the face, screaming its lungs out, and yet we fail to notice it.  We’re looking through a telescope, searching the stars for the answer, when the answer is actually a speck of dirt on the telescope lens.  ~Jason Q., from generationterrorists.com

It’s just life.  Just live it.  ~Terri Guillemets

Life is little more than a loan shark:  It exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes.  ~Luigi Pirandello

Life is a shit sandwich.  But if you’ve got enough bread, you don’t taste the shit.  ~Jonathan Winters

There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner:  that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.  It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.  ~H.L. Mencken

Almost everything in life is easier to get into than out of.  ~Agnes’ Law

Life is one big judgment call.  ~Terri Guillemets

Chance is always powerful, let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.  ~Ovid

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run.  The daily work – that goes on, it adds up.  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Life is a series of collisions with the future.  ~José Ortega y Gasset

To the student I would say, "Life is principally multiple choice, but at the end there’s a tough essay question."  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.  ~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Life is half spent before we know what it is.  ~George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, 1651

Why does a person even get up in the morning?  You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you’ll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die.  Life is so stupid I can’t stand it.  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust – we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.  ~Albert Einstein, in The Saturday Evening Post, 26 October 1929

Jack Palance:  "Do you know what the secret of life is?  One thing.  Just one thing.  You stick to that and everything else don’t mean shit."
Billy Crystal:  "Yeah, but what’s that one thing?"
Jack Palance:  "That’s what you’ve got to figure out."
~From the movie City Slickers

A best friend shares the good times and help you out by listening during the bad times.

A coward is a hero with a wife, kids, and a mortgage.

A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walk out.

All things are difficult before they are easy.

Behind every great fortune there is a crime.

Best friend is someone who knows all about you and loves you anyway.

Cheer up, the worst is yet to come.

Common sense ain’t common.

Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed.

Don’t hate yourself in the morning–sleep till noon.

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.  ~Dennis Wholey

Life is an endless struggle full of frustrations and challenges, but eventually you find a hair stylist you like.  ~Author Unknown

Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? is not life one?  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

What is life?  It is the flash of a firefly in the night.  It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.  It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.  ~Crowfoot, 1890, as quoted in Catch the Whisper of the Wind compiled by Cheewa James

Have you noticed that life, real honest-to-goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in the newspapers?  ~Jean Anouilh, The Rehearsal, 1950

God writes a lot of comedy… the trouble is, he’s stuck with so many bad actors who don’t know how to play funny.  ~Garrison Keillor

The meaning of life is not an unquestionable answer; it is an unanswerable question.  ~Terri Guillemets

Look, I don’t want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you’re alive you’ve got to flap your arms and legs, you’ve got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you’re not alive.  ~Mel Brooks

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.  ~e.e. cummings

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.  ~Brendan Gill