Life Quotes

“Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? is not life one?”

“"For any one with true dramatic instincts, it is only the Overture that is ended! The real treat has yet to begin. You go to a theatre, and pay your ten shillings for a stall, and what do you get for your money? Perhaps it's a dialogue between a couple of farmers — unnatural in their overdone caricature of farmers' dress — more unnatural in their constrained attitudes and gestures — most unnatural in their attempts at ease and geniality in their talk. Go instead and take a seat in a third-class railway-carriage, and you'll get the same dialogue done to the life! Front-seats — no orchestra to block the view — and nothing to pay!"... "I wonder if Shakespeare had that thought in his mind," I said, "when he wrote 'All the world's a stage'?" The old man sighed. "And so it is," he said, "look at it as you will. Life is indeed a drama; a drama with but few encores — and no bouquets!" he added dreamily. "We spend one half of it regretting the things we did in the other half!" "And the secret of enjoying it," he continued, resuming his cheerful tone, "is intensity!" "But not in the modern æsthetic sense, I presume? Like the young lady, in Punch, who begins a conversation with 'Are you intense?'" "By no means!" replied the Earl. "What I mean is intensity of thought — a concentrated attention. We lose half the pleasure we might have in Life, by not really attending.”

“This world is just a stage, and we Must do our stunt of comedy, Or mouth our tragic little book Till Death shall murmur "Get the hook!"”

“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.”

“The tragedy of life is not that man loses but that he almost wins.”

“My quest for cosmic understanding is a book I have picked up and put down many times, always forgetting to insert a bookmark.”

“Life — my dear madam, is the — er — predicament which precedes death.”

“I grew up believing that all was good. I suppose this was the natural consequence of a happy, untroubled childhood. Now, of course, I know that there is both good and evil, that each contains some of the other, and I have found them to exist for the most part in equal quantity, balanced like the two ends of a seesaw, man standing in the middle and able to throw his weight to one side or the other as he wills.”

“To slake the thirst of being. To drink the draught, deep and cool, and satisfying.”

“You live long enough in a world spinning on its axis, you learn to spin in the same direction.”

“And so wags the world, the great pendulum swung by the sun through space.”

“Life is a collection of moments you would have appreciated more if you had only known they were moments.”