Nothing is so false as human life, nothing so treacherous. God knows no one would have accepted it as a gift, if it had not been given without our knowledge.

The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.

As wise women and men in every culture tell us: The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us.

What is the life of man! Is it not to shift from side to side?-from sorrow to sorrow?-to button up one cause of vexation!-and unbutton another!

Everyday life is a stimulating mixture of order and haphazardly. The sun rises and sets on schedule but the wind bloweth where it listeth.

Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for a while and then act our part in it.

Better a thousand times even a swiftly fading, ephemeral moment of life than the epoch-long unconsciousness of the stone.

Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.

Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others-his last breath.

The shortness of life cannot dissuade us from its pleasures, nor console us for its pains.