The whole of what we know is a system of compensations. Each suffering is rewarded; each sacrifice is made up; every debt is paid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.
Thomas Merton
The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
Thomas Carlyle
He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
Albert Camus
Basically, I’m interested in friendship, sex and death.
Sharon Riis
Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.
Thomas Hardy
Life is seldom as unendurable as, to judge by the facts, it logically ought to be.
Brooks Atkinson
Birth, copulation and death. That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks.
T. S. Eliot
Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the universe.
Alfred North Whitehead
There is no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana
The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing. The main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unforeseen attack.
Marcus Aurelius
We never live, but we are always in the expectation of living.
Voltaire
Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.
Stephen Leacock
There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.
Coco Chanel
It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.
Adlai Stevenson
A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum.
Walter Scott