Life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open. Robert Frost, Birches, 1916
In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on. Robert Frost
No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679, Leviathan
We live as we dream – alone. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Droll thing life is – that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself – that comes too late – a crop of inextinguishable regrets. ibid.
Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. Joseph Conrad
It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome. Joseph Conrad
Perhaps life is just that ... a dream and a fear. Joseph Conrad
Woody Allen: That’s quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn’t it?
Woman: Yes it is.
Woody Allen: What does it say to you?
Woman: It re-states the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of man forced to live in a barren godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror and degradation forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos. Play It Again, Sam 1972 starring Woody Allen & Diane Keaton & Jerry Lacy & Tony Roberts & Susan Anspach et al, director Herbert Ross
Why does there have to be an underground? After all there’s the Orb and there’s the Telescreen and there’s the Orgasmatron – what more do they want? Sleeper 1973 starring Woody Allen & Diane Keaton & John Beck & Howard Cosell & Mews Small et al, director Woody Allen
Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. Annie Hall 1977 starring Woody Allen & Diane Keaton & Tony Roberts & Carol Kane & Paul Simon & Janet Margolin & Shelley Duvall & Christopher Walken & Colleen Dewhurst & Donald Symington & Joan Newman et al, director Woody Allen, him to her
My one regret in life is that I am not someone else. Woody Allen
Life is full of misery, loneliness and suffering – it’s all over much too soon. Woody Allen
I think that the tendency for most people is to fall back on a comic interpretation of things – because things are so sad, so terrible. If you didn’t laugh you’d kill yourself. But the truth of the matter is that existence in general is very very tragic, very very sad, very brutal and very unhappy. Woody Allen
You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred. Woody Allen
Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television. Woody Allen
I felt much better when I gave up hope. Woody Allen, cited John Pilger
cf.
Since I gave up hope I feel a lot better. Steve Taylor, song
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare. W H Davies, Leisure, 1911
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the gory eye of day;
The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away. W B Yeats, Oedipus at Colonus, 1928
Set your will on the Way. Heave a firm grasp on virtue. Rely on humanity. Find recreation in the arts. Confucius, 551-479 B.C.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age. Philip Larkin, Dockery & Son, 1964
Life’s not just being alive, but being well. Martial, Epigrammata
Of what does a happy life consist,
My dear friend, Julius? Here’s a list:
Inherited wealth, no need to earn
Fires that continually burn,
And fields that give a fair return. ibid.
Difficult or easy, pleasant or bitter, you are the same you: I cannot live with you – or without you. ibid.
I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life ... to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
Our life is frittered away by detail ... Simplify, simplify. ibid.
I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulette I could have worn. ibid.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. ibid.
There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive for action or change. Peter Ackroyd, English Music
For when I trace back the years I have liv’d, gathering them up in my Memory, I see what a chequer’d Work Of Nature my life has been. If I were now to inscribe my own History with its unparalleled Sufferings and surprizing Adventures (as the Booksellers might indite it), I know that the great Part of the World would not believe the Passages there related, by reason of the Strangeness of them, but I cannot help their Unbelief; and if the Reader considers them to be but dark Conceits, then let him bethink himself that Humane life is quite out of the Light and that we are all Creatures of Darknesse. Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor
Always present your front to the world. Moliere aka Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, L’Avare, 1669
One should eat to live, and not live to eat. ibid.
He who lives without tobacco is not worthy to live. Moliere aka Jean-Baptiste Poquelin
It’s good food and not fine words that keeps me alive. Moliere aka Jean-Baptiste Poquelin
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be oneself. Montaigne aka Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Essais, 1580
Fame and tranquillity can be never be bedfellows. ibid.
Living is my job and my art. ibid.
The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death. ibid.
The value of life lies not in the length of days but in the use you make of them; he has lived for a long time who has little lived. Whether you have lived enough depends not on the number of your years but on your will. ibid.
They always want to get in on the act they sell you. I don’t think they’ve done anything effective in their lives ... Butt out. This is my life and this is my death. It’s been sanctioned by the courts that I die, and I accept that. Gary Gilmore
Life is perhaps most wisely regarded as a bad dream between two awakenings, and every day is a life in miniature. Eugene O’Neill, Marco Millions, 1928
The only living life is in the past and future … the present is an interlude … strange interlude in which we call on past and future to bear witness we are living. Eugene O’Neill, Strange Interlude, 1928