Quotes: Life (5)

Life 47 Life's purpose. "A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve." O. W. Holmes. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Life 47 Life means failure. "Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed: failure is the fate allotted." Robert Louis Stevenson. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Life 47 Failure is inevitable in life. "The failures and reverses which await men--and one after another sadden the brow of youth..." Thoreau. 1842. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Life 48 The earth turns and never gets anywhere; live for the moment. "Nothing ever gets anywhere; the earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere; the moment is the only thing that counts." Jean Cocteau. 1922. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Life 52 There is tragedy in little events and the trivial in the truly tragic. "There are tragic elements in superficial things and trivial in the tragic." Hugo von Hofmannsthal. 1905. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Life 53 Some things people can learn only from themselves. "There is much of mankind that a man can learn only from himself." Walter Bagehot. 1879. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Life 57 I seem to be prepared for something that never happens. "...all [my] life...seems to me preparation for something that never happens." W. B. Yeats. 1938. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Life 57 There is no finality in life, except for death. "We live beyond any tale we happen to enact." V. S. Pritchett. 1979. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Life 59 Life is a theater. "Everybody has his own theater, in which he is manager, actor, prompter, playwright, scene-shifter, boxkeeper, doorkeeper, all in one, and audience into the bargain." Julius Hare. 1827. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Life 68 Our greatest despair is for the possibilities we did not realize. "It is not impossibilities which fill us with the deepest despair, but possibilities which we have failed to realize." Robert Mallet. (b. 1915.) Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.