82 Quotes About Life, With Their Real Sources
Most quote sites will hand you a beautiful line and the wrong author. This one names the book, the poem, or the essay each quote came from — and where the internet has spent decades crediting the wrong person, it says so.
Showing 82 of 82 quotes
On Living Deliberately
For when the days are passing faster than you'd like and you want to be present for them.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
Life is long, if you know how to use it.
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.
Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.
The unexamined life is not worth living.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
That you are here — that life exists and identity, that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
Wherever you go, there you are.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
When Life Is Hard
The lines people come back to in the difficult years. Written mostly by people who had them.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.
What is to give light must endure burning.
The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.
You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lies, you may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I'll rise.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.
The best way out is always through.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Printed on motivational posters as a call to persistence. In context it is bleaker — Beckett is describing failure as the permanent condition, not a stage before success.
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
On Love and the People We Keep
Love, friendship, and the people who make a life — from novelists who understood both.
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
We accept the love we think we deserve.
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.
If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
Attached to George Eliot since the 1880s, but it appears nowhere in her published work or letters. The earliest printed versions credit her without a source.
I am half agony, half hope.
If you wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
Change, Endings, and Letting Go
For the turning points — the leaving, the starting over, the deciding.
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it yet.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.
Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Life Advice from the Novels That Got It Right
Fiction has been answering this question for centuries, usually better than the internet does.
Not all those who wander are lost.
It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.
So it goes.
I knew who I was this morning, but I've changed a few times since then.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
Do I dare disturb the universe?
Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
Quoted as a hymn to nonconformity. The poem says the two roads were 'worn really about the same' — Frost is gently mocking the story we tell ourselves afterwards. He called it 'a tricky poem'.
Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it by yourself.
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth... then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
From the Poets and Mystics
Rumi, Rilke, Hafez — the lines that circulate most widely online, with a note on how much of Rumi you've read is really Rumi.
The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
From Coleman Barks' enormously popular English versions. Barks does not read Persian and worked from earlier translations, producing free interpretations rather than literal ones. The sentiment is Rumi's; the phrasing is Barks'.
Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth, 'You owe me.'
From Daniel Ladinsky's The Gift, which he describes as inspired by Hafez rather than translated from him. No corresponding Persian original has been identified.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.
You do not have to be good. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Forever is composed of nows.
Shakespeare on Being Alive
Four centuries on, still the most quoted — and still routinely quoted against the meaning of the scene.
This above all: to thine own self be true.
Quoted as sincere wisdom. Shakespeare gives it to Polonius, a tedious old courtier reciting platitudes at a son who is barely listening — and who is dead within two acts. The irony is the point.
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither: ripeness is all.
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
Famously Misattributed
Beautiful lines the internet credits to the wrong person. Here's who actually said them — worth knowing before you get one tattooed.
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
Absent from Gandhi's collected writings. It is a 20th-century compression of a longer passage: 'If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.' The slogan version appears to be American, from the 1970s.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
No Einstein source exists. The earliest printed versions are from Narcotics Anonymous literature in 1981 and Rita Mae Brown's novel Sudden Death in 1983.
Well-behaved women seldom make history.
Usually credited to Marilyn Monroe or Eleanor Roosevelt. It was written by a Harvard historian in a scholarly article about Puritan funeral sermons — and she meant it as an observation about the archival record, not a rallying cry.
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
John Lennon made it famous in Beautiful Boy in 1980, and it is almost always credited to him. The cartoonist Allen Saunders published it twenty-three years earlier.
Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
Attributed to Wilde constantly and found in none of his work. No printed version predates the 20th century, long after his death.
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
No Twain source. Twain is a magnet for orphaned quotes — if a witty line has no author, the internet gives it to him or to Churchill.
Dance like nobody's watching.
Credited to Mark Twain, Satchel Paige, and William Purkey in roughly equal measure. None of the attributions holds up; the phrasing appears to be modern and anonymous.
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.
A tidied-up rewrite. Thoreau actually wrote: 'If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.'
The best quotes about life are still in the books
Every line on this page was written by someone who read a great deal first. Parch keeps the quotes you find attached to the book they came from — searchable forever, private by default, and one tap from becoming a card worth sharing.
Questions about these quotes
What is the most famous quote about life?
Socrates' "The unexamined life is not worth living" and Mary Oliver's "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" are probably the two most quoted — one from Plato's Apology, the other from a 1990 poem. Both ask the same question about 2,400 years apart.
Are these quotes actually verified?
Where a quote appears in a specific book, poem, or essay, we name it — 66 of the 82 here carry a source. Where the attribution is traditional but no primary source exists, we mark it "attributed" rather than pretending. And 14 quotes on this page are famously credited to the wrong person; we say who actually wrote them.
Which life quotes did the internet get wrong?
"Be the change you wish to see in the world" is not in Gandhi's writings. "The definition of insanity..." is not Einstein's. "Well-behaved women seldom make history" was written by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in a 1976 academic article, not by Marilyn Monroe. And "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans" predates John Lennon by 23 years.
Can I use these quotes on Instagram or in a caption?
Yes. Short quotations with attribution are standard practice. Use the "Short only" filter to narrow the page to quotes under seventy characters, which fit a bio or caption without truncating, then tap Copy to take the quote and its author together.
How do I save quotes from books I'm reading?
That is what Parch does. Save a quote against the book it came from, and it stays searchable and attached to that book forever — then turn any of them into a designed card to share. It works on iOS and Android, and your notes are private by default.
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