Chester Himes Quotes

Human life [is] ... a process of filling in time until the arrival of death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of what kind of business one is going to transact during the long wait.

Life is short, and therefore, one thing being certain, death, let us take up a great ideal, and give up the whole life to it. For what is the value of life, this vegetating little low life of man? Subordinating it to one high ideal is the only value that life has.

it seems a silly kind o' business to bring us into the world at all for no special reason 'cept to take us out of it again just as folks 'ave learned to know us a bit and find us useful.

I don't know if I was put on this Earth for a purpose or not. But I'm fairly confident that I'll be taken off of it for one.

Life belongs to man, but the meaning of life is beyond him.

I finally did not understand if we are living to survive or we are living to die!

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?

You don't waste your entire life waiting to go back to dust.

We were born and we die. In between, I think we try to live as best we can.

If you haven't understood that if you are born you die, you scarcely deserve to be able to be alive.

What is life about? Two things: love and death.

Life is what you do while you're waiting to die.

If a man knew how to live he would never die.

No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they'd die for.

Thou madest man, he knows not why, he thinks he was not made to die.

We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, "I wish I hadn't been born?" Once you're born you'll have to die, now is that funny or sad?

What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.

Is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.

We are not born to survive. Only to live.

If I have no children what would be the point of living.

We all have a cradle-to-the-grave journey to make and, in between, what do you do? There's got to be something hereafter.

Mother Teresa was asked what was the meaning of life, and she said to help other people, and I thought, 'What a strange thing to say' - but maybe it's the right thing to say.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.