Frederic Bastiat Quotes

What am I, Life? A thing of watery salt Held in cohesion by unresting cells, Which work they know not why, which never halt, Myself unwitting where their Master dwells?

The realization that life is absurdand cannot be an end, but only abeginning. This is a truth nearly allgreat minds have taken as their starting point.

But that is the object of long living, that man should cease to care about life.

A new question has arisen in modern man's mind, the question, namely, whether life is worth living...No sensible answer can be given to the question...because the question does not make any sense.

I pursue one goal the encyclopaedia of life.

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.

There is also purpose in life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces.

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.

There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living; there is nothing harder to learn.

Life is a gift from God, an unlimited series of opportunities to find the good in ourselves and others. There is good in everything, if we are willing to see it.

There are but three events which concern man: birth, life and death. They are unconscious of their birth, they suffer when they die, and they neglect to live.

Every breath we draw is a gift of God's love; every moment of existence is a grace.

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.

Reason is Life's sole arbiter, themagic Laby'rinth's single clue.

Life's perhaps the only riddle That we shrink from giving up.

It is a tragedy that most of us die before we have begun to live.

Life is a problem. Not merely a premiss from which we start, but a goal towards which we proceed. It is an opportunity for us not merely to get, but to attain; not simply to have, but to be. Its standard of failure or success is not outward fortune, but inward possession.

Man does not live by bread alone, even presliced bread.

Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.

I'd rather be smart than a movie star.

The meaning of our lives is revealed through experiences that at first seem at odds with each other--moments we wish would never end and moments we wish had never begun.

Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it.

What is our life? A play of passion. Our mirth the music of division. Our mother's wombs the tyring houses be, Where we are drest for this short Comedy.