William S. Burroughs Quotes

Pain is something that's common to human life. When we ignore it, we aren't engaging in the whole reality, and the pain begins to fester.

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.

Acting is about communicating what it is like to be human: the pain, the laughs, the misery, the joy. I suppose I am searching to have it all.

I don't know if my work is a concerted effort to make kids sad! But life and death go hand in hand. It's our condition as human beings.

It is true that I have had heartache and tragedy in my life. These are things none of us avoids. Suffering is the price of being alive.

Love is possible as life is possible.

To labour is the lot of man below; And when Jove gave us life, he gave us woe.

What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.

Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for a while and then act our part in it.

Birth, death, and suffering all bring us to the very edge of what our minds can understand.

If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.

The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the easy life of the gods would be a lifeless life.

Humans will always endure suffering - even accepting the fact that we're going to die will cause us suffering, and from that stems a little pessimism and negativity that all of us are susceptible to.

The first and foremost reality is that suffering and death are not only enemies of life, but a means of reminding us of life's twin realities, love and hate.

Fair or foul the lot apportioned life on earth, we bear alike.

Since every man who lives is born to die, And none can boast sincere felicity, With equal mind, what happens, let us bear, Nor joy nor grieve too much for things beyond our care. Like pilgrims to the' appointed place we tend; The world's an inn, and death the journey's end.

Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?

The essence of being human is that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we can love some persons and some things, in spite of the fact that time and death will ultimately claim us all.

[H]appy or miserable, life is the only blessing which man possesses[.

All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.

Life is a disease; and the only difference between on man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives.

What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.

There is a saying that no man has tasted the full flavor of life until he has known poverty, love, and war.

Those who die, merely suffering the woes of life like cats and dogs, are they men?