Life is like a beautiful and winding lane, on either side bright
flowers, and beautiful butterflies, and tempting fruits, which we
scarcely pause to admire and to taste, so eager are we to hasten to an
opening which we imagine will be more beautiful still. But by degrees as
we advance, the trees grow bleak; the flowers and butterflies fail, the
fruits disappear, and we find we have arrived--to reach a desert
waste.--_G. A. Sala._
How small a portion of our life it is that we really enjoy! In youth we
are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age we are
looking backwards to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we
appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even
that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on
some future day when we have time.--_Colton._
The days of our years are three-score years and ten; and if by reason of
strength they be four-score years, yet is their strength labor and
sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.--_Bible._
When I reflect upon what I have seen, what I have heard, what I have
done, I can hardly persuade myself that all that frivolous hurry and
bustle and pleasure of the world had any reality; and I look on what has
passed as one of those wild dreams which opium occasions, and I by no
means wish to repeat the nauseous dose for the sake of the fugitive
illusion.--_Chesterfield._
Life is like a game of whist. I don't enjoy the game much, but I like to
play my cards well, and see what will be the end of it.--_George Eliot._
He most lives who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best; and he
whose heart beats the quickest lives the longest.--_James Martineau._
Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be
defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent
of thistledown.--_George Eliot._
When we embark in the dangerous ship called Life, we must not, like
Ulysses, be tied to the mast; we must know how to listen to the songs of
the sirens and to brave their blandishments.--_Arsene Houssaye._
Life is thick sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass
quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes the greater
is their power to harm us.--_Voltaire._
The earnestness of life is the only passport to the satisfaction of
life.--_Theodore Parker._
I am convinced that there is no man that knows life well, and remembers
all the incidents of his past existence, who would accept it again; we
are certainly here to punish precedent sins.--_Campbell._