Nature

"Our lives are albums written through With good or ill, with false or true; And as the blessed angels turn The pages of our years, God grant they read the good with smiles, And blot the ill with tears!"

"The days grow shorter, the nights grow longer, The headstones thicken along the way; And life grows sadder, but love grows stronger For those who walk with us day by day."

"Our lives are songs; God writes the words And we set them to music at pleasure; And the song grows glad, or sweet or sad, As we choose to fashion the measure."

"Ah! somehow life is bigger after all Than any painted angel could we see The God that is within us!"

"The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations."

"We live by Admiration, Hope, and Love; And, even as these are well and wisely fixed, In dignity of being we ascend."

"Plain living and high thinking are no more."

"A narrow isthmus betwixt time and eternity."

"Man's life is so interwoven with the grand life of his Maker that it admits of no adequate or rational interpretation except when the Creator as Supreme and the creatures of His hand as subordinate, are seen working in unison."

"Life is great if properly viewed in any aspect; it is mainly great when viewed in connection with the world to come."

"While we seek to fill up life in a way that will best secure the ends of our existence here, our whole plan and course of action should be such as will not hinder but serve our preparation for a future world."

"Pray for and work for fullness of life above every thing; full red blood in the body; full honesty and truth in the mind; and the fullness of a grateful love for the Saviour in your heart."

"There is no life so humble that, if it be true and genuinely human and obedient to God, it may not hope to shed some of His light. There is no life so meager that the greatest and wisest of us can afford to despise it. We cannot know at what moment it may flash forth with the life of God."

"Life is rather a state of embryo, a preparation for life; a man is not completely born till he has passed through death."

"And thus does life go on, until death accomplishes the catastrophe in silence, takes the worn frame within his hand, and, as if it were a dried-up scroll, crumbles it in his grasp to ashes. The monuments of kingdoms, too, shall disappear. Still the globe shall move; still the stars shall burn; still the sun shall paint its colors on the day, and its colors on the year. What, then, is the individual, or what even is the race in the sublime recurrings of Time? Years, centuries, cycles, are nothing to these. The sun that measures out the ages of our planet is not a second-hand on the great dial of the universe."

"This is life's greatest moment, when the soul unfolds capacities which reach beyond earth's boundaries."

"Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment uncertain, and judgment difficult."

"Life is before you,— not earthly life alone, but life— a thread running interminably through the warp of eternity."

"Life as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence when it comes upon soundings."

"The highest life is a broken column; the fairest life, a tar nished gem; the richest life, an unripened fruit."

"God help us! it is a foolish little thing, this human life, at the best; and it is half ridiculous and half pitiful to see what importance we ascribe to it, and to its little ornaments and distinctions."

"Act as if you expected to live a hundred years, but might die to-morrow."

"A few years hence and he will be beneath the sod; but those cliffs will stand, as now, facing the ocean, incessantly lashed by its waves, yet unshaken, immovable; and other eyes will gaze on them for their brief day of life, and then they, too, will close."

"O thou child of many prayers! Life hath quicksands, Life hath snares! Care and age come unawares!"

"Life and religion are one, or neither is any thing."

"Oh, I believe that there is no away; that no love, no life, goes ever from us; it goes as He went, that it may come again, deeper and closer and surer, and be with us always, even to the end of the world."

"A picture without sky has no glory. This present, unless we see gleaming beyond it the eternal calm of the heavens, above the tossing tree tops with withering leaves, and the smoky chimneys, is a poor thing for our eyes to gaze at, or our hearts to love, or our hands to toil on."

"Let the current of your being set towards God, then your life will be filled and calmed by one master-passion which unites and stills the soul."

"There is no human life so poor and small as not to hold many a divine possibility."

"They waste life in what are called good resolutions—partial efforts at reformation, feebly commenced, heartlessly conducted, and hopelessly concluded."

"Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou livest, Live well; how long, or short, permit to Heaven."

"The grand question of life is, Is my name written in heaven?"

"This earth will be looked back on like a lowly home, and this life of ours be remembered like a short apprenticeship to duty."

"As one climbs a mountain roadway, and looks off on the landscape through the forest trees or from some overtopping crag, at each step he sees more and more of the outlying beauty of field and lake and forest and hill and river, till he reaches the summit, where the whole vast scene opens to the view, and enthuses his soul with delight. So life should be a constant lookout, through the gray mists, through the falling shadows, through the running tears, till he comes to the shining top of life in God Himself, where the fogs lift, and the shadows fall, and the view is all undisturbed."

"The end of life is to be like unto God; and the soul following God, will be like unto Him."

"I believe that we cannot live better than in seeking to become better."

"I would not choose to go where I would be afraid to die, nor could I bear to live without a good hope for hereafter."

"Making their lives a prayer."

"It is infamy to die, and not be missed."

"What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are."

"… the giver of life, who gave it for happiness and not for wretchedness."

"There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or in personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair."

"Life involves suffering and transitoriness. No person can choose his age or the condition of his time. The past may rob the present of much joy and much mystery. The generation of Buchenwald and the Siberian labor camps cannot talk with the same optimism as its fathers. The bliss of Dante has been lost in our civilization."

"Unrest of spirit is a mark of life; one problem after another presents itself and in the solving of them we can find our greatest pleasure."

"This is a world in which each of us, knowing his limitations, knowing the evils of superficiality and the terrors of fatigue, will have to cling to what is close to him, to what he knows, to what he can do, to his friends and his tradition and his love, lest he be dissolved in a universal confusion and know nothing and love nothing."

"Life is not so important as the duties of life."

"A baby is God's opinion that life should go on."

"The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, however, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all life that comes within his reach. A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, and that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help. Only the universal ethic of the feeling of responsibility in an ever-widening sphere for all that lives—only that ethic can be founded in thought…. The ethic of Reverence for Life, therefore, comprehends within itself everything that can be described as love, devotion, and sympathy whether in suffering, joy, or effort."

"Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me. It is an uncomfortable doctrine which the true ethics whisper into my ear. You are happy, they say; therefore you are called upon to give much."

"Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means."