There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

I’m here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn’t make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

A useless life is an early death.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

For some reason, I’m really comfortable talking about my personal life in songs.

I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first.

The bird is powered by its own life and by its motivation.

Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.

Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.

Time stays, we go.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

Getting older is no problem. You just have to live long enough.

A man makes you feel important – makes you glad you are a woman.

Life is just one damned thing after another.

I just feel so much more comfortable and confident every game I play.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others.

Life is very difficult. One of the most ancient of religious ideas that emerges everywhere, I would say, is that life is essentially suffering.

Apart from life, a strong constitution, and an abiding connection to the Thembu royal house, the only thing my father bestowed upon me at birth was a name, Rolihlahla.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

In a magazine, one can get – from cover to cover – 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

I’ve lived in a big showplace house, and I never want to live again in a house that overshadows me.

Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it; and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.

Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.

All that seems indispensible in stating the account between the dead and the living, is to see that the debts against the latter do not exceed the advances made by the former.

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us – dreamers and indolent… It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich – these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life’s possibilities.

This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.

We all want to win more, but it’s all about being blessed and embracing your blessings. We have life.

Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.

Ageing’s alright, better than the alternative, which is not being here.

My focus is to forget the pain of life. Forget the pain, mock the pain, reduce it. And laugh.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.

And die of nothing but a rage to live.

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

I think Bible principles are principles for life.

Had I pursued my education long enough to learn all the conventional dos and don’ts of starting a business, I often wonder how different my life and career might have been.

When you have that respect from your teammates, it makes it a lot more comfortable.

Wealth is well known to be a great comforter.

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later – yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?

Life well spent is long.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.