Here are the 117 best handpicked poet quotes about life categorized:
- Deep poet quotes about life
- Inspirational poet quotes about life
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Our Handpicked Poet Quotes About Life
Dive into a collection of the most insightful poet quotes about life, thoughtfully curated for your introspective journey.
Whether you’re seeking words that illuminate the beauty and complexities of existence, or reflect on the resilience and transformative power of the human spirit, our anthology offers a diverse range of meaningful examples.
With our meticulously curated selection, the finest poet quotes about life are all conveniently located in one place.
So, take a moment to explore and appreciate the wisdom and inspiration these words have sparked in poets throughout history!
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My Favorite Poet Quote About Life
Life is a flower, and its honey is love.
–Victor Hugo
Deep Poet Quotes About Life
There is no such thing as a happy life, there are only happy days.
–André Theuriet
The web of our life is of a mingled Yarn, good and ill together.
–Shakespeare
Our life is scarce the twinkle of a star in God’s eternal day.
–B. Taylor
A wasted life is premature death.
–Goethe
It matters not how long we live, but how.
–P. J. Bailey
You’ll see that, since our fate is ruled by chance,
Each man, unknowing, great,
Should frame life so that at some future hour
Fact and his dreamings meet.
–V. Hugo
Sometimes an hour of Fate’s serenest weather strikes through our changeful sky its coming beams; Somewhere above us, in elusive ether, waits the fulfilment of our dearest dreams.
–B. Taylor
Fate holds the strings, and men like children move
But as they’re led: success is from above.
–Lord Lansdowne
Men at some time are masters of their fates;
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
–Shakespeare
The love of liberty with life is given,
And life itself the inferior gift of Heaven.
–J. Dryden
No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him.
–J. R. Lowell
Much learning shows how little mortals know;
Much wealth, how little worldlings can enjoy.
–E. Young
Nothing begins, and nothing ends,
That is not paid with moan;
For we are born in others’ pain,
And perish in our own.
–F. Thompson
To know that which before us lies in daily life Is the prime wisdom.
–Milton
Labor is the unavoidable fatigue of a necessary journey.
–Lord Chesterfield
Learn, if you can, the WHY and the WHEREFORE.
–Lord Chesterfield
You have to buy experience.
–John Galsworthy
Ah! how sweet to waltz through life with the right partner.
–George Meredith
It’s no good simply going—you’ve got to go somewhere.
–Gilbert Parker
Life is only futile to the futile.
–Gilbert Parker
Live and let live is doing good.
–Gilbert Parker
Never give up your soul to things only, keep it for people.
–Gilbert Parker
No past that is hidden has ever been a happy past.
–Gilbert Parker
The real business of life is trying to understand each other.
–Gilbert Parker
The higher we go the faster we live.
–Gilbert Parker
We don’t live in months and years, but just in minutes.
–Gilbert Parker
We are only children till we begin to make our dreams our life.
–Gilbert Parker
Look round the habitable world: how few Know their own good, or knowing it, pursue.
–John Dryden
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
When all the blandishments of life are gone,
The coward sneaks to death, the brave live on.
–George Sewell
To live in hearts we leave behind Is not to die.
–Walter Savage Landor
No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him. There is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will;
And blessed are the horny hands of toil.
–James Russell Lowell
‘T is better to be lowly born, and range with humble livers in content.
Than to be perked up in a glistering grief, And wear a golden sorrow.
–Shakespeare
Man is his own star, and the soul that can render an honest and a perfect man commands all light, all influence, all fate.
–J. Fletcher
True happiness ne’er entered at an eye;
True happiness resides in things unseen.
–E. Young
True happiness consists not in the multitude of friends,
But in the worth and choice.
–B. Jonson
We are our own fates. Our own deeds are our doomsmen. Man’s life was made not for men’s creeds, but men’s actions.
–Lord Lytton (Owen Meredith)
What’s Fame? A fancied life in others’ breath,
A thing beyond us, e’en before our death.
–A. Pope
Our wills and fates do so contrary run that our devices still are overthrown; Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.
–Shakespeare
Know then, whatever cheerful and serene supports the mind, supports the body too; Hence, the most vital movement mortals feel
Is hope, the balm and lifeblood of the soul.
–J. Armstrong
The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is as impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself, as for a thing to be and not to be at the same time.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.
–James Russell Lowell
It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested.
–James Russell Lowell
The soul is a great traveller.
–Gilbert Parker
I ne’er should learn my fate to bear,
Yet I have learned to bear it now
But oh! you must not ask me how!
–H. Heine (J. E. Wallis, Translator)
Life is the only blessing that wickedness possesses.
–Schiller
Life is not the highest good, but the consciousness of sin is life’s greatest evil.
–Schiller
Life is Love.
–Goethe
Life is still so fair.
–Schiller
Art is long and time is fleeting.
–Longfellow
Life, as well as all other things, hath its bounds assigned by nature; and its conclusion, like the last act of a play, is old age, the fatigue of which we ought to shun, especially when our appetites are fully satisfied.
–Cicero
A man of upright life, and pure from guilt, needs no weapon to defend him.
–Horace
Death is the gate of life. Death is common to all. Death rather than disgrace. Death is the utmost boundary of wealth and power.
–Horace
Life is like a deceitful woman who breaks all her pledges to her lover,
and leaves him no other consolation than the right to despise her.
–Alfred Mercier
Woman’s life may be divided into three stages; in the first she dreams of love, in the second experiences it, in the last she regrets it.
–Saint Prosper
Life often seems but a shipwreck, whose fragments are friendship, glory and love. The shores of time that we pass during our life are covered with these derelicts.
–Mme. de Staël
Inspirational Poet Quotes About Life
Life has bestowed nothing on man without great labour.
–Horace
There is no other. It is not, believe me, the part of a wise man to say ” I will live.” To-morrow’s life is too late, so-live to-day.
–Martial
For life is only life, when blest with health.
–Martial
Why do we, in our brief span of life, aim at achieving so much?
–Horace
In adversity it is easy for a man to despise life, but the truly brave man is he who can endure to be miserable.
–Martial
Each man must wait his latest day of life, and none may we call truly happy until the grave closes over him.
–Ovid
A noble man must either live a good life or die a glorious death.
–Sophocles
Sweetest is the life that is untroubled with thought.
–Sophocles
A man should endeavour not merely to appear good, but to be good both in his public and private life.
–Plato
Our life’s a stage, a comedy; either learn to play and take it lightly, or bear its troubles patiently.
–Palladas
For him whose life is misery a speedy death is best.
–Euripides
Life is like the dice that, falling, still show a different face. So life, though it remains the same, is always presenting different aspects.
–Alexis
A man’s life, like a statue, ought to be beautiful in all its parts.
–Socrates
None are so much enamoured of life as those who are growing old.
–Sophocles
Life is like a chariot-wheel that ever rolls along.
–Anacreon
Let us help one another to bear the burdens of life.
–Voltaire
What lightens labour, sanctifies toil and makes a man good and strong, wise and patient, just and benevolent, both lowly and great, as well as worthy of intelligence and freedom, is the perpetual vision before him of a better world beaming through life’s shadows.
–Victor Hugo
The happiness of life makes the glory of death.
–Victor Hugo
This life is the cradle in which we are prepared for the life to come.
–Joubert
Each period of life has its failings. Youth is fiery and insatiable in its pleasures; age is incorrigible in its avarice.
–Fénelon
In youth we only live for loving; later, we have to love or it would not be life.
–Saint-Évremond
I no longer live. I am merely a spectator of life.
–Lamartine
Love is the sweetest thing in life. No sound is sweeter than the sound of praise.
–Xenophon
All things in life are a mingling of bitterness and joy; war has its delights, and marriage its alarms.
–La Fontaine
Art is not the bread, but the wine of life.
–Jean Paul Richter
Honour women! They entwine and weave the roses of heaven into the life we live on earth.
–Schiller
What is life without the light of love!
–Schiller
When the life of a great man has fallen to the dust, his name still lives on.
–Schiller
He who loves nothing, lives a dark and wintry life.
–Gessner
We cannot have a perfect life without friends.
–Dante
Making ourselves immortal costs us life.
–R. de Campoamor
Life, as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence where it comes upon soundings.
–Holmes
Life at the greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humoured and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.
–Goldsmith
Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for vicissitudes.
–Goethe
Life has no memory.
–Emerson
Life, however short, is made shorter by waste of time; and its progress towards happiness, though naturally slow, is made still slower by unnecessary labour.
–Johnson
Life is a campaign, not a battle, and has its defeats as well as its victories.
–Donn Piatt
Life is a fairy scene: almost all that deserves the name of enjoyment or pleasure is only a charming delusion; and in comes repining age, in all the gravity of hoary wisdom, and wretchedly chases away the bewitching phantom.
–Burns
Life is a fortress which neither you nor I know anything about. Why throw obstacles in the way of its defence? Its own means are superior to all the apparatus of your laboratories.
–Emerson
Life is a fragment, a moment between two eternities, influenced by all that has preceded, and to influence all that follows.
–Channing
Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.
–Emerson
Life is a sleep, love is a dream, and you have lived if you have loved.
–A. de Musset
Life is a voyage.
–Victor Hugo
Life is act, and not to do is death.
–Lewis Morris
Life is probation, and this earth no goal, But starting-point of man.
–Browning
Life lies most open in a closed eye.
–Quarles
Life must be lived on a higher plane. We must go up to a higher platform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there the whole aspect of things changes.
–Emerson
Life only avails, not the having lived.
–Emerson
Life outweighs all things, if love lies within it.
–Goethe
Life sues the young like a new acquaintance…. To us, who are declined in years, life appears like an old friend.
–Goldsmith
Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live.
–Emerson
Life with all it yields of joy and woe, And hope and fear, Is just our chance o’ the prize of learning love, How love might be, hath been indeed, and is.
–Browning
Like a morning dream, life becomes more and more bright the longer we live, and the reason of everything appears more clear.
–Jean Paul
All our life is mixed with death, And who knoweth which is best?
–Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A day for toil, an hour for sport, But for a friend is life too short.
–R. W. Emerson