"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does."
(Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche)

"He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation."
(John Stuart Mill)

"Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in."
(Mark Twain)

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."
(Anne Dillard)

"I advice you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying you annuities."
(Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire, 1694-1778)

"I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves."
(Ludwig Wittgenstein)

"I find life itself provides ample and sufficient tests of my valor and mettle: illness; betrayal; fruitless searches for love; working for the abusive, the insane, and the despotic. All challenges easily as thrilling to me as scrambling over icy rock in a pair of barely adequate boots."
(David Rakoff, on mountain climbing, from Fraud)

"I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment."
(John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley)

"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next."
(Gilda Radner)

"I went to the woods, because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
(Henry David Thoreau, Walden)