Top 100 Life Before Man Quotes
#1. He's heard Unitarianism called a featherbed for falling Christians, but his mother doesn't seem like a woman who has fallen anywhere. (Where is the featherbed for falling Unitarians, he wonders? Such as himself.) [From "Life Before Man," 1979)
Margaret Atwood
#2. My father passed away a few days before my election. This man, an African American born to a poor single mother in 1936 in the South, would worry in the last years of his life that he had better life chances when he was growing up than a young man born in the same circumstances would have today.
Cory Booker
#3. If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same old person?
Joe Abercrombie
#4. I did not rush in with the vim I would have displayed a year or so earlier, before Life had made me the grim, suspicious man I am to-day:
P.G. Wodehouse
#5. No man can possibly know what life means, what the world means, until he has a child and loves it. And then the whole universe changes and nothing will ever again seem exactly as it seemed before.
Lafcadio Hearn
#6. Death takes what man would keep," said the butterfly, "and leaves what man would lose. Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks. I warm my hands before the fire of life and get four-way relief.
Peter S. Beagle
#7. One of the things I love about our source text as Christians, the Bible, is that it teaches us not to avoid conflict. And it teaches us that before the fall of man, in Paradise, there was conflict. God wants conflict to be a part of your life.
Donald Miller
#8. We all stand before the judge at some point, and the way a man dies is no different than how he decides to live life. You just remember that when your time comes.
Johnny Stone
#9. The man who seeks one thing in life, and but one May hope to achieve it before life be done. But he who seeks all things wherever he goes Only reaps from the hopes which around him he sows A harvest of barren regrets.
Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl Of Lytton
#10. Salute to the Thief. Junaid of Baghdad was passing the scene of a public hanging, where a thief was on the scaffold. Junaid bowed towards the criminal. Someone asked him: 'What did you do that?' Junaid said: 'I was bowing before his single-mindedness. For his aim, that man has given his life.
Idries Shah
#11. To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to live the life of a child forever. For what is a man's life, unless woven into the life of our ancestors by the memory of past deeds?
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#12. Even here, in the weight machine of a train station, they try to hoodwink us. Here, on the threshold of a man's freedom, just before he boards a train to a new life, these flashing fortune machines are the final alarm bell of the Rooster Coop.
Aravind Adiga
#13. We should be surprised that a matter that generally plays such an important part in the life of man has hitherto been almost entirely disregarded by philosophers, and lies before us as raw and untreated material.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#14. Boethius might have been styled happy, if that precarious epithet could be safely applied before the last term of the life of man.
Edward Gibbon
#15. Hi there! You're cute. Do you have any girlfriends? 'Cause Gran says Momma needs a man in her life. Then Pops says, 'Pfft, Martine, the last thing Elise needs is a man!' But I think my Gran is right."
"Rennie, for tonight, let's play the think-about-what-we-say-before-we-say-it-game.
Lauren Dane
#16. I was born into the club life. My father was an Angel, and my grandfather before him. I was birthed by a club whore, suckled at the breast before the bitch ODed. I was chewed up as a sweet, blue-eyed baby boy and spat out a man.
Carmen Jenner
#17. In linking holy and without blemish (or without blame) so closely, the Holy Spirit would have led us to seek for the embodiment of holiness as a spiritual power in the blamelessness of practice and of daily life.
Andrew Murray
#18. Blood was shed that you three might breathe the good air of life, and if that means you have to miss out on a Zibzy game, then so be it. Part of being a man is putting others' needs before your own.
Andrew Peterson
#19. Time is not money; time is an opportunity to live before you die. So a man who walks, and lives and sees and thinks as he walks, has lengthened his life.
Donald C. Peattie
#20. Yes, that's right ... love should come before logic ... Only then will man come to understand the meaning of life.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#21. Writing books about whores ... I'll bet you newer ... joined giblets wiv a man in your lily-white life.'
Dr. Hindley and Worthy began to reprove him, but Sara smiled quizzically. ' "Joined giblets?" ... I've never heard it put that way before.
Lisa Kleypas
#22. The one image that's been causing a lot of discussion is one image that I shot of a man falling head-first from the building, before the buildings fell down. He was trapped in the fire, and decided to jump and take his own life, rather than being burned.
Richard Drew
#23. You may be asking yourselves, 'Who is this man standing before us?' i would like to reply to that question with something absolutely certain about my own life: The man standing before you is a man who has been forgiven. A man who was, and is, saved from his many sins.
Pope Francis
#24. There is an ancient saying, famous among men, that thou shouldst not judge fully of a man's life before he dieth, whether it should be called blest or wretched.
Sophocles
#25. A professor at the University of Michigan said to me: "As soon as we create life in a test tube, we won't need God anymore." I answered: "This happened once before when man ruled God out and proposed the Tower of Babel. It ended in frustration, confusion, and judgment.
Billy Graham
#26. Nature has granted man no better gift than the shortness of life. The senses grow dull, the limbs are numb, sight, bearing, gait, even the teeth and alimentary organs die before we do, and yet this period is reckoned a portion of life. - Pg. 82
Robert Harris
#27. Maybe I would like to see beauty again before I die." "Bah. What would you carve? What would you see before you die? What could be worth your life?" "Man's nobility - the most sublime form of beauty.
Terry Goodkind
#28. She showed that alertness, that swiftness of reflection comes out in men before a battle, in conflict, in the dangerous and decisive moments of life - those moments when a man shows once and for all his value, and that all his past has not been wasted but has been a preparation for these moments.
Leo Tolstoy
#29. A man's labor is not only his capital but his life. When it passes it returns never more. To utilize it, to prevent its wasteful squandering, to enable the poor man to bank it up for use hereafter, this surely is one of the most urgent tasks before civilization.
William Booth
#30. Live your life as a revolution and not just a process of evolution. I realized today that if I stay on a path of gradual evolution into the man I ultimately want to become, I am going to run out of time before I reach the goal.
Steve Sabol
#31. Prayer covers the whole of man's life. There is no thought, feeling, yearning, or desire, however low, trifling, or vulgar we may deem it, which if it affects our real interest or happiness, we may not lay before God and be sure of sympathy.
Henry Ward Beecher
#32. Before marriage, a man declares that he would lay down his life to serve you; after marriage, he won't even lay down his newspaper to talk to you.
Helen Rowland
#33. CENTAUR, n. One of a race of persons who lived before the division of labor had been carried to such a pitch of differentiation, and who followed the primitive economic maxim, "Every man his own horse."
Ambrose Bierce
#34. I am the one who needs rescuing. Save me ( ... ) Save me from going back to being the man I was before I came here. Save me from all the years of loneliness I'll have to endure without you in my arms. Save me from spending the rest of my life longing for a woman I can never have.
Teresa Medeiros
#35. Before man ventures into daydreams about his futuristic society, he should
first immerse himself in the nothingness of his being, and finally restore life to what it is all about: a working hypothesis.
Tomislav Sunic
#36. I'm like a man who's been half-asleep all his life, trying to find out what he was like before he woke up.
Daniel Keyes
#37. He felt like a man who, after straining his eyes to peer into the remote distance, finds what he was seeking at his very feet. All his life he had been looking over the heads of those around him, while he had only to look before him without straining his eyes. p 1320
Leo Tolstoy
#38. I always check my harness before I do a stunt; I test-drive the cars I have to race or explode; I'm present at all pyrotechnical rehearsals; and I walk through everything step-by-step. No man should put their life in someone else's hands unless they have covered their own safety from all angles.
Akshay Kumar
#39. I repose in this quiet and secluded spot not from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited as to race by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life: EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR.
Thaddeus Stevens
#40. The system of life on this planet is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realized that it was a system at all and that it wasn't something that was just there.
Douglas Adams
#41. No man likes to acknowledge that he has made a mistake in the choice of his profession, and every man, worthy of the name, will row long against wind and tide before he allows himself to cry out, 'I am baffled!' and submits to be floated passively back to land.
Charlotte Bronte
#42. A master of origami said he tried to express with paper the joy of life, and the last thought before a man dies.
Tor Udall
#43. Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it's business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don't love what you're doing and you can't give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You'll be an old man before you know it.
Al Lopez
#44. A marriage is a way of accepting love and commitment of a man and woman in front of God, before moving to a new life.
Santonu Kumar Dhar
#45. A man needs a private life. With no ability to have a private life, one thing leads to another, and before you know it we have Bill and Monica. We need to get real about things. Humans are humans. Why should we expect more?
Jack Nicholson
#46. The man of upright life is obeyed before he speaks.
Confucius
#47. It's interesting, winning an Academy Award as a young man ... life-changing, but I'm just me within that. It's been very helpful for my career, but I'm trying to stay on the path I was on before.
Adrien Brody
#48. I had worked for this old man and once he told me that he had spent his whole life thinking about his career and his work. And he was fifty-two and it suddenly struck him that he had never really given anything of himself. His life was for no one and nothing. He was almost crying saying that.
Celine
#49. A dead man's vanity: his ashes full of life that cannot be deceased before a living being's pride.
Munia Khan
#50. If a man's public record be a clear one, if he has kept his pledges before the world, I do not inquire what his private life may have been.
Susan B. Anthony
#51. He was another person, despite his firm decision and anguished effort to continue to be the same man he had been before his mortal encounter with love.
The truth is that he was never the same again. Winning back Fermina Daza was the sole purpose of his life
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#52. Only the stupid conquer in life; the other man foresees
too many obstacles and becomes uncertain before he starts.
Erich Maria Remarque
#53. This is Maximilien de Robespierre, barrister-at-law: unmarried, personable, a young man with all his life before him. Today against his most deeply held convictions he has followed the course of the law and sentenced a criminal to death. And now he is going to pay for it.
Hilary Mantel
#54. Let never man be bold enough to say,
Thus, and no farther shall my passion stray:
The first crime, past, compels us into more,
And guilt grows fate, that was but choice, before.
Aaron Hill
#55. Every morning is a beginning, a fresh start, and a man needn't be hog-tied to the past. Whatever went before, a man's life can begin now, today.
Louis L'Amour
#56. What is there astonishing in the death of a mortal? But we are grieved at his dying before his time. Are we sure that this was not his time? We do not know how to pick and choose what is good for our souls, or how to fix the limits of the life of man.
Saint Basil
#57. Once in his life - Laurent got only two words out before the man simply did what most people wanted to do when speaking with Laurent: he hit him.
C.S. Pacat
#58. At present we can only reason of the divine justice from what we know of justice in man. When we are in other scenes, we may have truer and nobler ideas of it; but while we are in this life, we can only speak from the volume that is laid open before us.
Alexander Pope
#59. In the past two years, I've started the process of becoming a new man. I am much chastened and profoundly remorseful over the reckless and hurtful things I have done in my life, especially those which have brought me before you today.
Jack Abramoff
#60. Surely going to bed with a man before marriage was the most courageous act of my life.
Diana Trilling
#61. Before the battle they had been discussing whether there might be life after death, and Windham and Rochester had made a pact that if there was, the first to die would come back and tell the other. But, said Rochester, he [Windham] never did.
Jenny Uglow
#62. Sweetness eliminates gravity and thus a man with a heavy burden of life starts feeling like floating in the air before sweetness.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#63. Every man must be made to realize that further retreat is impossible. He must realize with his mind and heart that this is a matter of life and death of the Soviet state, of the life and death of the people of our country ... the Nazi troops must be stopped now, before it is too late.
Leonid Brezhnev
#64. Feel no fear before the multitude of men, do not run in panic,
but let each man bear his shield straight toward the fore-fighters,
regarding his own life as hateful and holding the dark spirits of death as dear as the radiance of the sun.
Tyrtaeus
#65. Just the night before, a puma's howl had set a chill at my spine and, man, life didn't get any richer than that.
Ed Lynskey
#66. Mother, before God," I say, my voice shaking with tears, "I swear that I have to believe that there is more for me in life than being wife to one man after another, and hoping not to die in childbirth!
Philippa Gregory
#67. He knows if he kills this man he will see his face every night before he goes to sleep. That his face will become more vivid to him than his own face. If he kills the man he will be forced to wear this man's face for the rest of his life.
Glenn Haybittle
#68. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment.
T. S. Eliot
#69. It is not the grown man- the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated offspring- you see before you, with his parking tickets and unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever been all rolled up into one.
Jojo Moyes
#70. Not to know what happened before you were born is always to remain a child. For what is a man's life if it is not linked with the life of future generations by memories of the past?
Marianne Curley
#71. Where have the years gone, Ruby Rose? Sometimes I have to stop and think about how old I am. When I wake up in the morning, before I move this tired old body or look in the blasted mirror, I swear I'm still a young man. It just feels like yesterday. I don't know how it's gone so fast.
Lea Davey
#72. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as theevening of life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just before sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an hour.
Henry David Thoreau
#73. A man's greatest moment in life is when his enemy lays vanquished, his village aflame, his herds driven before you and his weeping wives and daughters are clasped to your breast.
Genghis Khan
#74. Then he sat down at the table of a larger man, a man with tattoos but the old kind, before tattoos became dainty and about spiritual life. The man wore tattoos from the time when tattoos meant you liked to kick people around.
Aimee Bender
#75. Jesus ... said - long before his followers had established churches and a priesthood - 'I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.' This Way is the life of the Spirit. To follow it entails no necessity for places (all places are holy ground), no priesthood, since every man becomes a priest unto God ...
Esme Wynne-Tyson
#76. We have not only to be witnesses and pleaders, but we have also to be examples ... If a man's life at home is unworthy, he should go several miles away before he stands up to preach, and then, when he stands up, he should say nothing.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#77. These things were happening in my life where I was like, 'Man, I wish my pops was here to see this.' I never had those thoughts before fame, when my life was just a regular life. I wasn't saying, 'I wish my dad could be around and see me working at Applebee's.'
Kid Cudi
#78. Here lies the girl whose only crutch
Was loving one man just a little too much
If you go before I do
I'm gonna tell the gravedigger that he better dig two.
The Band Perry
#79. A conservative young man has wound up his life before it was unreeled. We expect old men to be conservative but when a nation's young men are so, its funeral bell is already rung.
Henry Ward Beecher
#80. As a man must be born before he can begin to lead his physical life, so he must be born to lead a Divine Life. That birth occurs in the Sacrament of Baptism. To survive, he must be nourished by Divine Life; that is done in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.
Fulton J. Sheen
#81. Man what's the point of living if I'm living for myself
Lord empty out my life before I put you on the shelf
LeCrae
#82. Any man that puts other family first before his own immediate family is sure heading for a future disaster because; family is everything".
Abdulazeez Henry Musa
#83. It is always hard to leave a home a drama a way of life a life. So I sat there warm and safe that night held by the sea and a good man and my own good fortune victim and witness to all the transitory sweetness like Gatsby's dreams that stood before and behind me.
Gail Caldwell
#84. The average life expectancy for a black man in an American city is something like twenty-three very short years. The reality of that had never fully kicked in before, but it did that night. And I thought, hell, I'm at risk just walking around.
Suzanne Brockmann
#85. There are three things a man must do before his life is done; Write two lines in APL, And make the buggers run.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
#86. The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides. Accept life, and you must accept regret.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#87. No man ever sailed over exactly the same route that another sailed over before him; every man who starts on the ocean of life arches his sails to an untried breeze.
William Mathews
#88. If a man tried to take his time on earth and prove before he died, what one man's life could be worth, well I wonder what would happen to this world?
Harry Chapin
#89. The agony of a man's affliction is often necessary to put him into the right mood to face the fundamental things of life. The Psalmist says: Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now have I kept Thy Word.
Oswald Chambers
#90. It is a very lonely life that a man leads, who becomes aware of truths before their times.
Thomas Reed
#91. No man's prayer is acceptable with God whose life is not well pleasing before God.
Alexander Whyte
#92. Then right before my eyes, she flew. She actually flew like a bird. No, she flew as a young girl might fly, or a woman or a man, if people were meant to fly. She soared through the air. And that changed the course of my life forever.
James Patterson
#93. The Gods hate hubris in a man almost more than any trait. Remember the boastful words of Odysseus to Poseidon after the fall of Troy? He paid for it with ten years of his life, and the lives of all his men. Retract your boast before something bad happens!
Gary Corby
#95. A man must be disposed to judge of emancipation by other tests than whether it has increased the produce of sugar, - and to hate slavery for other reasons than because it starves men and whips women, - before he is ready to lay the first stone of his anti-slavery life.
Frederick Douglass
#96. We must imagine our lives well. We must engage our conscience. Conscience is the voice of God in the nature and heart of man.
Laura Kasischke
#97. A wise man once told me, Life's greatest fear is having knowledge of something, and dying before having the opportunity to share it." -Charles Blair
Charles Blair
#98. This life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant.
Venerable Bede
#99. I kiss him with everything that I have and everything that I am. I kiss him with the passion of a woman tasting the promise of true love for the very first time in her life. Every man before him forgotten.
Mia Asher
