LIFE, the magazine, was also material for a bantering word game I played with my friends. We would repeatedly ask each other:
A magazine.
How much does it cost?
Twenty-five cents.
I only have a dime.
That’s tough.
What’s tough?
Life.
What’s life?
A magazine…
I was hoping that after collecting over 500 quotations that ponder this question, I might have a definitive answer of what life is. The best I could come up with at the end of my research, however, was that life was a magazine I used to read when I was growing up.
Allen Klein
San Francisco
Some of our favorite quotes
“What’s life? I really don’t know and that’s OK. I can live with that. After all I don’t know how my computer works and I still use that.”
– Rick Segel (page 2)
“The messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.”
– Daniel J. Boorstin (page 2)
“Life is the childhood of our immortality.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (p. 3)
“Life isn’t a science. We make it up as we go.”
– Al Hirschfeld (page 25)
“To me life has meaning because we love.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt (p. 36)
“Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (p. 40)
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
– Søren Kierkegaard (p. 48)
“Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one’s will.”
– Paul Gauguin (p. 58)
“There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.”
– Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (p. 72)
“Life is a test. It is only a test. Had this been a real life you would have been instructed where to go and what to do.”
– Poster saying (p. 75)
