Display Definition – The Cynical Web Site

life

n. A strange, inconvenient, and unpopular restaurant where waiters bring you things you did not order and do not like.

n. A foreign language that everyone mispronounces.

n. A spiritual preservative arresting the soul from decay.

n. An always fatal, sexually transmitted disease.

n. A zoo in a jungle.

n. A temporary condition cured by nearly everything.

Cynical Quotations

Life is a sports car – fast, sleek, majestic zipping through the continuum of time with the entire universe viewable through a gleaming and utterly transparent windshield. We are the bugs on that windshield.

— Guy Smith

Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

— William Goldman

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty.

— Ursula K. LeGuin

Life – the way it really is – is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.

— Joseph Brodsky

Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books – but it is terrible when one has to live it.

— Jean Anouilh

It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it is one damn thing over and over.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

Life is just one damned thing after another.

— Elbert Hubbard

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.

— Robert Heinlein

Things are going to get a lot worse before they get worse.

— Lily Tomlin

We are born wet, naked, and hungry . . . then things get worse.

— Charles Gilbert

The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

I got through life on partial credit.

— Dave Preston

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

— Bertrand Russell

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

— Steven Weinberg

No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

— Judge Gideon J. Tucker

In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular.

— Laurence J. Peter

For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.

— Clifton Fadiman

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

— Brendan Gill

Life is a long lesson in humility.

— James M. Barrie

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.