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• My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky. Alan Moore
• There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy. Mark Twain
• Each waking day is a stage dominated for good or ill, comedy, farce, or tragedy, by a dramatis personae, the ‘self’, and so it will be until the curtain drops. Charles Scott Sherrington
• Life is replete with comedy, drama, horror, suspense, tragedy, romance, mystery, fantasy and a good dose of fiction. While at times the plot may seem to be lacking, the special effects alone are well worth the price of admission. Derek R. Audette
• Life is funny. Life isn’t categorized into comedy, drama, action, is it? So I don’t know why they try to categorize everything. It drives me crazy-why it would have to be just a romantic comedy or…I want to have a little integrity, a little story, you know Jennifer Aniston
• Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last. Marisha Pessl
• I think my life has everything, you know; it has comedy, has drama, has action. Cesar Millan
• I was wondering whether they’ll write the story of my life as a tragedy or an epic fantasy… I was wondering if it was going to be a kiss at the end, or sad music and a sweeping camera shot over the fields I once roamed freely. I’m hoping for the kiss, but expecting the sweeping camera shot. Maggie Stiefvater
• Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor. Sholom Aleichem
• Six billion of us walking the planet, six billion smaller worlds on the bigger one. Shoe salesmen and short-order cooks who look boring from the outside – some have weirder lives than you. Six billion stories, every one an epic, full of tragedy and triumph, good and evil, despair and hope. You and me – we aren’t so special, bro. Dean Koontz
• Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more. Jeannette Walls

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Life is a drama…

• Life is a drama in everyday costumes. Anthony Lambert
• Life is a Drama. We come and we go. But before the curtains are drawn, we must enjoy the Show! Ravi V. Melwani
• No doubt it is a drama and the primary purpose of the show can only be enjoy the show. Shailendra Mohan Jain
• I beg you to believe that life is not a process, it’s a drama Malcolm Muggeridge
• Life is a reality show… a show that is often full of drama. Anthony Lambert
• Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews. John Updike
• We have not been given the lead in the cosmic drama. Perhaps someone else has. Perhaps no one else has. In either case, we have good reason for humility. Carl Sagan
• If you can go to a movie and see a picture of war and suffering, and afterward say, “What a wonderful picture!” so may you take this life as a cosmic picture-show. Be prepared for every kind of experience that may come to you, realizing that all are but dreams. Each human life constitutes a drama; and the events of each day represent a drama. You are living a fresh one each of the year’s 365 days. The thought that you are merely a player in these dramas is very comforting. Realize that the acting out of whatever part you are called upon to play does not affect your real being. At the end of every earthly incarnation you are the same—the immortal soul—untouched by sickness, sorrow, or death. Paramahansa Yogananda
• I feel that the real drama of life is never center stage, it’s always in the wings. It’s never with the spotlight on, it’s usually something that you don’t expect at all. Fred Rogers
• Thus the great drama of universal life is perpetually sustained; and though the individual actors undergo continual change, the same parts are ever filled by another and another generation; renewing the face of the earth, and the bosom of the deep, with endless successions of life and happiness. William Buckland
• The drama of life begins with a wail and ends with a sigh. Minna Antrim
• Life is a dramatic movie with the dull bits left in. Anthony Lambert
• Life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t’other from which . . . E. M. Forster
• I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Paul Davies
• It’s not some big event that creates the drama, it’s the little things of everyday life that bring about that drama. Asghar Farhadi
• The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both. Victor Hugo
• All drama is conflict. Without conflict, there is no action. Without action, there is no character. Without character, there is no story. And without story, there is no screenplay. Syd Field
• I think that even in a drama, we all want to smile, and laugh because what a horrible life if we’re just like “I’m in a drama.” And so I think in everything you’re trying to look for the humor, even if it’s a dark scene, because most people want to have fun in life, as opposed to have a boring time, a terrible time. David Koechner
• Life, individual or collective, personal or historic, is the one entity in the universe whose substance is compact of danger, of adventure. It is, in the strict sense of the word, drama. The primary, radical meaning of life appears when it is employed in the sense not of biology, but of biography. Jose Ortega y Gasset
• Drama is real life with all the boring parts cut out. Alfred Hitchcock
• Christianity makes of life a moral drama in which we play a starring role and in which the most ordinary events take on a grand significance. Dinesh D’Souza
• Life is always full of drama and challenges, but you don’t have to overreact to any of it if you choose not to. Sonia Choquette
• There’s enough drama in my life whether I want it or not. There’s enough going on right now to keep my head spinning all the time. Bob Mould
• Real life is messy, and drama is a shaped version of real life. Simon Beaufoy
• Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life…I have put only my talent into my works. Oscar Wilde
• If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art. And that — in a way, although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we’re starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves. That’s not an entirely despicable role for us to play. Steven Weinberg
• People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown. Chuck Palahniuk

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…part epic historical costume piece…

• History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background. Thomas Carlyle
• History is moving pretty quickly these days, and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts. Ian Fleming
• History is nothing if not an epic tale… Graydon Carter
• History is replete with examples of what happens when any group of authorities do not have to answer to empirical evidence but are free to define truth as they see fit. None of the examples has a happy ending. Why should it be otherwise with therapy? Robert Todd Carroll
• History is the narrative of people searching for a place to go. J. R. Moehringer
• History was… a single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation. Don DeLillo

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…part intimate biopic…

• Always live your life with your biography in mind. Marisha Pessl
• Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes. Tom Stoppard
• Life is a biography, not a series of disconnected moments, more or less pleasurable but increasingly tedious and unsatisfying unless one imposes a purposive pattern upon them. Theodore Dalrymple
• Live your life as if you are writing your Biography. Keshia Chante
• I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates. A. Scott Berg
• Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself. Harvey Fierstein
• Biography is history seen through the prism of a person. Louis Fischer

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…full of conflict and struggle…

• All drama is conflict. Without conflict, there is no action. Without action, there is no character. Without character, there is no story. And without story, there is no screenplay. Syd Field
• Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama. Allen Tate
• Drama lives on conflict. Michael Haneke
• Then my life crashed and burned down: trials, men, drama, no self-love, no identity. A little identity, but not a lot of love for myself, my life. Mary J. Blige

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…but also full of humor…

• Within any drama in anyone`s life, there`s always a way to find the humor in it. Without humor no one cares about whatever drama is going on. Elizabeth Reaser
• … life is a comedy far darker than drama. It just takes time to learn what to smile at. Robin Morgan
• I think all good drama is funny. All the best drama is ultimately very funny. Life is funny. You can’t have any honest treatise on life without bumping into some humor. Thomas Jane

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…a drama some say is written by God…

• Whether we like it or not, life has a lot of drama and pain. But God is writing a great story. Are we going to let Him? Are we going to trust Him? Beth Moore
• Brahma is the great Creator, Life a mystic drama; Heaven, and Earth, and living Nature Are but masks of Brahma. John Stuart Blackie

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…a drama to enthral the soul…

• The Self allows whatever reality the ego is creating. It’s perfectly willing to have whatever experience we choose. It enjoys learning from it all. It’s fascinated to see how the story will play itself out. After all, that’s why it created these forms in the first place: It wants to see how each individual with its unique personality and set of drives will live out its drama in the world. How will it interact? What conclusions will it draw? How will it see life? What will it choose? The Self is enthralled with its creation and joyously anticipates its every move. Gina Lake
• The outer purpose of the universe is to create form and experience the interaction of forms—the play, the dream, the drama, or whatever you choose to call it. Its inner purpose is to awaken to its formless essence. Then comes the reconciliation of outer and inner purpose: to bring that essence—consciousness—into the world of form and thereby transform the world. Eckhart Tolle
• I am a servant of the Supreme Being; and have come to behold the wonderful drama of life. Guru Gobind Singh
• When searching for harmony in life one must never forget that in the drama of existence, we are ourselves both actors and spectators. Niels Bohr
• You’re the hero of this great drama, so why not live heroically? Why not be open to the possibilities of all you could be and everything you could experience? Tim Freke

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…a drama that gives rise to much character development

• It is a very strong rule in drama, and in life, that people remain true to their basic natures. They change, and their change is essential for drama, but typically they only change a little, taking a single step towards integrating a forgotten or rejected quality into their natures. Christopher Vogler
• The real object of the drama is the exhibition of human character. Thomas B. Macaulay

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There are those who love life’s dramas…

• They say that art comes from the soul. The more drama in an artist’s life, the more he can draw on for his art. Robin Leach
• I have always been attracted to the bleaker aspects of life. I love drama. Marianne Faithfull
• If you win all the time, you lose the drama in life. To make the happy moments happy, you need the sad moments too. Doug Davidson
• Drama is very important in life: You have to come on with a bang. You never want to go out with a whimper. Everything can have drama if it’s done right. Even a pancake. Julia Child
• Many things happen in life. There are joyous days and times of suffering. Sometimes unpleasant things occur. But that’s what makes life so interesting. The dramas we encounter are part and parcel of being human. If we experienced no change or drama in our lives, if nothing unexpected ever happened, we would merely be like automatons, our lives unbearably monotonous and dull. Therefore, please develop a strong self so that you can enact the drama of your life with confidence and poise in the face of whatever vicissitudes you may encounter. Daisaku Ikeda
• I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama. Anais Nin
• The drama is a great revealer of life. George P. Baker
• Life is a Drama. We come and we go. But before the curtains are drawn, we must enjoy the Show! Ravi V. Melwani
• No doubt it is a drama and the primary purpose of the show can only be enjoy the show. Shailendra Mohan Jain

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…while others who do not…

• A life filled with silly social drama and gossip indicates that a person is disconnected from purpose and lacking meaningful goals. People on a path of purpose don’t have time for drama. Brendon Burchard
• I hate drama. But at the same time, nothing bothers me more than when life’s perfect. Rihanna
• Life is short, I have no time for drama. Caroline Manzo
• A perfect method of adding drama to life is to wait until the deadline looms large. Alyce Cornyn-Selby
• You need an entire drama to construct your life around to avoid living it. Jerry Stahl
• The willingness to question life is often accompanied by a weariness of the drama, either because the suffering has become too great or because the drama has lost its allure. Gina Lake
• I no longer have time for unnecessary drama. I wasted so much time scared, self-conscious and insecure. Life is too short to stress the small things anymore. Daryl Hannah

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…seeing it as a phenomenon of the ego…

• The egoic mind creates the drama of life through its insistence that there is a problem that needs solving. This perception sets the wheels in motion toward a solution, and our life becomes about that. The Self accepts that as well. It allows whatever is happening, including the ego’s rejection of what is happening and its attempts to fix it. The Self knows there will come a time when it will be realized and the Truth seen. Gina Lake

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…attempting to transcend the drama of life through awareness…

• There’s much more in any given moment than we usually perceive, and that we ourselves are much more than we usually perceive. When you know that, part of you can stand outside the drama of your life. Ram Dass
• To see your drama clearly is to be liberated from it. Ken Keyes Jr
• I watch myself unfold. I become the observer of my life instead of being trapped in the midst of the drama. Susan Jeffers
• When you are fully conscious, drama does not come into your life anymore. Eckhart Tolle
• You are no longer absorbed in your melodrama but, instead, sit comfortably deep inside the seat of awareness. Michael A. Singer
• Learn to watch your drama unfold while at the same time knowing you are more than your drama. Ram Dass
• When we become the observer, we take ourselves one step away from the drama. Becoming observer allows me to let go of expectations and to create a sense of wonder instead of fear about the future. Susan Jeffers
• Lighten up, it’s a movie. You’re the watcher, not the character. Set yourself aside from the drama. Anthony Lambert

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…in order to calm it down and turn melodrama into mellow drama

• You are no longer absorbed in your melodrama but, instead, sit comfortably deep inside the seat of awareness. Michael A. Singer
• Turn your melodrama into a mellow drama. Ram Dass
• The real goal of Zen is to find a way of life that’s easy and undramatic. Strong attachments lead to upset and drama. Brad Warner
• Let go. Let go of all the stress and drama in your life. It’s not worth it, and your body is far too important – too precious – to be bothered by a simple psych-out. You will figure it all out eventually, so why make life more complicated? Matthew Moy
• Life is hard enough, you don’t have to embellish the drama! Marianne Williamson
• When your life is working there will be an absence of drama Iyanla Vanzant
• Whatever dramas are going on in my life, I always find that place inside my head where I see myself as the cleanest, tallest, strongest, wisest person that I can be. Layne Staley

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Life is an adventure movie…

• Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art. Maya Angelou
• One way to get the most out of life is to look upon it as an adventure. William Feather
• Dare to dream, live with passion. Make your life an epic extraordinary adventure! Nik Halik
• Our sense of calling should be like an unfolding epic adventure. Christine Caine
• Life is a daring adventure or nothing. Helen Keller
• You’re here, alive, with an adventure ahead of you. Kathryn Moss
• I have but one life to give to adventure. Alexander Eliot
• Religion is not an experiment; it is an experience of life through which one is part of the cosmic adventure. Raimon Panikkar
• My day begins with gratitude and joy. I look forward with enthusiasm to the adventures of the day, knowing that in my life, All is good. Louise Hay
• Life is adventure, not predicament. James Broughton
• Thinking in mythological terms helps to put you in accord with the inevitables of this vale of tears. You learn to recognize the positive values in what appear to be the negative moments and aspects of your life. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure. Joseph Campbell

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…or at least, it is at its best…

• Don’t die without embracing the daring adventure your life is meant to be. Steve Pavlina
• Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure. . . Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.  Maya Angelou
• With self-esteem, your life can broaden into an adventure because you can know in your gut that you can handle the unknown. And you can handle helping others without fear, which is true liberation. Caroline Myss
• We are all functioning at a small fraction of our capacity to live fully in its total meaning of loving, caring, creating and adventuring. Consequently, the actualizing of our potential can become the most exciting adventure of our lifetime. Herbert Otto Gille
• Adventure is important in life. Making memories matters. Rob Lowe
• Our sense of calling should be like an unfolding epic adventure. Christine Caine

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…full of exciting dangers and challenges…

• Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of competence. Eleanor Roosevelt
• Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely and gallantly, as a splendid adventure in which you are setting out into an unknown country, to face many a danger, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle. Annie Besant
• Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. Helen Keller

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…where we get to dice with death…

• Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible. Thornton Wilder
• There are dreadful moments when death comes very near those we love, even if for the time being it passes by. But life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living. Theodore Roosevelt
• Death is the most beautiful adventure in life. Charles Frohman
• A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short. Bertrand Russell

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…full of learning and growth…

• You are embarking on the greatest adventure of your life – to improve your self-image, to create more meaning in your life and in the lives of others. This is your responsibility. Maxwell Maltz
• Life is an adventure in forgiveness. Norman Cousins
• A large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life, by him who interests his heart in everything. Laurence Sterne

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…full of new experiences…

• The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. Aron Ralston
• A man practices the art of adventure when he heroically faces up to life. When he has the daring to open doors to new experiences. When he is unafraid of new ideas, new theories and new philosophies. When he has the curiosity to experiment. When he breaks the chain of routine. Wilferd Peterson

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…full of making dreams come true…

• The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams. Oprah Winfrey
• Dare to dream, live with passion. Make your life an epic extraordinary adventure! Nik Halik

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…full of constant change…

• Each child is an adventure into a better life – an opportunity to change the old pattern and make it new. Hubert H. Humphrey
• Life is known only by those who have found a way to be comfortable with change and the unknown. Given the nature of life, there may be no security, but only adventure. Rachel Naomi Remen

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…full of discovery

• For nearly a quarter of a century, I have been engaged in the investigation of the fundamentals of life, the material universe and human behavior. Such an adventure leads one down many highways, through many byroads, into many back alleys of uncertainty, through many strata of life… Ron Hubbard

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Life is an action movie

• Infuse your life with action. Bradley Whitford
• Life is action. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
• God is life. God is life in action. Miguel Angel Ruiz
• Life is made up of constant calls to action. Learned Hand
• Put your life’s plan into determined action and go after what you want with all that’s in you. Henry J. Kaiser
• A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. William Hazlitt
• The life of action is nobler than the life of thought. Dinah Maria Murlock Craik
• Infuse your life with action. Don’t wait for it to happen. Make it happen. Make your own future. Make your own hope. Bradley Whitford
• All of life is action and passion, and not to be involved in the actions and passions of your time is to risk having not really lived at all. Herodotus
• To live is not breathing, it is action. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Action is the music of our life. Salvador de Madariaga
• For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out. Theodore Roosevelt
• Life is the soil, our choices and actions the sun and rain, but our dreams are the seeds. Richard Paul Evans
• One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation. Walter Scott
• Your life will be no better than the plans you make and the action you take. You are the architect and builder of your own life, fortune, destiny. Alfred Armand Montapert
• Life is a symphony, and the action of every person in this life is the playing of his particular part in the music. Hazrat Inayat Khan
• Life is for action. Russell Kirk
• Small, deliberate actions inspired by your true desires create a life you love. Danielle LaPorte
• Without life there can be no action — no objects of pursuit — no restless desires — no tormenting passions. William Hazlitt
• Vital lives are about action. Joan Erikson
• Man’s greatest actions are performed in minor struggles. Victor Hugo
• Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity. Edwin Hubbel Chapin
• The life of man is made up of action and endurance. Henry Parry Liddon
• Potential is the good of life — action the secret key. Deron Williams
• A life lived of choice is a life of conscious action. Neale Donald Walsch
• Nothing happens in a vacuum in life: every action has a series of consequences, and sometimes it takes a long time to fully understand the consequences of our actions. Khaled Hosseini
• Life doesn’t require ideals. It requires standards of action. Haruki Murakami
• The most decisive actions of life are most often unconsidered actions. Andre Gide
• The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action. Scott Peck
• Where wise actions are the fruit of life, wise discourse is the pollination. Bryant H. McGill

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…full of heroes and villains…

• When the curtain goes down at the end of the drama, the hero and the villain step out hand in hand and the audience applaud both because they know that the hero role and the villain role are only masks. Alan Watts
• With any good story, you need the adversary, the heroes and villains. You need a good mixture to make it work. Phil Keoghan
• Your life will have chapters, complete with crazy characters, villains and a plot you can’t even imagine as you sit here today. Sharyn Alfonsi
• Everybody is special. Everybody. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. Everybody. Everybody has their story to tell. Alan Moore

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…villains both historic and modern

• History is moving pretty quickly these days, and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts. Ian Fleming
• All the true heroes of history will be forgotten and all the villains will be remembered as heroes. Leo Tolstoy
• The famous names throughout history-be they heroes or villains-if they accomplished anything notable, they were passionate. Passion is what drives those who accomplish momentous feats, for good or evil. Andrew Williams

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Villains, some argue, make this movie called life far more interesting…

• A villain who shares one’s guilt is inevitably more attractive than a hero convinced of one’s innocence. Kenneth Tynan
• I always felt that heroes were essentially dull. Villains were more exotic and could do more interesting things. Jerry Robinson
• The villain is always more entertaining because he has fewer limitations. The hero is bound by honor, by justice and by the law, sometimes. Len Wein
• It really doesn’t matter whether it’s the villain or the hero. Sometimes the villain is the most colorful. But I prefer a part where you don’t know what he is until the end. Glenn Ford
• In the theater, as in life, we prefer a villain with a sense of humor to a hero without one. Mignon McLaughlin
• I find I am more interested in the villain-type roles because they can be so much more complex than just the villain. I don’t think anybody sees them as evil per se. They show how close we are to one another. It’s an untapped area of art. And I think, physically, I’m not going to play the hero. Shuler Hensley

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…for what good is a movie without its villains…

• The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture. Alfred Hitchcock
• Mythology needs heroes and it needs villains, it needs heroes to fail, it needs heroes to struggle. William Shatner
• When have you heard a story about the hero dying for the villain? Andy Mineo
• Look for the contradictions in every character, especially in your heroes and villains. No one should be what they first seem to be. Surprise the audience. Elia Kazan
• Approach your lives as if they were novels, with their own heroes, villains, red herrings, and triumphs. Mary Higgins Clark
• With any good story, you need the adversary, the heroes and villains. You need a good mixture to make it work. Phil Keoghan

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…and what is a hero without a nemesis?

• You need the villain. If you don’t have a villain, the good guy can stay home. Christoph Waltz
• The more powerful the villain is the more powerful the hero. William Shatner
• Well, you know, in any novel you would hope that the hero has someone to push back against, and villains – I find the most interesting villains those who do the right things for the wrong reasons, or the wrong things for the right reasons. Either one is interesting. I love the gray area between right and wrong. Dan Brown

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Villains clearly have a role to play in the movie of life

• In any story, the villain is the catalyst. The hero’s not a person who will bend the rules or show the cracks in his armor. He’s one-dimensional intentionally, but the villain is the person who owns up to what he is and stands by it. Marilyn Manson
• What the world needs is a set villain that people can point at and say, “It’s all your fault! Haruki Murakami
• It is much more fun to write about villains then heroes. The villains are the ones that think out the scheme, and the heroes just kind of come along for the ride. J. MacHale
• Villains often move the story along while the heroes react to the villains, so the villain becomes the engine of the story. Michael Scott

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It’s natural in life for us to split people up into heroes and villains…

• It was so much more comfortable to be able to divide people into heroes and villains and expect them to play their allotted part. Mary Balogh
• The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer – and they don’t want explanations that do not give them that. Thomas Sowell
• I began dividing life in absolutes… Things and people were either perfectly bad, or perfectly good, and when life didn’t obey this black-and-white rule, when things or people were complex or contradictory, I pretended otherwise. I turned every defeat into a disaster, every success into an epic triumph, and separated all people into heroes or villains. Unable to bear ambiguity, I built a barricade of delusions against it. J. R. Moehringer

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…but some argue we shouldn’t be so ready to do so…

• Life is not simple, and people can’t be boxed into being either heroes or villains. Jessica Hagedorn
• Sometimes someone that is the villain in your life, when you look deeper and you think of what their issues are and why they behave like that and where they came from – they become less of a villain and more of someone that you can understand. Brooke Elliott
• Its as boring to see a completely evil villain as it is to see a completely good guy. Brian Helgeland
• I don’t believe in villains or heroes, only in right or wrong ways that individuals are taken, not by choice, but by necessity or by certain still uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances and their antecedents. Tennessee Williams
• As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow. Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
• If you look in real life, it is very hard to describe people as good people, bad people, heroes or villains. People aren’t bad people. They all have their justifications. Lennie James
• If life has taught me one thing, it’s that there are no villains. Only people, doing their best. Joe Abercrombie
• Well, I think there are no villains in this world. There are just misunderstood heroes. Tom Hiddleston
• A villain is just a victim whose story hasn’t been told. Chris Colfer

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…for in reality, there is often a fine line between the two…

• Every villain is a hero in his or her own mind. Allison Brennan
• Every hero is the villain of his own story. Holly Black
• Nobody is a villain in their own story. We’re all the heroes of our own stories. George R. R. Martin
• The difference between a hero and a villain is that they just make different choices. Tom Hiddleston
• In the theatre, a hero is one who believes that all women are ladies, a villain one who believes that all ladies are women. George Jean Nathan
• What’s the point of being a hero when everyone thinks you’re a villain? Ellen Hopkins
• If you look at all of the villains in the course of human history, they’ve all believed, delusionally, in the virtue of their actions – every villain is a hero in his own mind. Tom Hiddleston
• One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero. Charlie Chaplin
• Both villains and heroes need to have a steadfast belief in themselves. Jack Gleeson
• No one is an unjust villain in his own mind. Even – perhaps even especially those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices they would call “hard but necessary” for the good of their nation. We’re all the hero of our own story. Jim Butcher
• Villains are undone by what is worst in them, heroes by what is best. Voltaire

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Most humans tend be somewhere in between

• At least you used to know ‘there’s the villain, there’s the good guy’, but today there are more shades of grey. Charles Roven
• Movies need heroes and villains, and real life doesn’t usually have heroes and villains. Real life has a lot of shades of gray, and moves have black and white even when they’re in color. Don Hewitt
• I like grey characters; fantasy for too long has been focused on very stereotypical heroes and villains. George R. R. Martin
• Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad. William Somerset Maugham
• I think that we are all the heroes of our own story, and I think life comes in all shades of gray. Personally, I love movies that exist like this, where you think someone can behave both heroically and like a villain. Matt Ross

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…and we often find ourselves playing both the role of hero and villain at different times

• Live as a villain, die as a hero. Banksy
• If you have not been a villain at a certain point in time, you will never be a hero. And the day you are a hero, you may become a villain the next day. Carlos Ghosn
• I have always been fascinated by the concept of the villain and the hero being in one person. Alex Kapranos
• In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be! Passions spin the plot: We are betrayed by what is false within. George Meredith
• Every hero is the villain of his own story. Holly Black
• I think that there are just people who are hurting other people, sometimes for the best of intentions and sometimes for the worst. In different times in my life, I’ve been the hero and I’ve been the villain. I also think that we’re all evil sometimes. James Marsters
• You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. Aaron Eckhart

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Maybe it best if we try to humanise our perceived villains…

• You need to try to find a way to humanize your villains. Genuine villains, in real life, still have mothers and daughters and sisters, and they fall in love. They don’t walk around with a big sign saying, “Bad guy,” on their head. They think they’re good guys. If you can play that, I think it makes it more interesting. Mark Strong

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…realising they often don’t have a choice

• Some people are born to play the hero, and some are born to play the bad guy. Fighting your destiny only makes life harder than it needs to be. Besides, people remember the villain long after they’ve forgotten the hero. Susan Elizabeth Phillips
• I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way. Jessica Rabbit
• People are not born heroes or villains; they’re created by the people around them. Chris Colfer

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Some argue that while villains are more interesting, it’s nobler to be hero and the world sorely needs them

• A successful villain should have all these things at his or her villainous fingertips, or else give up villainy altogether and try to lead a life of decency, integrity, and kindness, which is much more challenging and noble, if not always quite as exciting. Daniel Handler
• The world needs heroes and it’s better they be harmless men like me than villains like Hitler. Albert Einstein

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Life is an epic that is breath-taking in its scale…

• Epic: Heroic or grand in scale or character. Cambridge Dictionary
• The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real. Victor Hugo
• Good stories must travel through conflict. And in epic stories, the conflict must become unbearable. Donald Miller
• Six billion of us walking the planet, six billion smaller worlds on the bigger one. Shoe salesmen and short-order cooks who look boring from the outside – some have weirder lives than you. Six billion stories, every one an epic, full of tragedy and triumph, good and evil, despair and hope. You and me – we aren’t so special, bro. Dean Koontz
• The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles. Anatole Broyard
• My life is a vast inconsequential epic. Jack Kerouac
• More often than not, a hero’s most epic battle is the one you never see; it’s the battle that goes on within him or herself. Kevin Smith
• Everybody lives an epic. James Cook
• In a sense, you’re always mythologizing your life; it’s always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your “epicness.” But when you’re writing a memoir, you’re trying to make your life epic and it’s not – nobody’s life is. Sherman Alexie
• All of us, each and every one, lives a life that is, in its own right, an epic. Richard Hammond
• Life is the most spectacular show on earth. Sara Gruen
• Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last. Marisha Pessl

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…more an epic than a tragedy…

• But when you realize that the story of your life could be told a thousand different ways, that you could tell it over and over as a tragedy, but you choose to call it an epic, that’s when you start to learn what celebration is. When what you see in front of you is so far outside of what you dreamed, but you have the belief, the boldness, the courage to call it beautiful instead of calling it wrong, that’s celebration. Shauna Niequist
• I wonder whether they’ll write the story of my life as a tragedy or an epic fantasy… I was wondering if it was going to be a kiss at the end, or sad music and a sweeping camera shot over the fields I once roamed freely. I’m hoping for the kiss, but expecting the sweeping camera shot. Maggie Stiefvater

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…or at least that’s how its meant to be

• Your life is meant to be an epic story. How you think, perform and live today is part of that script. Robin Sharma
• Your life was meant to be epic. Stand up for your best today. Robin Sharma

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Life is God’s epic masterpiece…

• I believe that the Creator has an epic script into which my minute presence has been written. Steve Saint
• God is telling an amazing, glorious, epic story. We have to decide if we will trust Him with it. Steven Curtis Chapman

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…an epic tale spanning the expanse of history…

• History is nothing if not an epic tale… Graydon Carter
• History is the narrative of people searching for a place to go. J. R. Moehringer
• History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background. Thomas Carlyle
• Our history, in the cosmos and on planet Earth, was shaped by countless events, some obviously epic, some seemingly trivial, yet all vital in getting us to this point, here and now, the people we are today. Neil deGrasse Tyson

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…and also going back way further to include the evolution of all life on earth

• Evolution isn’t just a story about where we came from. It’s an epic at the center of life itself. Far from robbing our lives of meaning, it instills an appreciation for the beautiful, enduring, and ultimately triumphant fabric of life that covers our planet. Understanding that doesn’t demean human life – it enhances it. Kenneth R. Miller
• Plot, or evolution, is life responding to environment; and not only is this response always in terms of conflict, but the really great struggle, the epic struggle of creation, is the inner fight of the individual whereby the soul builds up character. William Wallace Cook

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Life is a bewildering mystery film…

• Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing. Henry Miller
• Between birth and burial, we find ourselves in a comedy of mysteries. If you don’t think life is mysterious, if you believe you have it all mapped out, you aren’t paying attention or you’ve anesthetized yourself with booze or drugs, or with a comforting ideology. And if you don’t think life’s a comedy – well, friend, you might as well hurry along to that burial. The rest of us need people with whom we can laugh. Dean Koontz
• Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind. Agnes Martin
• Like a morning dream, life becomes more and more bright the longer we live, and the reason of everything appears more clear. What has puzzled us before seems less mysterious, and the crooked paths look straighter as we approach the end. Jean Paul
• People no longer try to decipher the mystery of life but choose instead to be a part of it. Paulo Coelho
• I think my favorite thing is the mystery of life – it makes you feel that much better about accomplishing something. Jonny Lang
• Good and evil are so interwoven in life that every good, traced up far enough, is found to involve evil. This is the great mystery of life. Amelia Barr
• We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapors, these are the daily weather of this world. Gilbert K. Chesterton
• The Learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar, guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life. Charles Willson Peale

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…including in its themes the mystery of death and sex…

• Upon the purple tree-tops far away, and on the green height near at hand up which the shades were slowly creeping, there was an equal hush. Between the real landscape and its shadow in the water, there was no division; both were so untroubled and clear, and, while so fraught with solemn mystery of life and death, so hopefully reassuring to the gazer’s soothed heart, because so tenderly and mercifully beautiful. Charles Dickens
• Sex was like a world so mysterious to me, I really couldn’t believe there was this fantastic texture to life that I was getting to do…it has all these different levels, from lust and fearful, violent sex to the real spiritual thing at the other end. It’s the key to some fantastic mystery of life. David Lynch

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…the mystery of life itself…

• The mystery of life–its inexplicability, beauty, cruelty, tenderness, folly . . . has occupied the greater part of my waking thoughts; and in reverence or rage or irony, as the moment or situation might dictate, I have pondered and even demanded of cosmic energy to know Why. Theodore Dreiser
• When you have solved all the mysteries of life you long for death, for it is but another mystery of life. Khalil Gibran
• When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection. Agnes Martin
• To know the whole world is nothing when it is compared to knowing your own inner mystery of life. Rajneesh

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… the mystery of God and existence….

• I believe there is something of the divine mystery in everything that exists. We can see it sparkle in a sunflower or a poppy. We sense more of the unfathomable mystery in a butterfly that flutters from a twig–or in a goldfish swimming in a bowl. But we are closest to God in our own soul. Only there can we become one with the greatest mystery of life. In truth, at very rare moments we can experience that we ourselves are that divine mystery. Jostein Gaarder
• Evolution of consciousness is what it is about. For lack of a better way of saying it, it is God hiding portions of Itself from Itself with the sole purpose of rediscovering Itself. No human knows why. Yogananda calls it God’s hobby, which is as good a guess as any other. At these levels, I think it best to leave it a mystery; learn the rules to this Cosmic drama; live in accord with those rules; and simply enjoy the awesome show on display for your viewing pleasure. Steven Payeur
• A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God. Reinhold Niebuhr
• He thought about science, about faith, about man. he thought about how every culture, in every country, in every time, had always shared one thing. We all had the Creator. We used different names, different faces, and different prayers, but God was the universal constant for man. God was the symbol we all shared…the symbol of all the mysteries of life that we could not understand. The ancients had praised God as a symbol of our limitless human potential, but that ancient symbol had been lost over time. Until now. Dan Brown

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…and the mystery that each of us is

• At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose *your* self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I’s. But in one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one–which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your *I*. Dag Hammarskjold

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Mystery adds spice to the movie of our lives…

• Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known? Charles de Lint

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…and is a catalyst for scientific discoveries…

• Our great whirling planet, our human individuality, were not given to us merely that we might exist for a time and then vanish into nothingness, but that we might question what it is all about. To live without understanding the purpose of life is foolish, a waste of time. The mystery of life surrounds us; we were given intelligence in order to solve it. Paramahansa Yogananda
• I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence – as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature. Albert Einstein
• The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. Albert Einstein
• The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity. Albert Einstein
• Scientific discoveries inspire and enrich us, teaching us about the mysteries of life and the nature of the world. William J. Clinton

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…and spiritual explorations….

• Meditation has only one meaning, and that is going beyond the mind and becoming a witness. In your witnessing is the miracle – the whole mystery of life. Rajneesh
• Meditation is the golden key to all the mysteries of life. Rajneesh
• So, it comes to pass that, when we pursue an inquiry beyond a certain depth, we step out of the field of psychological categories and enter the sphere of the ultimate mysteries of life. The floorboards of the soul, to which we try to penetrate, fan open and reveal the starry firmament. Bruno Schulz
• Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem alone. Marion Woodman
• It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion. Albert Einstein
• The mystery of life is certainly the most persistent problem ever placed before the thought of man. There is no doubt that from the time humanity began to think it has occupied itself with the problem of its origin and its future which undoubtedly is the problem of life. The inability of science to solve it is absolute. This would be truly frightening were it not for faith. Guglielmo Marconi
• Zen wants us to acquire an entirely new point of view whereby to look into the mysteries of life and the secrets of nature. This is because Zen has come to the definite conclusion that the ordinary logical process of reasoning is powerless to give final satisfaction to our deepest spiritual needs. T. Suzuki
• To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty… this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness. Albert Einstein
• Science can point out dangers, but science cannot turn the direction of minds and hearts. That is the province of spiritual powers within and without our very beginnings-powers that are the mysteries of life itself. Oren Lyons

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…and expressions of creativity and art

• Creativity is the supreme mystery of life, the mystery of the appearance of something new, hitherto unknown, derived from nothing, proceeding from nothing, born of nothing other. Nikolai Berdyaev
• What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there’s another force from inside battling to make us something else. Nadine Gordimer
• Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect. Oscar Wilde
• Music is the answer to the mystery of life. The most profound of all the arts, It expresses the deepest thoughts of life. Arthur Schopenhauer
• Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise. Julia Cameron
• In a moment of grace, we can grasp eternity in the palm of our hand. This is the gift given to creative individuals who can identify with the mysteries of life through art. Marcel Marceau

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We should sit back and savour the mystery that the movie of life offers us…

• I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it. Harry Emerson Fosdick
• No, explanation is not needed – only exclamation, a wondering heart, awakened, surprised, feeling the mystery of life each moment. Then, and only then, you know what truth is. And truth liberates. Rajneesh
• When most mysteries are solved, I feel tremendously let down. So I want things to feel solved up to a point, but there’s got to be a certain percentage left over to keep the dream going. David Lynch
• As I make my slow pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful mystery seems to gather and grow. C. Benson
• It does not matter whether you have religion or are an agnostic believe in nothing, You can only appreciate (without knowing or understanding) the mysteries of life. Jack Kornfield
• I am moved by the desire to see and to be seen, to grow and to unveil the mysteries of life and, at the same time, by the aspiration that life will continue to reveal new mysteries and new possibilities. Rod Stryker
• The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. Frank Herbert
• Something precious is lost if we rush headlong into the details of life without pausing for a moment to pay homage to the mystery of life and the gift of another day. Kent Nerburn
• Profound love demands a deep conception and out of this develops reverence for the mystery of life. It brings us close to all beings, to the poorest and smallest as well as all others. Albert Schweitzer

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…enjoying the delicious emotions of wonder and awe it instils…

• Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand. Neil Armstrong
• If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in. Rachel Carson
• He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. Albert Einstein
• There’s never any closure in an awe-inspired life, only constant acceptance of the mysteries of life. Paul Pearsall
• Suddenly I burst into song: ‘Awe, sweet mystery of life, at last I found thee…’ And I felt so good inside and my heart felt so full, I decided I would set time aside each day to do awe-robics. Because at the moment you are most in awe of all there is about life that you don’t understand, you are closer to understanding it all than at any other time. Lily Tomlin
• We have lost awe and wonder. In reference to the mystery of life itself, we’ve lost respect for movement in our planet. Gabrielle Roth
• One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. Albert Einstein
• I consider myself responsible to the coming generations, which are left stranded in a blitzed world, unaware of the soul trembling in awe before the mystery of life. Oskar Kokoschka

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…realising that there is much mystery that life will never explain for it is the nature of the mystery genre to leave you guessing

• Within the mystery of life there is the infinite darkness of the night sky lit by distant orbs of fire, the cobbled skin of an orange that releases its fragrance to our touch, the unfathomable depths of the eyes of our lover. No creation story, no religious system can fully describe or explain this richness and depth. Mystery is so every-present that no one can know for certain what will happen one hour from now. It does not matter whether you have religion or are an agnostic believe in nothing, You can only appreciate (without knowing or understanding) the mysteries of life. Jack Kornfield
• When all the words have been written, and all the phrases have been spoken, the great mystery of life will still remain. We may map the terrains of our lives, measure the farthest reaches of the universe, but no amount of searching will ever reveal for certain whether we are all children of chance or part of a great design.  And who among us would have it otherwise?  Who would wish to take the mystery out of the experience of looking into a newborn infant’s eyes?  Kent Nerburn
• I am entirely on the side of mystery. I mean, any attempt to explain away the mystery is ridiculous. I believe in the profound and unfathomable mystery of life which has a sort of divine quality about it.  Aldous Huxley
• I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. Umberto Eco
• There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. Douglas Adams

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Life is a thriller full of intrigue and suspense…

• Suspense: The feeling of excitement or nervousness that you have when you are waiting for something to happen and are uncertain about what it is going to be. Cambridge Dictionary
• Life is like a novel. It’s filled with suspense. You have no idea what is going to happen until you turn the page. Sidney Sheldon
• I think the most important part of storytelling is tension. It’s the constant tension of suspense that in a sense mirrors life, because nobody knows what’s going to happen three hours from now. Richard Condon
• The ups and downs and the dreaded suspense kept you on the edge of your seat, alive and thriving for more. Kathryn Moss
• The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life. Daniel J. Boorstin
• This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last. Oscar Wilde
• Every man has a choice between love of truth and love of repose. Love of repose brings him a solid reputation and peaceful life; love of truth keeps him in suspense. A man who loves truth respects the highest law of his being. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The rules of suspense are that you do know, and you just don’t know when. Gus Van Sant
• Mystery is an intellectual process… But suspense is essentially an emotional process. Alfred Hitchcock

…set in a world with no guarantees…

• If you want guarantees in life, then you don’t want life. You want rehearsals for a script that’s already been written. Life by its nature cannot have guarantees, or its whole purpose is thwarted. Neale Donald Walsch
• There are no guarantees in life. The simple twists of fate and the breaks of the game are the two maxims that define so much of the success and failure in life. Bill Walton

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…where everything is unpredictable and anything can happen…

• Life is like a movie. It’s filled with suspense. You have no idea what is going to happen in the next scene. Anthony Lambert
• Life is like a movie. There’s always something great and unexpected… just ahead. Kathryn Moss
• When you see a motion picture or a stage performance, if you know the plot beforehand it will not be so interesting. It is good that you don’t understand this life, because God is playing a movie drama in your life. It wouldn’t be interesting if we knew what was going to take place before it happened. Don’t be anxious about what is to be in the end. But always pray to God, “Teach me to play my part in this drama of life—weak or strong, sick or well, high or low, rich or poor—with an immortal attitude, that at the end of this drama I may know the moral of it all.” Paramahansa Yogananda
• A good movie is unpredictable, just like your life. Patrick Allan
• At its best, life is completely unpredictable. Christopher Walken
• Even when you think you have your life all mapped out, things happen that shape your destiny in ways you might never have imagined. Deepak Chopra
• How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is. Kurt Vonnegut
• I don’t make plans, because life is short and unpredictable – much like the weather! Al Roker
• I think what I mostly realize is just that life is unpredictable. So don’t be afraid, but just enjoy the day you’re in. Really make the most of it. Amy Grant
• It was inevitable for people to try to create a sense of normalcy in a place where nothing was normal. It helped one get through the day, to add predictability to a life that was inherently unpredictable. Nicholas Sparks
• Life and death were so unpredictable. So close to each other. We existed moment to moment, never knowing who would be the next to leave the world. I was still in it, barely, and as I looked up from the ashes, everything around me seemed so sweet and so beautiful. The trees. The stars. The moon. I was alive – and I was glad I was. Richelle Mead
• Life is a desert of shifting sand dunes. Unpredictable. Erratic. Harmony changes into dissonance, the immediate outlives the profound, esoteric becomes cliched. And vice versa. Ella Leya
• 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
• Life is chaotic and unpredictable. If a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it could cause people at the opposite end of the globe to watch a Discovery Channel special on butterflies. Stephen Colbert
• Life’s a wheel of fortune and it’s my chance to spin it. Tupac Shakur
• Life is full of many unpredictable changes… Let go of chaos yesterday; cheerfully live for today, and look forward to tomorrow with greater possibilities… It’s our imperfections that make us perfect in our own unique ways. Oprah Winfrey
• Life is just too short, too unpredictable and too complicated. Be happy no matter what, a smile sometimes is all you need. Shahid Kapoor
• Life is no different than the weather. Not only is it unpredictable, but it shows us a new perspective of the world every day. Suzy Kassem
• Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation… If one is to record one’s life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable. Leonard Woolf
• Live life like you mean it! Stop procrastinating! Do all that you can…with all that you have…in the place that you are…right now! Life is too unpredictable to put things off and not take it seriously. Les Brown
• More often than not, real life is so rich, complex and unpredictable that it would seem completely implausible in the pages of a novel. Candice Millard
• My most enjoyable movie going experiences have always been going to a movie, sitting there and the lights go down and a film comes on the screen that you don’t know everything about, and you don’t know every plot turn and every character movement that’s going to happen. Christopher Nolan
• No-one knows what your life or life itself should be because it is in the process of being created. Life moves according to a growing consciousness of life and is completely unpredictable. Agnes Martin
• Real life isn’t a series of interconnected events occurring one after another – like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way. Michael Crichton
• The bright side of life’s unpredictability is that it’s not over until it’s over. As dark as the passages and confusing as the cul-de-sacs that you find yourself in are, progress is nevertheless being made. Something is unfolding. You are becoming. Marion Winik
• The course of life is unpredictable no one can write his autobiography in advance. Abraham Joshua Heschel
• The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we’re not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence. Paul Auster
• To live in the light of a new day and an unimaginable and unpredictable future, you must become fully present to a deeper truth – not a truth from you head but a truth from your heart; not a truth from your ego but a truth from the highest source. You have to be willing to be deeply honest with yourself about the shape your life is in each day. Debbie Ford
• You can lead a happy life if you recognize that it’s limited and completely unpredictable from one moment to the next. Wolfgang Schauble
• Ask yourself honestly: are you looking for a steady, predictable life? Is this what you want? If so, you must realize that the world cannot offer you this. Everything in the world is in the process of change. Nothing is steady. Nothing is predictable. Nothing will give you anything other than temporary security. Thoughts come and go. Relationships begin and end. Bodies are born and pass away. This is all the world can offer you: impermanence, growth, change. Paul Ferrini

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…and there are intricate plots full of unexpected twists…

• Twist: A dramatic and exciting ending to an episode of a serial, leaving the audience in suspense and anxious not to miss the next episode. Oxford Dictionary
• We all have to deal with the twists of fate whether they are explained or not and it’s how you react in life to these curveballs that is really the measure of a man. Larry Fessenden
• A small twist of fate can save or end a life; random chance is a permanent, powerful player in each of our lives, and in human history as well. Jeff Greenfield
• But there’s a twist. There’s always a twist. Dan Slott
• Each of us may think we know exactly what we need to make us happy, what will be good for us, what will ensure we have our happy ending, but life rarely works out in the way we expect, and our happy ending may have all sorts of unexpected twists and turns, be shaped in all sorts of unexpected ways. Jane Green
• Everything is nothing, with a twist. Kurt Vonnegut
• Going by my past journey, I am not certain where life will take me, what turns and twists will happen; nobody knows where they will end up. As life changes direction, I’ll flow with it. Katrina Kaif
• I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself. Claes Oldenburg
• I think of how life takes unexpected twists and turns, sometimes through sheer happenstance, sometimes through calculated decisions. In the end, it can all be called fate, but to me, it is more a matter of faith. Emily Giffin
• I think that the project of being alive is to be alive. So there will always be twists and turns and steps forward and steps back, but that’s just your life. There is no sort of place at which to arrive, and I think that the more one focuses on an end point, the harder it is to get there. It’s like the horizon, sort of ever receding, ever receding, ever receding. Ayana Mathis
• It is hard sometimes to look into the future, you never know what twist and turn the school of life is going to take. Susan Lucci
• It is odd, the twists that life will sometimes take. The ewe that you think will give birth with ease dies bringing forth a two-headed lamb. Or the ski trail that you have been told is treacherous, you navigate easily. Edith Pattou
• Life can take so many twists and turns. You can’t ever count yourself out. Even if you’re really afraid at some point, you can’t think that there’s no room for you to grow and do something good with your life. Portia de Rossi
• Life can take so many twists and turns. You can’t ever count yourself out. Portia de Rossi
• Life compulsively dangled the possibility of life. Life, the dramatist on speed. Life, that couldn’t stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and twists. Life with its hopeless addiction to plot. Glen Duncan
• Life has got all those twists and turns. You’ve got to hold on tight and off you go. Nicole Kidman
• Life is full of surprises and serendipity. Being open to unexpected turns in the road is an important part of success. If you try to plan every step, you may miss those wonderful twists and turns. Just find your next adventure-do it well, enjoy it-and then, not now, think about what comes next. Condoleezza Rice
• No year of life is emotionally, spiritually or even materially, all drought or all rainfall; nor is it all sun. The road turns a little every day, and one day there’s a sudden twist we didn’t dream was there, and for every loss there is somewhere a gain, for every grief a happiness, for every deprivation a giving. Faith Baldwin
• Our lives are made in these small hours, these little wonders, these twists and turns of fate. Time falls away, but these small hours, these small hours still remain. All of my regret, will wash away somehow. But i can not forget, the way i feel right now. Rob Thomas
• Sometimes God takes your life for some crazy twists and turns. Judah Smith
• The Dream of Life, in the end, is life-affirming, and I think it’s always useful for people to be reminded that no matter how rough things get, no matter what kind of twists and turns our lives can take, we can keep going, we can create something new. Patti Smith
• The road of life twists and turns and no two directions are ever the same. Yet our lessons come from the journey, not the destination. Don Williams
• The straight line cannot proceed through the torturous twists of life. Giambattista Vico
• The trouble with life is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning, and the same ending. Martin Amis
• Then you don’t know. You can’t know what it feels like to meet a person and suddenly know without a doubt that the whole purpose of your life so far-every choice you made, every twist of fate along the way-was just a journey to get you to that person. My life started when I met Clea. Every minute without her is just killing time until we can be together again. Hilary Duff
• There are good people who are dealt a bad hand by fate, and bad people who live long, comfortable, privileged lives. A small twist of fate can save or end a life; random chance is a permanent, powerful player in each of our lives, and in human history as well. Jeff Greenfield
• We all have to deal with the twists of fate whether they are explained or not and it’s how you react in life to these curveballs that is really the measure of a man. Larry Fessenden
• We have each other, and our stories twist and mingle like the twisting currents of a river. We hold each other tight as we spin and lurch across our lives. There are moments of great joy and magic. The most astounding things can lie waiting as each day dawns, as each page turns. David Almond
• While life is meant to test, challenge, and strengthen us, if we are attempting to negotiate the twists and turns and ups and downs of mortality alone, we’re doing it all wrong. Mortality is a test, but it is an open book test. We have access not only to the divine text but to Him who authored it. Sheri L. Dew

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…unexpected surprises…

• Isn’t that the reason why we go to the theatre, why we go to the movies, because we want to get out of ourselves? We want a surprise; and a surprise means that you have to other yourself. That is to say, there has to enter into your experience some element that is not under your control. So if our technology were to succeed completely, and everything were to be under our control, we should eventually say, “We need a new button.” With all these control buttons, we always have to have a button SURPRISE, and just so it doesn’t become too dangerous, we’ll put a time limit on it—surprise for 15 minutes, for an hour, for a day, for a month, a year, a lifetime. Then, in the end, when the surprise circuit is finished, we’ll be back in control and we’ll all know where we are. And we’ll heave a sigh of relief, but, after a while, we’ll press the button SURPRISE once more. Alan Watts
• Life is so full of unpredictable beauty and strange surprises. Sometimes that beauty is too much for me to handle. Do you know that feeling? When something is just too beautiful? When someone says something or writes something or plays something that moves you to the point of tears, maybe even changes you. Mark Oliver Everett

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…and cliff-hanger endings…

• Cliffhanger: A story or a situation that is exciting because its ending or result is uncertain until it happens. Cambridge Dictionary
• Cliffhanger: A situation or contest of which the outcome is suspensefully uncertain up to the very last moment. Dictionary.com
• Death is the cliff-hanger in the movie of life. Anthony Lambert
• You’re in the midst of life’s great cliff-hanger. What will you do next?
• I often feel that my life, much like my shows, will end on a cliffhanger. Mike Judge
• I personally love a cliffhanger. I think it just extends the pleasure of viewing. Mireille Enos
• Real life is a story, too, only much more complicated. It’s still got a beginning, a middle, and an end. Everyone follows the same rules, you know. . . It’s just that there are more of them. Everyone has chapters and cliff-hangers. Everyone has their journey to make. Some go far and wide and come back empty-handed; some don’t go anywhere and their journey makes them richest of all. Some tales have a moral and some don’t make any sense. Some will make you laugh, others make you cry. The world is a library, young Poison, and you’ll never get to read the same book twice. Chris Wooding

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There are even unexpected instances of horror

• An extremely strong feeling of fear and shock, or the frightening and shocking character of something. Cambridge Dictionary
• The dark side of life, and the horror of it, belonged to a world that lay remote from his own select little atmosphere of books and dreamings. Algernon Blackwood
• Death holds no horrors. It is simply the ultimate horror of life. Jean Giraudoux
• Even as a child I felt in my heart two opposite emotions: the horror of life and the ecstasy of life. Charles Baudelaire
• Life is absolutely horrific, leading up to absolute horror. Meg Rosoff
• For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce. Oscar Wilde
• I love the idea that horror and fear is a celebration of health and life. Penn Jillette
• If a man could understand all the horror of the lives of ordinary people who are turning around in a circle of insignificant interests and insignificant aims, if he could understand what they are losing, he would understand that there can only be one thing that is serious for him – to escape from the general law, to be free. What can be serious for a man in prison who is condemned to death? Only one thing: How to save himself, how to escape: nothing else is serious. G. I. Gurdjieff
• In my actual imaginative contact with life, I am vastly more responsive to beauty than to horror – indeed, I never experience real cosmic horror except in infrequent nightmares. However, when I come to record my various imaginative experiences, I generally find that only the horror items have any uniqueness or originality. Others have seen the same beautiful things that I have seen, & have sung them more nobly. H. P. Lovecraft
• Men sometimes confess they love war because it puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. In going to the office every day, you don’t get that experience, but suddenly in war, you are ripped back into being alive. Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror – but, by God, you are alive. Joseph Campbell
• My life has been like all the lives, long and hard and full of sadness and confusion and horror, a frightening, difficult dream punctuated by brief moments of joy. And as is the case with all people’s lives, the moments of joy are never often enough and never long enough. James Frey
• My life has crept so long on a broken wing Through cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear, That I come to be grateful at last for a little thing. Alfred Lord Tennyson
• No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace. H. P. Lovecraft
• That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we’re old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we’ll lose everyone we love. We’re never the same. But somehow we’re all right. We go on. Dean Koontz
• The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art. Franz Kafka
• The horror no less than the charm of real life consists precisely in the recurrent actualization of the inconceivable. Aldous Huxley
• The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again. No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one’s pocket for another meal. Henry Miller
• The three horrors of modern life – talk without meaning, desire without love, work without satisfaction. Mignon McLaughlin
• The world is full of horror. Our imaginations struggle to keep up. It would be a poor life without imagining. I’m not sure we can have any salvation, in fact, without imagining. Steve Rasnic Tem
• Usually horror in your personal life can translate into some good music. Sometimes. Sometimes it can be really maudlin and boring, and kind of personal. Bob Schneider
• We’d turn our lives into a terrible adventure. A true-life horror story with a happy ending. A trial we’d survive to talk about. Chuck Palahniuk
• Whatever life may be, and whatever horror men have made of it, the world is a lovely place, a magic place, something to marvel over. The world is an amazing place. D. H. Lawrence
• When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influences and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. John Steinbeck
• You meet all kinds of people that help put life in perspective and turn the horror into some kind of lesson or avenue of awakening that lives with you all your days. Ruby Dee
• Horror films don’t create fear. They release it. Wes Craven

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• But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. Robin Williams
• I’d like to classify my life as a romantic comedy. Unfortunately I feel it’s probably more like a TV reality show. Uma Thurman
• In order to have a real life of any romance, there has to be a level of fantasy. Jane Alison
• In order to lead a fascinating life, one brimming with art, music, intrigue, and romance, you must surround yourself with precisely those things. Kate Spade
• Life has no romance without risk. – Sarah Doherty
• Life should imitate romance literature far more often. Charlaine Harris
• Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one’s life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one’s side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music, perhaps . . . perhaps . . . love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath. Lucy Maud Montgomery
• Romance is one of the sacred temples that dot the landscape of life. Marianne Williamson
• Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality. Gilbert K. Chesterton
• Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze. Elinor Glyn
• Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell. Anthony Trollope
• Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs. Margaret Atwood
• The greatest romance is with the Infinite. You have no idea how beautiful life can be. When you suddenly find God everywhere, when He comes and talks to you and guides you, the romance of divine love has begun. Paramahansa Yogananda
• The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The purest, most beautiful and appealing experiences of life: romance, love, marriage, and parenthood. Boyd K. Packer
• The romance of life begins and ends with two blank pages. Age and extreme old age. Jean Paul
• The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life. Jamaica Kincaid
• The word ‘romance,’ according to the dictionary, means excitement, adventure, and something extremely real. Romance should last a lifetime. Billy Graham
• There is no greater romance in life than this adventure in realization. Meher Baba
• To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. Oscar Wilde

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Life is a comedy…

• Comedy takes all of life and puts it through a lens of acceptance. Ted Alexandro
• I’d like to classify my life as a romantic comedy. Unfortunately I feel it’s probably more like a TV reality show. Uma Thurman
• Life doesn’t make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy’s job is to point out that it doesn’t make sense, and that it doesn’t make much difference anyway. Eric Idle
• Life is a comedy far darker than drama. It just takes time to learn what to smile at. Robin Morgan
• Life literally abounds in comedy if you just look around you. Mel Brooks
• My whole life I try to make into a comedy. Saoirse Ronan
• Now what else is the whole life of mortals, but a sort of comedy in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each ones part until the manager walks them off the stage? Desiderius Erasmus
• Play your part in the comedy, but don’t identify yourself with your role! Rumi
• The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. Oscar Wilde
• There is no character in the comedy of human life more difficult to play well than that of an old bachelor. Washington Irving
• There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy. Mark Twain
• Think about yourself at least once in your life otherwise you may miss the best comedy in this world. Charlie Chaplin
• What is our life? A play of passion. Our mirth the music of division. Our mother’s wombs the tyring houses be, Where we are drest for this short Comedy. Walter Raleigh

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…full of laughs…

• Comedy is a necessity to get through life with the fewest scars. Humor is the best antidote to help relieve all struggles. Suzy Kassem
• Comedy is about flaws anyway… There’s a lot of humor in the dark areas of life. Brett Gelman
• I think in life, the sense of humor and comedy always exists. Mike Epps
• Life is not a tragedy, it is a comedy. To be alive means to have a sense of humor. Rajneesh
• Life is tragic comedy, in a way. There is humor. Tcheky Karyo

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…full of jokes and hilarious punch lines

• Every moment of life is unique-a kiss, a sunset, a dance, a joke. None will ever recur in quite the same way. Each happens only once in the history of the universe. Stephen Nachmanovitch
• Everything about life is a joke. Don’t you know that? Kurt Vonnegut
• God is always joking. Look at your own life – it is a joke! Look at other people’s lives, and you will find jokes and jokes and jokes. Seriousness is illness; seriousness has nothing spiritual about it. Spirituality is laughter, spirituality is joy, spirituality is fun. Rajneesh
• I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it. Neil Gaiman
• I have never been able to see life as anything but a vast complicated practical joke, and it’s better to laugh than cry. Robert A. Heinlein
• I love comedy. Life is a cosmic joke. Robert Wyatt
• If life is a joke then I’m waiting for the punch. Mac Miller
• If life is merely a joke, the question still remains: for whose amusement? Publilius Syrus
• If life’s a joke, then suicide’s a bad punch line. – Louise Erdrich
• In life there are always these things happening if you can just get the joke. Lynda Barry
• It was almost funny. Life seemed downright accidental in its brevity, and death a punch line to a lousy joke. Maureen Johnson
• It’s important to remember that life is a joke and that outlook grants a lot of perspective John Mulaney
• Joke: Something, such as a funny story or trick, that is said or done in order to make people laugh. Cambridge Dictionary
• Life as such has to be taken as a cosmic joke – and then suddenly you relax because there is nothing to be tense about. And in that very relaxation something starts changing in you – a radical change, a transformation – and the small things of life starts having new meaning, new significance. One learns only one thing, how to rejoice in life. Rajneesh
• Life is a joke that’s just begun. S. Gilbert
• Life is too important to be taken as a joke, but too ridiculous to be taken seriously. Ashleigh Brilliant
• Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us. Scott Fitzgerald
• Life seemed to be an educator’s practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong. Russell Baker
• My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked, a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself. Maya Angelou
• My life is passed in making bad jokes and seeing them turn into true prophecies. Gilbert K. Chesterton
• My whole life is a practical joke. Howie Mandel
• Perhaps the way to succeed is to think of life on Earth as a colossal joke, a creation of such immense stupidity that the only way to live is to laugh until you think your heart will break. Meg Rosoff
• There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke. Bob Dylan
• What if life is just a cosmic joke, like spiders in your underwear. Jimmy Buffett

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There is so much about life that is funny…

• Life is funny. Life isn’t categorized into comedy, drama, action, is it?So I don’t know why they try to categorize everything. It drives me crazy-why it would have to be just a romantic comedy or…I want to have a little integrity, a little story, you know Jennifer Aniston
• Everyone’s sex life is funny except your own. John Waters
• Funny, isn’t it, how your whole life goes by while you think you’re only planning the way you’re going to live it? Edna Ferber
• Life can be very funny and very tragic. Emmy Rossum
• Life has played some funny tricks on me and taken me on a wild ride. How did I ever get into this wonderful mess that is my life? Bo Derek
• Life is a funny thing, the minute you think you’ve got everything figured out something comes along and turns it all upside down. Zayn Malik
• Life is funny and we are really funny, especially when we get to be hoity toity; we can be so ridiculous. Life is fun. Desmond Tutu
• Life is funny isn’t it? Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, just when you finally begin to plan something, get excited about something, and feel like you know what direction you’re heading in, the paths change, the signs change, the wind blows the other way, north is suddenly south, and east is west, and you’re lost. It is so easy to lose your way, to lose direction. And that’s with following all the signposts. Cecelia Ahern
• Life is funny, baby, and that’s no joke. Rachel Cohn
• Life itself is pretty funny when you realize how absurd it can be. Ray Stevenson
• Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave. Quentin Crisp
• Life’s funny chucklehead. You only get one and you don’t want to throw it away. Andrew Klavan
• Life’s funny. You have to find a way to keep going, to keep laughing, even after you realize that none of your dreams will come true. When you realize that, there’s still so much of a life to get through. Claire Messud
• Life’s pretty funny when you’re objectively on the outside looking at it. Philip Seymour Hoffman
• Life’s too damn funny for me to explain. Don Marquis
• No good at life, but very funny sometimes with the commentary. Kurt Vonnegut
• When you cannot joke about the darkness of life, that’s when the darkness takes over. Amanda Palmer
• You make a joke out of everything. Life’s too painful not to. Richelle Mead

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…and learning to laugh at life and at ourselves is one of life’s great lessons

• You’ll laugh at the comedy of errors that is my life. Bret Michaels
• You can perceive life as tragic, or you can laugh at the tragedy of it and that turns it into comedy. It doesn’t change the circumstances. Harold Ramis
• It’s important to remember that life is a joke and that outlook grants a lot of perspective, but I don’t think comedy should change and become political due to other things. It should just laugh at that cosmic joke that life is all the time. John Mulaney
• Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long shot. To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it. Charlie Chaplan
• Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable. H. L. Mencken
• Between birth and burial, we find ourselves in a comedy of mysteries. If you don’t think life is mysterious, if you believe you have it all mapped out, you aren’t paying attention or you’ve anesthetized yourself with booze or drugs, or with a comforting ideology. And if you don’t think life’s a comedy – well, friend, you might as well hurry along to that burial. The rest of us need people with whom we can laugh. Dean Koontz
• Only silence can laugh, because only silence can understand the cosmic joke. Rajneesh
• Tragedy and comedy are simply questions of value; a little misfit in life makes us laugh; a great one is tragedy and cause for expression of grief. Elbert Hubbard

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The truth is that life is not always a feel-good movie

• Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly. Matthew Quick

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There are many ways in which life can be a kind of Greek tragedy…

• I’ve come to realize that life is not a musical comedy, it’s a Greek tragedy. Billy Joel
• Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for a while and then act our part in it. Jonathan Swift
• Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live. Albert Camus
• The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love. William Somerset Maugham
• Life’s Tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late. Benjamin Franklin
• The biggest tragedy of life is the utter impossibility to change what you have done John Galsworthy
• The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy. Ellen Glasgow
• The most fundamental tragedy of my life is that the ones who I see do not exist and the one who exists I do not see. Kedar Joshi
• The principle tragedy of my life is, like all tragedies, an irony of Destiny. I reject real life as if it were a condemnation; I reject dreams as if they were an ignoble liberation. After the end of the stars uselessly whitened in the morning sky and the breeze became less cold in the barely orange tinged in the yellow of the light on the scattered low clouds, I, who hadn’t slept, could finally, slowly raise my body, exhausted from nothing from the bed from which I had thought the universe. Fernando Pessoa
• The tragedy of life is that people do not change. Agatha Christie
• There is only one real tragedy in a woman’s life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband. Oscar Wilde

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… tragedy often epic in scale…

• But when you realize that the story of your life could be told a thousand different ways, that you could tell it over and over as a tragedy, but you choose to call it an epic, that’s when you start to learn what celebration is. When what you see in front of you is so far outside of what you dreamed, but you have the belief, the boldness, the courage to call it beautiful instead of calling it wrong, that’s celebration. Shauna Niequist
• Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last. Marisha Pessl

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…including spiritual loss…

• The tragedy of human life consists in our vain attempts to stretch the limits of things which can never become unlimited, to reach the infinite by absurdly adding to the rungs of the ladder of the finite. Rabindranath Tagore
• The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. Plato
• The greatest tragedy of life is not unanswered prayer, buy unoffered prayer. F.B. Meyer
• The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life’s tragedy. Oscar Wilde
• The tragedy of life and of the world is not that men do not know God; the tragedy is that, knowing Him, they still insist on going their own way. William Barclay
• The greatest tragedy is a life lived and died without knowing Father God intimately and experiencing His love personally. Bob Parr

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…running out of time…

• The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we begin it so late. William Mather Lewis
• Every life is a tragedy, but far more the writer’s life, because the more he has to see, the more deeply he understands and feels about life, the less time he has to put it down. Gabrielle Roy

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…lack of purpose and vision…

• The tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. It isn’t a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream…It is not a disgrace not to reach the stars, but it is a disgrace to have no stars to reach for. Not failure, but low aim is sin. Benjamin E. Mays
• The greatest tragedy in life is not death, but a life without a purpose. Myles Munroe
• The greatest tragedy in life is not to die, it is to live as if dead, to let the life within us wither. Toward what goal or achievement are we striving in life? This is the important question to ask ourselves. Daisaku Ikeda
• The greatest tragedy in life is to spend your whole life fishing only to discover it was never fish that you were after. Henry David Thoreau
• The greatest tragedy is not death, but life without purpose. Rick Warren
• The greatest tragedy in life is people who have sight but no vision. Helen Keller
• The greatest tragedy in life is not death. The greatest tragedy is to be alive and not know why Simon T. Bailey

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…failure and success…

• The great tragedy of life is not that people set their sights too high and fail to achieve their goals but that they set their sights too low and do. Michelangelo
• Life’s greatest tragedy consists of men and women who earnestly try, and fail! Napoleon Hill
• There are two great tragedies in life: one is to fail to achieve one’s grandest ambitions, and the other one is to succeed. Graham T. Allison
• There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. Oscar Wilde
• The tragedy of this life is not failure, but low aim. Benjamin E. Mays
• The tragedy of life is not that a man loses but that he almost wins. Heywood Hale Broun
• Tragedy in life normally comes with betrayal and compromise, and trading on your integrity and not having dignity in life. That’s really where failure comes. Tom Cochrane
• The tragedy of life is not found in failure but complacency. Not in you doing too much, but doing too little. Not in you living above your means, but below your capacity. It’s not failure but aiming too low, that is life’s greatest tragedy. Benjamin E. Mays

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… untimely death…

• Life is a tragedy, one way or another. What is certain is that you die. Anne Rice
• While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die – whether it is our spirit, our creativity or our glorious uniqueness. Gilda Radner
• There’s no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were. Dwight D. Eisenhower
• Life has taught me that the greatest tragedy is not to die too soon but to live too long. Ellen Glasgow
• The tragedy of death is unreal; those who shudder at it are like an ignorant actor who dies of fright on the stage when nothing more has been fired at him than a blank cartridge. Paramahansa Yogananda

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…and worse than death; a life not fully lived and potential not reached

• Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy. Orson Scott Card
• Man’s worst tragedy in life is his failure to reach his greatest potential Ed Palubinskas
• Death is not the greatest tragedy in life. The greatest tragedy is what dies inside us while we live. We need not fear death. We need fear only that we may exist without having sensed something of the possibilities that lie within human existence. Norman Cousins
• One of the greatest tragedies in life is to watch potential die untapped. Myles Munroe
• The greatest tragedy in life is not death; the greatest tragedy takes place when our talents and capabilities are underutilized and allowed to rust while we are living. Mata Amritanandamayi
• The tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. It isn’t a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream…It is not a disgrace not to reach the stars, but it is a disgrace to have no stars to reach for. Not failure, but low aim is sin. Benjamin E. Mays
• The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives – the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself. Norman Cousins
• The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we begin it so late. William Mather Lewis
• The tragedy of life is what dies in the hearts and souls of people while they live. Albert Einstein
• The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives. Albert Schweitzer
• The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me. Raymond Chandler
• While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die – whether it is our spirit, our creativity or our glorious uniqueness. Gilda Radner
• One of the great tragedies of life, it seems to me, is when a person classifies himself as someone who has no talents or gifts. When, in disgust or discouragement, we allow ourselves to reach depressive levels of despair because of our demeaning self-appraisal, it is a sad day for us and a sad day in the eyes of God. For us to conclude that we have no gifts when we judge ourselves by stature, intelligence, grade-point average, wealth, power, position, or external appearance is not only unfair but unreasonable. Marvin J. Ashton

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Much of the tragedy in our lives never actually transpires

• Most of my life has been one tragedy after another, most of which hasn’t happened. Voltaire
• There has been much tragedy in my life; at least half of it actually happened. Mark Twain

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We are invited to transcend the tragedies of life through optimism, hope and triumph…

• Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better. Martin Seligman
• A man that holds strong to his hope during the storms of trials and tribulations, surely lives to happily tell his courageous story. Edmond Mbiaka
• The temper of mind that sees tragedy in life has not for its opposite the temper that sees joy. The opposite pole to the tragic view of life is the sordid view. Edith Hamilton
• What I’m interested in is happiness with a full awareness of the tragedy of life, the potential tragedy that lurks around every corner and the tragedy that actually is life. Wolfgang Tillmans
• You can perceive life as tragic, or you can laugh at the tragedy of it and that turns it into comedy. It doesn’t change the circumstances. Harold Ramis
• We see in tragedy the noblest men, after a long conflict and suffering, finally renounce forever all the pleasure of life and the aims till then pursued so keenly, or cheerfully and
• Well, for me, it’s the relationship between comedy and life – that’s the edge I live on, and maybe it’s my protection against looking at the tragedy of it all. It’s seeing life in balance.
• When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways – either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength. Dalai Lama
• An optimist is someone who isn’t sure whether life is a tragedy or a comedy but is tickled silly just to be in the play. Robert Brault
• Although there may be tragedy in your life, there’s always a possibility to triumph. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from. The ability to triumph begins with you. Always. Oprah Winfrey
• A life without tragedy would not be worth living. Edward Abbey
• I think everybody has tragedy in their life. Everybody has hurdles in their life. Everybody has tough things to overcome. My kids say to me, ‘This isn’t fair.’ I said, ‘Life isn’t fair.’ Everybody has their issues. It’s how you handle your issues that distinguishes you. Maria Shriver
• The way you get through tragedy is to look at the good things in life. Rudy Giuliani
• In every life, no matter how full or empty ones purse, there is tragedy. It is the one promise life always fulfills. Thus, happiness is a gift, and the trick is not to expect it, but to delight in it when it comes, and to add to other peoples store of it. Charles Dickens
• Sometimes in tragedy we find our life’s purpose – the eye sheds a tear to find its focus. Robert Breault
• Tragedy blows through your life like a tornado, uprooting everything, creating chaos. You wait for the dust to settle, and then you choose. You can live in the wreckage and pretend it’s still the mansion you remember. Or you can crawl from the rubble and slowly rebuild. Because after disaster strikes, the important thing is that you move on. But if you’re like me, you just keep chasing the storm. Rob Thomas
• Tragedy dramatizes human life as potentiality and fulfillment. Its virtual future, or Destiny, is therefore quite different from that created in comedy. Comic Destiny is Fortune – what the world will bring, and the man will take or miss, encounter or escape; tragic Destiny is what the man brings, and the world will demand of him. That is his Fate. Susanne Katherina Langer
• Comedies, in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. …Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms…  Joseph Campbell

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…through surrender…

• I have been asked hundreds of times in my life why God allows tragedy and suffering. I have to confess that I really do not know the answer totally, even to my own satisfaction. I have to accept, by faith, that God is sovereign, and He is a God of love and mercy and compassion in the midst of suffering. Billy Graham

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…and most of all, through love

• As for life’s tragedies, our love will defeat them. Love is the most effective cure. In the crevices of disasters, happiness lies like a diamond in a mind, so let us instill in ourselves the wisdom of love. Naguib Mahfouz

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Tragedy adds profundity and interest to the movie of our lives

• All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them. Isak Dinesen
• A story depicts also the troubled part of the hero’s life … A. C. Bradley
• Even the hard times are part of your life story. If you acknowledge them and move past them, they eventually add up to the experience that makes you wise. Miley Cyrus
• If you can go to a movie and see a picture of war and suffering, and afterward say, “What a wonderful picture!” so may you take this life as a cosmic picture-show. Be prepared for every kind of experience that may come to you, realizing that all are but dreams. Each human life constitutes a drama; and the events of each day represent a drama. You are living a fresh one each of the year’s 365 days. The thought that you are merely a player in these dramas is very comforting. Realize that the acting out of whatever part you are called upon to play does not affect your real being. At the end of every earthly incarnation you are the same—the immortal soul—untouched by sickness, sorrow, or death. Paramahansa Yogananda
• It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story. Haruki Murakami
• Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it. Kurt Vonnegut
• Your struggle is part of your story. Anthony Lambert

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Life can be both comic and tragic; a kind of tragicomedy

• I’ve come to realize that life is not a musical comedy, it’s a Greek tragedy. Billy Joel
• Life can be very funny and very tragic. Emmy Rossum
• Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny. Stephen Hawking
• Life is tragic comedy, in a way. There is humor. Tcheky Karyo
• I see tragedy and comedy and pain and irony and all that stuff. But in the end I think life is fascinating, and I think people are more good than bad, and I think that the possibilities of progress are real. Barack Obama
• Life is a comedy far darker than drama. It just takes time to learn what to smile at. Robin Morgan
• Life is a double-faced creature; one face is tragedy, the other one is comedy. We have no way but to face the first face with dignity! Mehmet Murat Ildan
• Life is funny. Life isn’t categorized into comedy, drama, action, is it? So I don’t know why they try to categorize everything. It drives me crazy-why it would have to be just a romantic comedy or…I want to have a little integrity, a little story, you know Jennifer Aniston
• For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce. Oscar Wilde
• Life is replete with comedy, drama, horror, suspense, tragedy, romance, mystery, fantasy and a good dose of fiction. While at times the plot may seem to be lacking, the special effects alone are well worth the price of admission. Derek R. Audette
• There’s comedy even in tragedy. There’s comedy in life. Nathan Fillion
• The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow. Socrates
• The purpose of the whole [the Comedy] and of this portion [the Paradiso] is to remove those who are living in this life from the state of wretchedness, and to lead them to the state of blessedness. Dante Alighieri
• The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life’s tragedy. Oscar Wilde
• There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy. Mark Twain

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…a kind of tragicomedy

• Most people go on living their everyday life: half-frightened, half indifferent, they behold the ghostly tragic-comedy that is being performed on the international stage before the eyes and ears of the world. Albert Einstein
• Well, for me, it’s the relationship between comedy and life – that’s the edge I live on, and maybe it’s my protection against looking at the tragedy of it all. It’s seeing life in balance.
• Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? Is not life one?  Augustus William

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…part of life’s play of opposites

• Yet a romantic comedy with no bite becomes sentimental and sickly. Tragedy reminds us of the gravity of life, so that we can feel compassion and empathy. Yet a harrowing tragedy with no redemption becomes dark and bitter. We want the paralogical play of opposites in our stories. And that’s what we’ve got with the great tragicomedy of life. Tim Freke
• Comedy and tragedy co-exist. You can’t have one without the other. I’m of the school that anything can be funny, if seen from a comedic point of view. Harold Ramis
• Comedy and tragedy co-exist. You can’t have one without the other. I’m of the school that anything can be funny, if seen from a comedic point of view. Harold Ramis

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Tragedy and comedy are all mixed up…

• Comedy and tragedy are so mixed up in life. Lucy Maud Montgomery
• But it is only in epic tragedies that gloom is unrelieved. In real life tragedy and comedy are so intermingled that when one is most wretched ridiculous things happen to make one laugh in spite of oneself. Georgette Heyer
• I don’t want to make a style. Not tragedy, not comedy. Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together. Alejandro Jodorowsky
• Human life is a combination of tragedy and comedy. The shapes and designs that surround us are the music accompanying this tragedy and this comedy. Alvar Aalto

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…and there is often a thin line between the two

• A thin line separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt. Our lives constantly walk that line. When we slip off on one side or the other, we’re taken by surprise. But who said there wouldn’t be surprises? Knowing God just means that all the rules will be fair; at the end of our life drama, we’ll see that. We never know how things will turn out, but if we know with certainty they will make sense regardless of how they turn out, we’re on to something. Barbara Johnson
• I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. We’re all cruel, aren’t we? We are all extreme in one way or another at times and that’s what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with. I hope the overall view isn’t just that though, or I’ve failed in my writing. There have to be moments when you glimpse something decent, something life-affirming even in the most twisted character. That’s where the real art lies. Martin McDonagh
• Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together. Alejandro Jodorowsky

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When is life a tragedy and when is it a comedy?

• Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long shot. To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it. Charlie Chaplan
• Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy. Scott Fitzgeral
• Life is a comedy when watching and a tragedy when experiencing. I try and share anything I have. Eric Idle
• Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor. Sholom Aleichem
• Tragedy massages the human ego even as comedy deflates it. … Tragedy pits us against large foes and the trip wire is our own character. … In comedy we fall afoul of one another. Comedy depends on social life, on our behavior in groups. In tragedy you can observe one human against the gods. In comedy it’s one human versus other humans and often one man (or woman if I’m writing it) against her own worst impulses. Rita Mae Brown
• Tragedy and comedy are simply questions of value; a little misfit in life makes us laugh; a great one is tragedy and cause for expression of grief. Elbert Hubbard

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Whether life is tragedy or comedy often depends on how you take it

• You can perceive life as tragic, or you can laugh at the tragedy of it and that turns it into comedy. It doesn’t change the circumstances. Harold Ramis
• Optimist: someone who isn’t sure whether life is a tragedy or a comedy but is tickled silly just to be in the play. Robert Breault
• Comedy relieves us from the burden of being too serious, so that we can play in the moment.
• Even though our souls chose the role for us to play in this lifetime, it is our choice how we present it. That is our “free will.” So the question becomes how do we perceive our life, our drama, our story, our own star-studded movie? Is it a comedy or a tragedy? Some of my students have joked that their life is a “tragic comedy.” I think many of you would agree with that perception. Fortunately, today there are numerous genres to choose from. Gina E. Jones
• Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more. Jeannette Walls
• Life is neither comedy or tragedy, life is what you make of it. Radha Mitchell
• Well, for me, it’s the relationship between comedy and life – that’s the edge I live on, and maybe it’s my protection against looking at the tragedy of it all. It’s seeing life in balance. Comedy and tragedy co-exist. You can’t have one without the other. I’m of the school that anything can be funny, if seen from a comedic point of view. Harold Ramis

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