WHAT IS LIFE?

 

WHAT IS LIFE?

There are innumerable thoughts about life, but not definitions. . Let me begin with a definition : The ability to breathe, grow, reproduce, etc, which people, animals and plants have before they die and which objects do not have.

Now what follows is a bunch of thoughts:  (1) Life is a short journey in this mysterious world. (2) Everybody’s life is full of sufferings (Lord Buddha and Guru Nanak Dev.)  (3) As dreams are made on, and our little life/Is rounded with sleep. (4) Out, out brief candle ! Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player /That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/And then is heard no more; it is a tale /Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, /Signifying nothing.—English poet-dramatist William Shakespeare ,1564-1616 , in Macbeth.) (5) What is this life if, full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare.--English poet W. H. Davies, 1871-1940.

6. A little work, a little sleep, a little love and it is all over --.American author, Mary Roberts Rinehart, 1876-1958. 7.

 Let your life lightly dance on the edges of time like dew on the tip of  a leaf. (Indian writer-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore 1861-1941 .

8. The idea shared by many  that life is a vale of tears is  just as false as the idea shared by the great majority, the idea to which youth and health and riches incline you, that life is a place of entertainment.  ---Russian author Leo Tolstoy , 1828=1910.

And finally, what American author Augusta Evans Wilson – 1835-1909 said: Life does not count by years;, some suffer a lifetime in a day, and so grow old between the rising and the setting of the sun.

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G.R.Kanwal

19^th May 2024