Life is an experiment
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All life is an experiment.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
[1841-1935 U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice],
Dissent, Abrams v. U.S. (1919)

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little course, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice. Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
[1803-1882 U.S. orator, author, Unitarian minister],
Journals

Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they [my seniors] have tried it.
—Thoreau
[Henry David Thoreau, 1817-62 US
essayist, poet, naturalist], Walden

Life is an endless series of experiments.
—Mohandas K Gandi

Remember, life is not a continuous attempt to light the cave. Life is standing in the light.
—Jim Rosemergy

[Unity minister], A Daily Guide to Spiritual Living

Life for [the American] is always becoming, never being.
—Albert Einstein

[1879-1955 German/American physicist,
Nobel Prize, 1921], Ideas and Opinions

Life is a lively process of becoming.
—Douglas MacArthur
[1880-1964 US army general]

Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.
—Matthew Arnold

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
—Anaïs Nin
[1903-77 French/American author, psychoanalyst, feminist]

We’re all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
—Tennessee Williams
[1911-1983 U.S. playwright, Pulitzer prize winner],
"Camino Real," 1953

Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.
—David Cronenberg
[1943- Canadian film maker], Cronenberg on Cronenberg, 1992

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.
—Cyril Connolly

To be ushered into life, blindly to toil a few years through its fitful maze, and then to go out in darkness is surely not the method of wise design. Life must mean more than this, and it does mean more.
—Charles Fillmore,
Talks on Truth

Life is a mission. Every other definition of life is false, and leads all who accept it astray. Religion, science, philosophy, though still at variance upon many points, all agree in this, that every existence is an aim.
—Guiseppe Mazzini,

Life and Writings

Life is a mission, not a career.
—Stephen R. Covey
[U.S. management consultant], from "The Second
Annual Worldwide Lessons in Leadership Series," 1997

Life is…a mystery as deep as ever death can be.
—Mary M Dodge

Life is not a problem to be solved, nor a question to be answered. Life is a mystery to be experienced.
—Alan Watts
[1915-73 US philosopher]

Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.
—Van Kaam

Life is like a jigsaw puzzle, but you don’t have the picture on the front of the box to know what it’s supposed to look like. Sometimes, you’re not even sure if you have all the pieces.
—Author unknown

Most people think of life as a puzzle to which pieces are constantly being added. My life started as a completed puzzle, but I’ve lost too many pieces along the way for it to ever be that way again.
—Caroline Yawn

Life is…the only riddle that we shrink from giving up.
—William S Gilbert

I count life just a stuff
To try the soul’s strength on.
—Robert Browning,
In a Balcony

Life is a great surprise.
—Vladimir Nabokov

Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
[1803-82 US orator, author, Unitarian minister],
Essays, Second Series, "Experience"

Life is a test and this world a place of trial. Always the problems—or it may be the same problem—will be presented to every generation in different forms.
—Sir Winston Churchill
[1874-1965 British Prime Minister], speech at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1949

Is life worth living?
Aye, with the best of us—
Heights of us, depths of us—
Life is the test of us!
—Corinne Roosevelt Robinson,
Life, A Question

Life consists in penetrating the unknown, and fashioning our actions in accord with the new knowledge thus acquired.
—Leo Tolstoy,

The Kingdom of God Is within You,
1893

One of the wonders of life is just that—the wonder of life.
—Bill Copeland