life (noun): "the quality that distinguishes a vital and functional being from a dead body"

Though it's hard to argue with Merriam-Webster, we all know that life means something more than the standard dictionary definition—or, at least, we want it to. If you're searching for insights into the meaning of life, or words of inspiration to make your life more meaningful, there's no better source than authors of great works of literature.

From Shakespeare to Alice Walker, from Jane Austen to Saul Bellow, iconic authors have a lot to say about life—its hardships and joys, its lessons and surprises. Below, we've gathered 50+ of the best quotes about the nature and meaning of life from authors of some of the best books ever written.

Quotes to encourage you when life turns challenging

• "I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship." -Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

• "There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm." -Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

• "Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat." -Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

• "Life is every bit as devious as Death. It too can wear a hooded coat. It too can slip into town, lurk in an alley, or wait in the back of a tavern." -Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

• "Wasn't that the story of her life? ... You make the wrong choices, you make mistakes, you disappear for a decade, you marry the wrong man. You get hurt. You lose sight of who you are, or of who you want to be, and then you remember, and if you’re lucky you have sisters or friends who remind you when you forget your best intentions. You come back to yourself, again and again. You try, and fail, and try again." -Jennifer Weiner, Mrs. Everything

• "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." -Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

• "You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live." -Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

• "You endure what is unbearable and you bear it. That is all." -Cassandra Clare, The Clockwork Princess

• "There are years that ask questions and years that answer." -Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

• "A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?" -John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• "Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever." -Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

• "To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation." -Yann Martel, Life of Pi

• "There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment." -Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

• "I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am." -Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

• "Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?" -Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

• "And may the odds be ever in your favor." -Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

Quotes to inspire you to live your life to the fullest

• "Anything worth dying for is certainly worth living for." -Joseph Heller, Catch-22

• "It is nothing to die; it is dreadful not to live." -Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

• "Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living." -Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

• "A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it." -D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

• "It is the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting." -Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

• "It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live." -J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

• "Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever." -Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

• "Get busy living or get busy dying." -Stephen King, "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," Different Seasons

• "We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn't chosen." -Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

• "We always think there’s enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like 'if.'" -Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

• "This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time." -Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

• "Time moves slowly, but passes quickly." -Alice Walker, The Color Purple

• "I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it." -Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

• "This was not a tragedy. Dying on your couch watching TV by yourself is a tragedy. Dying while doing something you love with every part of your body is magic." -Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward

• "Too much sanity may be madness—and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!" -Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

• "Appreciate what you have now, because there may be no tomorrow. If your life span is decreasing every day, what are you doing now to appreciate what you have left? What gives your life meaning?" -Jodi Picoult, The Book of Two Ways

• "It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living." -Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

• "Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself." -Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

• "Your life belongs to you and you alone." -Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

• "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep." -William Shakespeare, The Tempest

• "You cannot find peace by avoiding life." -Michael Cunningham, The Hours

• "It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how." -Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

• "Oh, the places you’ll go! You’ll be on your way up! You’ll be seeing great sights! You’ll join the high fliers who soar to high heights." -Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You'll Go

Quotes about the fleeting and complicated nature of life

• "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair." -Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

• "All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts." -William Shakespeare, As You Like It

• "She hadn't realized how long it takes to become somebody else, or how lonely it can be living in a world not meant for you." -Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

• "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." -Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

• "Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading." -Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

• "Nothing is all good or all bad ... Life is so much messier than that." -V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

• "We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories." -Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

• "Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings." -Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

• "The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything." -Isabel Allende, City of the Beasts

• "The same substance composes us—the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star—we are all one, all moving to the same end." -P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins

• "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire." -Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List

• "We try to preserve life, even when we know it has no chance of enduring its body. We feed it, keep it comfortable, bathe it, medicate it, caress it, even sing to it. We tend to these basic functions not because we are brave or selfless but because, like breath, it is the most fundamental act of our species: to sustain the body until time leaves it behind." -Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

• "A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved." -Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

• "Anyone ... who describes dying as ‘slipping away’ or ‘peaceful’ has never witnessed it happen. Death is violent, death is a struggle. The body clings to life, as ivy to a wall, and will not easily let go, will not surrender its grip without a fight." -Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

• "Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand." -Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

• "You can cling to this world for a thousand years and still be plucked out of it in a breath." -Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

• "What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?" -George Eliot, Middlemarch

• "All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust." -J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

• "The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42." -Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

• "Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is." -Saul Bellow, Herzog

• "Somewhere, you see, in the river of time, I am already alive." -Akwaeke Emezi, The Death of Vivek Oji