Life

Life (cf. biota) is a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have signaling and self-sustaining processes from those that do not, either because such functions have ceased (death), or else because they lack such functions and are classified as inanimate. Biology is the science concerned with the study of life.

Famous quotes containing the word life:

“I found my brother’s body at the bottom there, where they had thrown it away on the rocks, by the river. Like an old, dirty rag nobody wants. He was dead. And I felt I had killed him. I turned back to give myself up.... Because if a man’s life can be lived so long and come out this way, like rubbish, then something was horrible, and had to be ended one way or another. And I decided to help.”
—Abraham Polonsky (b. 1910)

“I don’t like your miserable lonely single “front name.” It is so limited, so meagre; it has no versatility; it is weighted down with the sense of responsibility; it is worn threadbare with much use; it is as bad as having only one jacket and one hat; it is like having only one relation, one blood relation, in the world. Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)

“What is art,
But life upon the larger scale, the higher,
When, graduating up in a spiral line
Of still expanding and ascending gyres,
It pushes toward the intense significance
Of all things, hungry for the Infinite?
Art’s life,—and where we live, we suffer and toil.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)