Note that Tom Waits didn’t write that. It’s an old novelty song recorded by a number of different artists in the '20s and '30s.
The lyricist was Edgar Leslie, who wrote it with Walter Donaldson in 1929. Leslie also wrote the lyrics for Foe Me and My Gal, Kansas City Kitty and Me and the Man in the Moon.
Sorry I could not finish my message. You are right with your perception of Lincolns Inaugural address, being melodious, rhythmic and meaningful.
There is a similar quote from J.F. Kennedy that addresses our time and I find very meaningful, both in a public sense and in my personal life
“So, let us not be blind to our differences–but let us also direct attention to our common iinterests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. **We all **breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” ― John F. Kennedy
In other words" it was life"
I’d like to nominate two:
One, from Dead Poets Society, quoting Walt Whitman:
“That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.”
The second, from Ben Folds…but first, context:
Being said to an ex-lover, concerning the current one:
“I want to be for her what I could never be for you.”
Great sentence, nonetheless. 
I knew Tom wasn’t the author, but made great use of it. The sentence paired well with King’s use of Siodmak’s sentence, though.
From the book and movie “Cloud Atlas” … " Our lives are not our own, We are bound to others past and present, and be each crime and every kindness we birth our future."
I hope I remembered that all right… anyway to me it’s a beautiful idea…and sentence 
This is my favorite…so far!
Now being used to sell iPad Airs.
I like this. Can you tell us the source please?
It’s from arguably one of the greatest, if not the greatest television dramas of all time. Without spoiling too much (in case you haven’t seen it), the bald guy’s BIL is a DEA agent who has just brutally rearranged the protagonist’s face.
Jesus! Aaron Paul reminds me so much of Henry Fonda in Grapes of Wrath and I can’t help wondering how much of that was an homage.
Which scene? I’m wracking (racking?) my brain but it’s just not coming to me. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen GOW.
Yeah…I had the TV on in the background, and saw that commercial. It’s what made me think of it.
Well, that, and my niece used that monologue as an audition for her drama club in high school a few weeks ago.
This one but only in terms of the manner of delivery and the scar on the face for comparison. The tone is at the opposite end of compassion and brotherly love from Jesse’s. 
“They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” - Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928
I love the use of “other nations” in reference to non-human animals.
No James Joyce yet? Herewith, my favourite, the last sentence of The Dead,
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Yep, I was coming to quote this part:
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
“Don’t believe the hype.”
The opening narration to an episode of the 1949 radio series, The Green Lama:
“It is truly written that a man’s best friend is his dog – but for Juan Martinez, the little white chihuahua carried the seeds of death!”
I want that on a T-shirt.