Motivational Quotes

Life

Every man's life is a fairy tale written by God's finger.

- Anderson, Hans Christian

Best Quotes about Life

We never live, but we hope to live; and as we are always arranging to be happy, it must be that we never are so.

Pascal, Blaise

To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earthly things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one's power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God; this is what man's journey is about, I think.

Smith, Lillian

Life It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.

Shakespeare, William

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning -- in other words, of absurdity --the more energetically meaning is sought.

Havel, Vaclav

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.

Shields, Carol

We Japanese enjoy the small pleasures, not extravagance. I believe a man should have a simple lifestyle -- even if he can afford more.

Ibuka, Massaru

Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.

Nash, Ogden

Anything for the quick life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse.

Dickens, Charles

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

Even when I'm sick and depressed, I love life.

Rubinstein, Arthur

11.

The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist -- this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul -- a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.

Mead, Margaret

12.

Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.

Fran Lebowitz

13.

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. [Psalms 90:10]

Bible

14.

Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

15.

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

Boom, Corrie Ten

16.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Brodsky, Joseph

17.

What else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?

Henry, O.

18.

Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination

Isherwood, Christopher

19.

Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life.

Pirandello, Luigi

20.

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

21.

We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do -- it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much.

Lawrence, D. H.

22.

Life's a bitch, and life's got lots of sisters.

Presser, Ross

23.

When I consider life, it is all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, people favor this deceit.

Dryden, John

24.

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

William Shakespeare

25.

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

Santayana, George

26.

Life in the Fast Lane Playing in Traffic intense stressful challenging overwhelming fulfilling demanding exciting nerve-wrecking entrepreneurial unrelenting empowered exposed: no place to hide flexible confusing results compensation sweatshop team ascendancy ego suppression flat organizations who's my boss no titles no status customer focus self-abnegation decentralized decision making chaos the end of tenure the end of security no complacency fear ongoing change burnout

27.

The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.

Norman Thomas

28.

My life is a battle.

Voltaire

29.

If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

30.

To live is to go on a journey; to die is to come back home.

31.

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Shaw, George Bernard

32.

The essence of life is finding something you really love and then making the daily experience worthwhile.

Waitley, Denis

33.

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.

Stark, Freya

34.

Life is a long lesson in humility.

James M. Barrie

35.

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

Miller, Henry

36.

Nature has invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward. As a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life.

Louis Schwartzberg

37.

Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.

Huxtable, Ada Louise

38.

Life is like playing the violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Butler, Samuel

39.

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

There are nine requisites for contented living: HEALTH enough to make work a pleasure; WEALTH enough to support your needs; STRENGTH enough to battle with difficulties and forsake them; GRACE enough to confess your sins and overcome them; PATIENCE enough to toil until some good is accomplished; CHARITY enough to see some good in your neighbor; LOVE enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others; FAITH enough to make real the things of God; HOPE enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.

Pasternak, Boris

42.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

Miller, Henry

43.

The city is recruited from the country.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.

Canetti, Elias

45.

Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.

Berenson, Bernard

46.

Life marches by, I suggest you get on with it.

Baluch, Joy

47.

The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.

Mankiewicz, Joseph L.

48.

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived --forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

49.

Paris, a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief. [About Paris]

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

50.

It is vanity to desire a long life and to take no heed of a good life.

Kempis, Thomas