Motivational Quotes

Life

When we speak the word life, it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

- Artaud, Antonin

Best Quotes about Life

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

I'm impressed with the people from Chicago. Hollywood is hype, New York is talk, Chicago is work.

Douglas, Michael

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

William Shakespeare

Walk through life eager and open to self-improvement and that which is going to best help you evolve, because that's really why were here: to evolve as human beings.

Oprah Winfrey

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

Santayana, George

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.

Allen, Fred A.

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

Taken in any context, except seriously, life on earth is palatable and positively enjoyable.

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

Butler, Samuel

10.

Young people talk of what they are doing; old people of what they have done; and fools of what they have a mind to do.

Proverb

11.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat... the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

12.

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.

James, William

13.

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really merely commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outer results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

14.

First I was dying to finish high-school and start college. Then I was dying to finish college and start working. Next, I was dying for my children to grow old enough for school, so I could return to work. Finally, I was dying to retire. And now, I am dying

15.

Life is a dead-end street.

Mencken, H. L.

16.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

Stone, Robert

17.

Life does not happen to us, it happens from us.

Wickett, Michael

18.

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.

Moses, Grandma

19.

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

Mille, Agnes De

20.

Everyone is trying to accomplish something big, not realizing that life is made up of little things.

Clark, Frank A.

21.

Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.

Nouwen, Henri

22.

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.

Baudrillard, Jean

23.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

24.

In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.

Socrates

25.

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Delacroix, Eugene

26.

See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little.

Pope John XXIII

27.

Life is like one big Mardi Gras. But instead of showing your boobs, show people your brain, and if they like what they'll, you'll have more beads than you know what to do with.

Ellen DeGeneres

28.

Life is too short to learn German.

Porson, R.

29.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

Camus, Albert

30.

Too often man handles life as he does the bad weather, He whiles away the time as he waits for it to stop.

Polgar, Alfred

31.

Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing.

Seneca

32.

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

33.

There is only one way to come into this world; there are too many ways to leave it.

Harington, Donald

34.

Real life seems to have no plots.

Burnett, Ivy Compton

35.

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs...

Epicurus

36.

The tragedy of life is not that a man loses, but that he almost wins.

Broun, Heywood

37.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Steve Jobs

38.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

Weil, Simone

39.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

Bachelard, Gaston

40.

Life is full of surprises and and serendipity. Being open to unexpected turns in the road is an important part of success. If you try to plan every step, you may miss those wonderful twists and turns. Just find your next adventure-do it well, enjoy it-and then, not now, think about what comes next.

Condoleeza Rice

41.

After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.

Poe, Edgar Allan

42.

It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

Ellis, Havelock

43.

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late

Franklin, Benjamin

44.

Live as you would have wished to live when you come to die.

Gellert

45.

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

Benjamin, Walter

46.

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.

Drummond, Henry

47.

Life is given for wisdom, and yet we are not wise; for goodness, and we are not good; for overcoming evil, and evil remains; for patience and sympathy and love, and yet we are fretful and hard and weak and selfish. We are keyed not to attainment, but to the struggle toward it.

Munger, Thornton T.

48.

Life is just a journey

Diana, Princess of Wales

49.

Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic

Wilde, Oscar

50.

A man's life is 20 years of having his mother ask him where he is going, 40 years of having his wife ask the same question and, at the end, perhaps having the mourners wondering too.