Motivational Quotes

Life

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.

- Austen, Jane

Best Quotes about Life

There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.

Herold, Don

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

Three keys to more abundant living: caring about others, daring for others, sharing with others.

Ward, William A.

Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on us.

Holdcroft, Thomas L.

Life is a classroom in which each of us is being tested, tried, and passed.

Thibodeau, Robert

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

Bacon, Francis

The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mode of happiness. but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed the change; happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow Up.

Morgan, Charles

The world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open.

William Shakespeare

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

Socrates

10.

So in all these little ways we spin a web, a cocoon, around ourselves. The cocoon becomes nice and snug and comfortable because it is very familiar. We know every little corner of our life; we can even write poetry about it. We may also have ideas about the great mystery which religions speak of, which gives our cocoon an especial sense of security: we can worship the great mystery outside of it and feel good about that. The cocoon is safe, bounded, claustrophobic, and a little stale. We settle into it and live our lives.

Hayward, Jeremy W.

11.

Life is raw material. We are artisans. We can sculpt our existence into something beautiful, or debase it into ugliness. It's in our hands.

Better, Cathy

12.

Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

Raban, Jonathan

13.

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

14.

Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

15.

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

Prochnow, Herbert

16.

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

Huxtable, Ada Louise

17.

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.

18.

Optimism and humor are the grease and glue of life. Without both of them we would never have survived our captivity.

Butler, Philip

19.

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.

Aleichem, Sholom

20.

Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.

Lehrer, Tom

21.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Baudrillard, Jean

22.

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

Herrick, Robert

23.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

24.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

25.

In the morning of life, work; in the mid day give council; in the evening, pray.

Proverb, German

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.

Life is indeed difficult, partly because of the real difficulties we must overcome in order to survive, and partly because of our own innate desire to always do better, to overcome new challenges, to self-actualize. Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor.

Albert Ellis, Michael Abrams, Lidia Dengelegi

28.

How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

29.

All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it -- an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.

Conrad, Peter

30.

The purpose of life is to fight maturity.

Dick Werthimer

31.

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

Mankiewicz, Joseph L.

32.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

33.

There are four things every person has more of than they know; sins, debt, years, and foes.

Proverb, Persian

34.

The continuous invention of new ways of observing is man's special secret of living.

Young, J. Z.

35.

The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.

Ben Stein

36.

Life is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you're gonna get.

Movie, Forrest Gump

37.

Life loves the liver of it.

Angelou, Maya

38.

The drama of life begins with a wail and ends with a sigh.

Antrim, Minna

39.

The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

40.

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

O'Neill, Eugene

41.

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

Moses, Grandma

42.

Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

43.

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

Real life seems to have no plots.

Burnett, Ivy Compton

45.

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

46.

Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.

Reed, Lou

47.

To a wise man every day is a new life.

48.

We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.

Osler, Sir William

49.

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

Nash, Ogden