Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Austen, Jane

Best Quotes about Life

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

Thornton Wilder

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

Conrad, Joseph

New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.

Carson, Johnny

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

Lawrence, D. H.

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.

Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.

Sheen, Fulton John

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Our life's journey of self-discovery is not a straight-line rise from one level of consciousness to another. Instead, it is a series of steep climbs and flat plateaus, then further climbs. Even though we all approach the journey from different directions, certain of the journey's characteristics are common to all of us.

Wilde, Stuart

10.

Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.

Brecht, Bertolt

11.

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

Butler, Samuel

12.

Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only in proportion as we are desirous of living more do we really live.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

13.

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

Antrim, Minna

14.

Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.

Frankl, Viktor E.

15.

Living, just by itself -- what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting --or he'll come along and nibble your brain.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

16.

My life is a battle.

Voltaire

17.

We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.

Kennedy, John F.

18.

Today, you have 100% of your life left.

Hopkins, Tom

19.

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

20.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

21.

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

22.

Making a life comes before making a living.

23.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

24.

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.

Woody Allen

25.

Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life's ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets.

Miller, Henry

26.

Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to the brass tacks.

Eliot, T. S.

27.

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.

Larkin, Philip

28.

Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.

Osler, Sir William

29.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

30.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

Temple, Sir William

31.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

When we exercise self-control on a given occasion, we win for ourselves a little credibility we can rely on the next time around. Pretty soon we develop a reputation to ourselves that we want badly to uphold. With each test that we meet, our resolve gains momentum, fueled by the fear that we may succumb and establish a damaging precedent for our own weakness.

Daniel Akst

33.

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

Havel, Vaclav

34.

Plunge boldly into the thick of life, and seize it where you will, it is always interesting.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.

Radner, Gilda

36.

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

37.

Life begins when you get out of the grandstand into the game.

Debevoise, P. L.

38.

The world has so many lessons to teach you. I consider the world, our earth, to be like a school, and our life, the classrooms. Sometimes on our planet life school, the lessons often come dressed up as detours and road blocks and sometimes as full blown crises. And the secret I've learned to getting ahead is being open to the lessons.

Oprah Winfrey

39.

The man who says he has exhausted life generally means that life has exhausted him.

Wilde, Oscar

40.

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around.

Hepburn, Katharine

41.

Life is a glass given to us to fill; a busy life is filling it with as much as it can hold; a hurried life has had more poured into it than it can contain.

Brown, William Adams

42.

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

43.

Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.

May, Rollo

44.

What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction. And the greatest good is trivial; for all life is a dream and all dreams are dreams.

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro

45.

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.

Drummond, Henry

46.

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

Dryden, John

47.

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

48.

Life is uncharted territory. It reveals its story one moment at a time.

Buscaglia, Leo

49.

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

50.

I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital... not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground. The crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

Ruskin, John