Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Bachelard, Gaston

Best Quotes about Life

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

Refrain from asking what going to happen tomorrow, and everyday that fortune grants you, count as gain.

Horace

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

Samuel Butler

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

Baudelaire, Charles

Life is an earnest business, and no one every became good or great on a diet of broad grins.

Blackie, Professor

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

Herrick, Robert

Search for meaning, eat, sleep. Search for meaning, eat, sleep. Die, search for meaning, search for meaning, search for meaning.

Horton, Doug

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.

Mills, C. Wright

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

Every morning I wake up saying, I'm still alive; a miracle. And so I keep on pushing.

Cousteau, Jacques

11.

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

12.

There are three stages in a person's life, birth, their life and death. They are not conscious of birth submit to death and forget to live.

La Bruyere, Jean De

13.

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

14.

He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many fold in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale.

Johnson, Samuel

15.

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.

Rogers, Carl

16.

To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one.

Kornfield, Jack

17.

It's better to be an authentic loser than a false success, and to die alive than to live dead.

Markiewicz, William

18.

In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.

Spengler, Oswald

19.

Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step, but most of the time we are taking small, seemingly insignificant steps on the stairway of life.

Ransom, Ralph

20.

Life is just a journey

Diana, Princess of Wales

21.

Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

My art and profession is to live.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

23.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

Gauguin, Paul

24.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Woolf, Virginia

25.

Living Life Tomorrow's fate, though thou be wise, Thou canst not tell nor yet surmise; Pass, therefore, not today in vain, For it will never come again.

Khayyam, Omar

26.

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

May, Rollo

27.

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

28.

Real life seems to have no plots.

Burnett, Ivy Compton

29.

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

30.

Do not take life too seriously; you will never get out of it alive.

Hubbard, Elbert

31.

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

Eliot, T. S.

32.

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

33.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Thoreau, Henry David

34.

The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing; the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unseen attack.

Aurelius, Marcus

35.

We come into this world head first and go out feet first; in between, it is all a matter of balance.

Boese, Paul

36.

Where the criminals cover their crimes by making them legal. [On Washington D. C.]

Dane, Frank

37.

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

James, William

38.

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

39.

Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

William Goldman

40.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

Camus, Albert

41.

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

42.

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump; you have to get it right the first time.

Mead, Margaret

43.

Life is real! Life is earnest! And death is not its goal. Dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

44.

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

45.

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

Allen, Fred A.

46.

In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you're told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.

Hoggart, Simon

47.

You're alive. Do something. The directive in life, the moral imperative was so uncomplicated. It could be expressed in single words, not complete sentences. It sounded like this: Look. Listen. Choose. Act.

Barbara Hall

48.

This life of separateness may be compared to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.

Buddha

49.

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

Hayakawa, S. I.

50.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Pound, Ezra