Motivational Quotes

Life

You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can decide how you're going to live now.

- Baez, Joan

Best Quotes about Life

If you believed more in life you would fling yourself less to the moment.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

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

Butler, Samuel

Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live; Not where I love, but where I am, I die.

Southey, Robert

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

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

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

Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it.

Stoppard, Tom

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

Buechner, Frederick

10.

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

Gauguin, Paul

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.

I can't be bitter. No one has a contract on life.

Heath, David M.

13.

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

Bacon, Francis

14.

Dance like no one is watching, Love like you'll never be hurt, Sing like no one is listening, Live like it's heaven on earth.

Purkey, William

15.

Life is a campaign not a battle, and has its defeats as well as its victories.

Piatt, Don

16.

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.

17.

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

Camus, Albert

18.

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

Blackie, Professor

19.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

Santayana, George

20.

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

Kennedy, John F.

21.

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

22.

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

Kempis, Thomas

23.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

Rimbaud, Arthur

24.

There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone is too far from home.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

25.

Life is a long lesson in humility.

James M. Barrie

26.

Most of us fall short much more by omission than by commission. While the world perishes we go our way: purposeless, passionless, day after day.

Pilgrim, Peace

27.

The life of man is a journey; a journey that must be traveled, however bad the roads or the accommodation.

Goldsmith, Oliver

28.

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

Dryden, John

29.

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

Pavese, Cesare

30.

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

31.

If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I'm sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for.

Thoreau, Henry David

32.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Jacobs, Jane

33.

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

Santayana, George

34.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

Thoreau, Henry David

35.

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

James, William

36.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

37.

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.

Boulanger, Nadia

38.

Life is an uphill business for the guy who's not on the level.

Welsh, John

39.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

40.

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

Boom, Corrie Ten

41.

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

Camus, Albert

42.

Real life seems to have no plots.

Burnett, Ivy Compton

43.

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis: I am always in the convalescent stage.

Shaw, George Bernard

44.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

45.

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

Markiewicz, William

46.

This tattered life is my only robe; the wind my only refuge.

Mountain, Marian

47.

Life is not one thing after another. It's the same damn thing over and over!

48.

Life itself is the proper binge.

Child, Julia

49.

Some people seem to go through life standing at the complaint counter.

Propp Jr., Fred

50.

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