Motivational Quotes

Life

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.

- Benjamin, Walter

Best Quotes about Life

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

Moses, Grandma

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

Bachelard, Gaston

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.

Kundera, Milan

It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it's one damn thing over and over.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

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

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

Mumford, Lewis

Life is fickle; the fair man doesn't invariably win.

Mark Hodder

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

Epicurus

Not by gain our life is measured, But by what we've lost 'Tis scored; 'Tis not how much wine is drunken But how much has been outpoured. For the strength of love never standeth In the sacrifice we bear; He who has the greatest suffering Ever has the most to share.

Nee, Watchman

10.

There is no shortcut to life. To the end of our days, life is a lesson imperfectly learned.

Salisbury, Harrison

11.

Can't nothing make your life work if you ain't the architect.

McMillan, Terry

12.

The four stages of life are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence.

Linkletter, Art

13.

It is advisable that a person know at least three things, where they are, where they are going, and what they had best do under the circumstances.

Ruskin, John

14.

One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.

Wolfe, Thomas

15.

This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what's so.

Erhard, Werner

16.

The only reason they come to see me is that I know that life is great -- and they know I know it.

Gable, Clark

17.

We don't beat the Grim Reaper by living longer, we beat the Reaper by living well and living fully, for the Reaper will come for all of us. The question is what do we do between the time we are born and the time he shows up. It's too late to do all the things that you're gonna kinda get around to.

Randy Pausch

18.

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

If God exists and we are made in his image we can have real meaning, and we can have real knowledge through what he has communicated to us.

Schaeffer, Francis

20.

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

Prochnow, Herbert

21.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

22.

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the Earth are never alone or weary of life.

Carson, Rachel

23.

Man values life as a sacred jewel in such a way that he reveres him most who haughtily scorns it.

Platen

24.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

25.

Life is really about a spiritual unfolding that is personal and enchanting -- an unfolding that no science or philosophy or religion has yet fully clarified.

Redfield, James

26.

Difficulties come when you don't pay attention to life's whisper. Life always whispers to you first, but if you ignore the whisper, sooner or later you'll get a scream.

Oprah Winfrey

27.

The trouble with life is that there are so many beautiful women and so little time.

Barrymore, John

28.

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

29.

This also -- that I live, I consider a gift of God.

Ovid

30.

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

Morley, Christopher

31.

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

32.

Every man's life is a fairy tale written by God's finger.

Anderson, Hans Christian

33.

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others

Keller, Helen

34.

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

35.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Percy, Walker

36.

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

Crisp, Quentin

37.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

John Lennon

38.

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

39.

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

Stoppard, Tom

40.

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

41.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

42.

People do not live nowadays. They get about 10% out of life.

Duncan, Isadora

43.

The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist -- this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul -- a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.

Mead, Margaret

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Dryden, John

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

Be glad of life because it gives you a chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at stars.

Dyke, Henry Van

50.

Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.

Smith, Logan Pearsall