Motivational Quotes

Life

Threescore years and ten is enough; if a man can't suffer all the misery he wants in that time, he must be numb.

- Billings, Josh

Best Quotes about Life

There is one thing that matters -- to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

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

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

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

Carson, Johnny

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

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

Horace

Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.

Frankl, Viktor E.

Living the truth in your heart without compromise brings kindness into the world. Attempts at kindness that compromise your heart cause only sadness.

The person who does not know how to live while they are making a living is a poorer person after their wealth is won than when they started.

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

10.

Life's but a day at most.

Burns, George

11.

The surrender of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledgment of inferiority.

Calhoun, John C.

12.

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

Woody Allen

13.

We never live, but we hope to live; and as we are always arranging to be happy, it must be that we never are so.

Pascal, Blaise

14.

Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing.

Seneca

15.

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

Kafka, Franz

16.

He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.

Horace

17.

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

Allen, Fred A.

18.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

Camus, Albert

19.

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

20.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

21.

The purpose of life is to fight maturity.

Dick Werthimer

22.

Washington is a place where politicians don't know which way is up and taxes don't know which way is down.

Orben, Robert

23.

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived --forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

24.

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

Herzen, Alexander

25.

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

26.

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

Aristotle

27.

All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

28.

Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement.

Dimnet, Ernest

29.

Not only is life a bitch, but it is always having puppies.

Gusoff, Adrienne

30.

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

31.

Life isn't like a book. Life isn't logical or sensible or orderly. Life is a mess most of the time. And theology must be lived in the midst of that mess.

Colton, Charles Caleb

32.

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

33.

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

Markiewicz, William

34.

The average person living to age 70 has 613, 000 hours of life. This is too long a period not to have fun.

35.

A man's life is 20 years of having his mother ask him where he is going, 40 years of having his wife ask the same question and, at the end, perhaps having the mourners wondering too.

36.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

37.

Youth is too tumultuous for felicity; old age too insecure for happiness. The period most favorable to enjoyment, in a vigorous, fortunate, and generous life, is that between forty and sixty.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

38.

Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.

Rivarol, Antoine

39.

Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.

Jordan, David Starr

40.

If you're not in New York, you're camping out.

Dewey, Thomas E.

41.

New York is not Mecca. It just smells like it.

Simon, Neil

42.

We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity... what is still lacking here is a grasp of the connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order itself.

Einstein, Albert

43.

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.

Santayana, George

44.

To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

45.

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

46.

We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.

Sir Winston Churchill

47.

Life is something you do when you can't get to sleep.

Lebowitz, Fran

48.

The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.

Russell, Bertrand

49.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

50.

Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.

Diane Ackerman