Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Boese, Paul

Best Quotes about Life

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

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

Larkin, Philip

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.

If you seek, how is that different from pursuing sound and form? If you don't seek, how are you different from earth, wood, or stone? You must seek without seeking.

Fo-Yan

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

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.

Blake, William

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

First I was dying to finish high-school and start college. Then I was dying to finish college and start working. Next, I was dying for my children to grow old enough for school, so I could return to work. Finally, I was dying to retire. And now, I am dying

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

10.

A life is like a tree -- if you don't make it straight when its young and green, you'll never do it when it's old and dry.

11.

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

Kempis, Thomas

12.

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

13.

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

Ovid

14.

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end

15.

The continuous invention of new ways of observing is man's special secret of living.

Young, J. Z.

16.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life... I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau, Henry David

17.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Baudrillard, Jean

18.

The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.

Edison, Thomas A.

19.

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

Brendan Gill

20.

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

21.

There are four things every person has more of than they know; sins, debt, years, and foes.

Proverb, Persian

22.

Life is like a taxi. The meter just keeps a-ticking whether you are getting somewhere or just standing still.

Erickson, Lou

23.

One of the most appalling comments on our present way of life is that half of all the beds in our hospitals are reserved for patients with nervous and mental troubles, patients who have collapsed under the crushing burden of accumulated yesterdays and fearful tomorrows. Yet a vast majority of those people would be walking the streets today, leading happy, useful lives, if they had only heeded the words of Jesus: Have no anxiety about the morrow; or the words of Sir William Osler; Live in day-tight compartments.

Carnegie, Dale

24.

Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.

Leacock, Stephen B.

25.

Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.

Mumford, Lewis

26.

Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.

Huxtable, Ada Louise

27.

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I think that what we're really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Campbell, Joseph

28.

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

29.

Live as if everything you do will eventually be known.

Prather, Hugh

30.

I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday.

Fields, W. C.

31.

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.

Mccarthy, Mary

32.

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.

Lorca, Federico Garcia

33.

And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour,we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale.

William Shakespeare

34.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Pound, Ezra

35.

One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.

Canetti, Elias

36.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Tremain, Rose

37.

In the early days of the Indian Territory, there were no such things as birth certificates. You being there was certificate enough.

Rogers, Will

38.

Washington is a city of people doing badly what should not be done at all.

Gurney, Robert

39.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

40.

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

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

Camus, Albert

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.

Ben Stein

46.

Life is a long lesson in humility.

James M. Barrie

47.

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

48.

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