Motivational Quotes

Life

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

- Brodsky, Joseph

Best Quotes about Life

The City attaches an exaggerated importance to the healing power of lunch.

Fieldes, Christopher

All that man has will he give for his life.

Bible

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

Life is but a moment, death also is but another.

Schuller, Robert H.

Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies.

Landers, Ann

The sad souls of those who lived without blame and without praise.

Dante Alighieri

Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.

Brooke, Rupert

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

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

Weil, Simone

10.

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

11.

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

Linkletter, Art

12.

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

Rimbaud, Arthur

13.

Life is indeed difficult, partly because of the real difficulties we must overcome in order to survive, and partly because of our own innate desire to always do better, to overcome new challenges, to self-actualize. Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor.

Albert Ellis, Michael Abrams, Lidia Dengelegi

14.

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

Camus, Albert

15.

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

Whitehead, Alfred North

16.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

Frankl, Viktor E.

17.

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

18.

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.

Woolf, Virginia

19.

Were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults in the first.

Franklin, Benjamin

20.

Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.

Frankl, Viktor E.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

24.

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around.

Hepburn, Katharine

25.

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

26.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

27.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

28.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

Camus, Albert

29.

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

30.

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

Hoagland, Edward

31.

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

32.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

Stone, Robert

33.

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.

Robert Heinlein

34.

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

35.

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

Seneca

36.

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

Conrad, Joseph

37.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

38.

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

39.

All of life is a foreign country.

Kerouac, Jack

40.

For what is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. [James 4:14]

Bible

41.

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

42.

We Japanese enjoy the small pleasures, not extravagance. I believe a man should have a simple lifestyle -- even if he can afford more.

Ibuka, Massaru

43.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to save it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

44.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Pound, Ezra

45.

Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to the brass tacks.

Eliot, T. S.

46.

It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

47.

We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.

Fuller, Thomas

48.

In between goals is a thing called life, that has to be lived and enjoyed.

Caesar, Sid

49.

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

50.

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