Motivational Quotes

Life

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.

- Cabell, James Branch

Best Quotes about Life

Life is a horizontal fall.

Cocteau, Jean

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

Landers, Ann

Take life as you find it, but don't leave it that way

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

Simon, Neil

Every morning I wake up saying, I'm still alive; a miracle. And so I keep on pushing.

Cousteau, Jacques

So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.

Seneca

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

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

Carson, Rachel

10.

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

Keller, Helen

11.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

12.

Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

Raban, Jonathan

13.

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

14.

Life is a long lesson in humility.

James M. Barrie

15.

Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. Their families came and took them away. Eighty years later, by a bizarre coincidence, they lay in the same hospital, on their deathbeds, next to each other. One of them looked at the other and said,so. What did you think?

Wright, Steven

16.

Life is difficult and complicated and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

J.K. Rowling

17.

Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.

Reed, Lou

18.

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning -- in other words, of absurdity --the more energetically meaning is sought.

Havel, Vaclav

19.

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

Ben Stein

20.

Order your soul; reduce your wants; live in charity; associate in Christian community; obey the laws; trust in Providence.

Augustine, St.

21.

One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure its worth watching.

22.

To attain inner peace you must actually give your life, not just your possessions. When you at last give your life -- bringing into alignment your beliefs and the way you live then, and only then, can you begin to find inner peace.

Pilgrim, Peace

23.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Thoreau, Henry David

24.

The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.

Hayes, Helen

25.

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

26.

May you live as long as you want and not want as long as you live.

Hanks, Tom

27.

When we exercise self-control on a given occasion, we win for ourselves a little credibility we can rely on the next time around. Pretty soon we develop a reputation to ourselves that we want badly to uphold. With each test that we meet, our resolve gains momentum, fueled by the fear that we may succumb and establish a damaging precedent for our own weakness.

Daniel Akst

28.

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

29.

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

30.

There are three stages in a person's life, birth, their life and death. They are not conscious of birth submit to death and forget to live.

La Bruyere, Jean De

31.

Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.

Allen, Fred A.

32.

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

Gurney, Robert

33.

Life -- No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.

Forster, Edward M.

34.

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

Camus, Albert

35.

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness, and small obligations given habitually, are what preserve the heart and secure comfort.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

36.

Life's a bitch, and life's got lots of sisters.

Presser, Ross

37.

Life's enchanted cup sparkles near the brim.

Byron, Lord

38.

I used to trouble about what life was for -- now being alive seems sufficient reason.

Field, Joanna

39.

The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.

Baudrillard, Jean

40.

Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

41.

Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

Forster, Edward M.

42.

What else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?

Henry, O.

43.

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

44.

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

45.

The finest lives in my opinion are the common model, without miracle and without extravagance.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

46.

You have to do what you love to do, not get stuck in that comfort zone of a regular job. Life is not a dress rehearsal. This is it.

Basset, Lucinda

47.

In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.

Socrates

48.

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

49.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

William Shakespeare

50.

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