Motivational Quotes

Life

What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction. And the greatest good is trivial; for all life is a dream and all dreams are dreams.

- Calderon de la Barca, Pedro

Best Quotes about Life

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

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

Platen

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.

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.

Michelangelo

This life of separateness may be compared to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.

Buddha

Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.

Nouwen, Henri

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

William Shakespeare

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump; you have to get it right the first time.

Mead, Margaret

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

10.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, 'Come on in, the living's fine,' and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

Baker, Russell (Wayne)

11.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

12.

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

Dante Alighieri

13.

Live poor so you can die rich.

14.

Life was mostly made up of things you couldn't control, full of surprises, and they weren't always good. Life wasn't what you made it. You were what life made you.

Sara Zarr

15.

Any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.

Plato

16.

All things may be bought in Rome with money.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

17.

If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

18.

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

19.

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

Ovid

20.

Life is short, but it's long enough to ruin any man who wants to be ruined.

Billings, Josh

21.

There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.

Norris, Kathleen

22.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

23.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Isaac Asimov

24.

Life is a rollercoaster. Try to eat a light lunch.

Schmaltz, David A.

25.

Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

26.

Simply the thing I am shall make me live.

Shakespeare, William

27.

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

Rimbaud, Arthur

28.

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

Santayana, George

29.

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

30.

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

31.

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Ackerman, Diane

32.

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

Young, J. Z.

33.

The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

Mumford, Lewis

34.

My life is a battle.

Voltaire

35.

Life is a glass given to us to fill; a busy life is filling it with as much as it can hold; a hurried life has had more poured into it than it can contain.

Brown, William Adams

36.

Life is a wilderness of twists and turns, where faith is your only compass.

Santaguida, Paul

37.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

Temple, Sir William

38.

The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.

Norman Thomas

39.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Tremain, Rose

40.

Life is like wine, the longer you take to enjoy it the more chance you've got of tasting vinegar.

41.

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

Duncan, Isadora

42.

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

Mille, Agnes De

43.

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

Cabell, James Branch

44.

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.

Aleichem, Sholom

45.

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

46.

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.