Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

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

Fuller, Thomas

Where the criminals cover their crimes by making them legal. [On Washington D. C.]

Dane, Frank

A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.

Huxley, Aldous

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

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

Robert Heinlein

Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel.

Walpole, Horace

Making a life comes before making a living.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

Miller, Henry

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

Presser, Ross

10.

In the game of life it's a good idea to have a few early losses, which relieves you of the pressure of trying to maintain an undefeated season.

Baughan, Bill

11.

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

Bible

12.

Life at the greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humored and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.

Goldsmith, Oliver

13.

May God bless you to live as long as you want to; and want to as long as you live!

Proverb, Scottish

14.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

15.

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

Herrick, Robert

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Life does not happen to us, it happens from us.

Wickett, Michael

19.

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

20.

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

21.

Some people seem to go through life standing at the complaint counter.

Propp Jr., Fred

22.

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

Woody Allen

23.

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.

Boulanger, Nadia

24.

Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Samuel Butler

25.

This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness... they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

26.

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.

Austen, Jane

27.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Steve Jobs

28.

We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.

Osler, Sir William

29.

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

30.

Life is like playing the violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Butler, Samuel

31.

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

Norman Thomas

32.

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

33.

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

Hayes, Helen

34.

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

Cabell, James Branch

35.

All of life is a foreign country.

Kerouac, Jack

36.

To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earthly things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one's power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God; this is what man's journey is about, I think.

Smith, Lillian

37.

Campbell, Joseph

38.

Anything for the quick life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse.

Dickens, Charles

39.

Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic

Wilde, Oscar

40.

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Delacroix, Eugene

41.

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

42.

When I consider life, it is all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, people favor this deceit.

Dryden, John

43.

The simplification of life is one of the steps to inner peace. A persistent simplification will create an inner and outer well-being that places harmony in one's life.

Pilgrim, Peace

44.

Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on us.

Holdcroft, Thomas L.

45.

My kids idea of a hard life is to live in a house with only one phone.

Foreman, George

46.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

47.

Life is a dead-end street.