Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Camus, Albert

Best Quotes about Life

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)

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

Ben Stein

I have an existential map; it has you are here written all over it.

Wright, Steven

The purpose of life is the expansion of happiness.

Yogi, Maharishi Mahesh

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

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Kant, Immanuel

What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.

Brodsky, Joseph

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

Larkin, Philip

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

10.

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

11.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Woolf, Virginia

12.

Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live; Not where I love, but where I am, I die.

Southey, Robert

13.

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

Santayana, George

14.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

Weil, Simone

15.

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived --forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

16.

Life is too short to learn German.

Porson, R.

17.

Live as if everything you do will eventually be known.

Prather, Hugh

18.

Look to the future, because that is where you'll spend the rest of your life.

Burns, George

19.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

Bacon, Francis

20.

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

21.

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

22.

The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy.

Shinn, Florence Scovel

23.

Today's city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.

Oppenheimer, Martin

24.

It's not how long life is but the quality of our life that is important.

Dawson, Roger

25.

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

26.

This tattered life is my only robe; the wind my only refuge.

Mountain, Marian

27.

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

28.

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

Fuller, Thomas

29.

Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it's the transparency that counts.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

30.

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.

31.

See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little.

Pope John XXIII

32.

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

Rimbaud, Arthur

33.

The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

34.

My art and profession is to live.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

35.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

Johnson, Samuel

36.

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

Boese, Paul

37.

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

Mead, Margaret

38.

It is advisable that a person know at least three things, where they are, where they are going, and what they had best do under the circumstances.

Ruskin, John

39.

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

Kafka, Franz

40.

The man who says he has exhausted life generally means that life has exhausted him.

Wilde, Oscar

41.

The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

42.

Life is a horizontal fall.

Cocteau, Jean

43.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

44.

The mountains, rivers, earth, grasses, trees, and forests are always emanating a subtle, precious light, day and night, always emanating a subtle, precious sound, demonstrating and expounding to all people the unsurpassed ultimate truth.

Yuan-Sou

45.

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.

Rogers, Carl

46.

The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing; the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unseen attack.

Aurelius, Marcus

47.

Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.

Steve Jobs

48.

Reality is the crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.

Tomlin, Lily

49.

There are nine requisites for contented living: HEALTH enough to make work a pleasure; WEALTH enough to support your needs; STRENGTH enough to battle with difficulties and forsake them; GRACE enough to confess your sins and overcome them; PATIENCE enough to toil until some good is accomplished; CHARITY enough to see some good in your neighbor; LOVE enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others; FAITH enough to make real the things of God; HOPE enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

50.

I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.

Stevenson, Robert Louis