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

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

Kant, Immanuel

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

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

Schweitzer, Albert

There are four things every person has more of than they know; sins, debt, years, and foes.

Proverb, Persian

Live today for tomorrow it will all be history.

Proverb

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

Boom, Corrie Ten

Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.

Osler, Sir William

Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.

Leacock, Stephen B.

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

Rimbaud, Arthur

10.

Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

11.

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late

Franklin, Benjamin

12.

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

Seneca

13.

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

14.

We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.

Markham, Edwin

15.

Life's but a day at most.

Burns, George

16.

The crime problem in New York is getting really serious. The other day the Statue of Liberty had both hands up.

Leno, Jay

17.

This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with the powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers, of families: read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life: re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books, and dismiss whatever insults your soul.

Whitman, Walt

18.

Simply the thing I am shall make me live.

Shakespeare, William

19.

In real life, however, you don't react to what someone did; you react only to what you think she did, and the gap between action and perception is bridged by the art of impression management. If life itself is but what you deem it, then why not focus your efforts on persuading others to believe that you are a virtuous and trustworthy cooperator?

Jonathan Haidt

20.

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

Camus, Albert

21.

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

Rogers, Carl

22.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

23.

The best things in life are never rationed. Friendship, loyalty, and love. They do not require coupons.

Hewitt, George T.

24.

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end

25.

Everyone is trying to accomplish something big, not realizing that life is made up of little things.

Clark, Frank A.

26.

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

27.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

28.

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

29.

Life is like riding a bicycle. You don't fall off unless you stop peddling.

Pepper, Claude D.

30.

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

Hume, David

31.

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

Lao-Tzu

32.

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.

Stark, Freya

33.

Life is like a taxi. The meter just keeps a-ticking whether you are getting somewhere or just standing still.

Erickson, Lou

34.

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

Wolfe, Thomas

35.

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

Thornton Wilder

36.

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

Dickens, Charles

37.

The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.

Mankiewicz, Joseph L.

38.

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

Miller, Henry

39.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat... the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

40.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

41.

After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.

Poe, Edgar Allan

42.

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

William Shakespeare

43.

Nature has invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward. As a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life.

Louis Schwartzberg

44.

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.

Lorca, Federico Garcia

45.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears -- as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Conrad, Joseph

49.

Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.

Disraeli, Benjamin

50.

Making a life comes before making a living.