Motivational Quotes

Life

Paris, a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief. [About Paris]

- Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

Best Quotes about Life

He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.

Horace

Either these [unsaved] people are to be evangelized, or the leaven of communism and infidelity will assume such enormous proportions that it will break you in a reign of terror such as this country has never known.

Moody, Dwight L.

Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.

Diane Ackerman

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

In the book of life every page has two sides: we human beings fill the upper side with our plans, hopes and wishes, but providence writes on the other side, and what it ordains is seldom our goal.

Nisami

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

Hanks, Tom

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

Wolfe, Thomas

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

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

10.

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

Rimbaud, Arthur

11.

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

Wickett, Michael

12.

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

13.

Don't worry about your life; what you shall eat, or drink, or the clothing for your body. [Matthew 6:31]

Bible

14.

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

15.

Live, let live, and help live

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

17.

We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity... what is still lacking here is a grasp of the connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order itself.

Einstein, Albert

18.

Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it.

Proverb, Indian

19.

In the morning of life, work; in the mid day give council; in the evening, pray.

Proverb, German

20.

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

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

21.

He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many fold in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale.

Johnson, Samuel

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

So in all these little ways we spin a web, a cocoon, around ourselves. The cocoon becomes nice and snug and comfortable because it is very familiar. We know every little corner of our life; we can even write poetry about it. We may also have ideas about the great mystery which religions speak of, which gives our cocoon an especial sense of security: we can worship the great mystery outside of it and feel good about that. The cocoon is safe, bounded, claustrophobic, and a little stale. We settle into it and live our lives.

Hayward, Jeremy W.

25.

Live life fully while you're here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You're going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process. Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it. Don't try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human.

Robbins, Anthony

26.

The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experiences.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

27.

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

28.

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.

Mills, C. Wright

29.

Life It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.

Shakespeare, William

30.

Eternal truths will be neither true nor eternal unless they have fresh meaning for every new social situation.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

31.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs

32.

Who goes to Rome a beast returns a beast.

Proverb, Italian

33.

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

Isaac Asimov

34.

The enjoyments of this life are not equal to its evils.

Pliny The Elder

35.

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

Hayakawa, S. I.

36.

Live poor so you can die rich.

37.

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

Wilde, Oscar

38.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Jacobs, Jane

39.

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

40.

If our life is unhappy it is painful to bear; if it is happy it is horrible to lose, So the one is pretty equal to the other.

La Bruyere, Jean De

41.

Every man's life is a fairy tale written by God's finger.

Anderson, Hans Christian

42.

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

43.

Life loves the liver of it.

Angelou, Maya

44.

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.

45.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

46.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

47.

The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.

Russell, Bertrand

48.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

James, William

49.

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

50.

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.

James, William