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

Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.

Nash, Ogden

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

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Gandhi, Mahatma

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.

Kundera, Milan

Life begins when you get out of the grandstand into the game.

Debevoise, P. L.

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.

Woolf, Virginia

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.

Santayana, George

The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

Aristotle

10.

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.

11.

Who goes to Rome a beast returns a beast.

Proverb, Italian

12.

Life is just a bowl of pits.

Rodney Dangerfield

13.

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.

Franklin, Benjamin

14.

Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.

Nabokov, Vladimir

15.

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Shaw, George Bernard

16.

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

17.

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

Ben Stein

18.

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

Buechner, Frederick

19.

We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on but where life, in its real sense, is lost.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

20.

Life is not always not always what one wants it to be., but to make the best of it as it is the only way of being happy.

Churchill, Jennie Jerome

21.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Percy, Walker

22.

Life is not one thing after another. It's the same damn thing over and over!

23.

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.

Moses, Grandma

24.

People creep into childhood, bound into youth, sober in adulthood, and soften into old age.

Giles, Henry

25.

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

Aristotle

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.

Radner, Gilda

29.

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.

Pasternak, Boris

30.

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

31.

Life without meaning cannot be borne. We find a mission to which we're sworn

32.

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

Mankiewicz, Joseph L.

33.

The drama of life begins with a wail and ends with a sigh.

Antrim, Minna

34.

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

35.

Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies.

Landers, Ann

36.

Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.

Fran Lebowitz

37.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

38.

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

Oppenheimer, Martin

39.

This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what's so.

Erhard, Werner

40.

One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.

Austen, Jane

41.

Today, you have 100% of your life left.

Hopkins, Tom

42.

I can't be bitter. No one has a contract on life.

Heath, David M.

43.

The purpose of life is to fight maturity.

Dick Werthimer

44.

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

45.

Difficulties come when you don't pay attention to life's whisper. Life always whispers to you first, but if you ignore the whisper, sooner or later you'll get a scream.

Oprah Winfrey

46.

The only reason they come to see me is that I know that life is great -- and they know I know it.

Gable, Clark

47.

Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.

Brecht, Bertolt

48.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Brodsky, Joseph

49.

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