Motivational Quotes

Life

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

- Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Best Quotes about Life

They that have lived a single day have lived an age.

La Bruyere, Jean De

Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five years and you pay it back and then -- one day -- you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then -- one day -- you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.

Leary, Denis

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

The sad souls of those who lived without blame and without praise.

Dante Alighieri

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

Pepper, Claude D.

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

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

Bachelard, Gaston

You really haven't changed, you've just become more of yourself. That is really what were all trying to do: become more of ourselves.

Oprah Winfrey

Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

Raban, Jonathan

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

14.

The average person living to age 70 has 613, 000 hours of life. This is too long a period not to have fun.

15.

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

Benjamin, Walter

16.

Life is a dead-end street.

Mencken, H. L.

17.

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

18.

Life at the top is financially rewarding, spiritually draining, physically exhausting, and short.

Newman, Peter C.

19.

The life of every person is like a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.

Barrie, Sir James M.

20.

Life. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.

Bierce, Ambrose

21.

It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

Ellis, Havelock

22.

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

O'Neill, Eugene

23.

Every time I look into the eyes of an animal I see life; the force of life and the beauty of creation

O'Reilly, Radar

24.

To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one.

Kornfield, Jack

25.

To attain inner peace you must actually give your life, not just your possessions. When you at last give your life -- bringing into alignment your beliefs and the way you live then, and only then, can you begin to find inner peace.

Pilgrim, Peace

26.

This city now doth, like a garment, wear the beauty of the morning; silent bare, ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie open unto the fields and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Wordsworth, William

27.

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

Norman Thomas

28.

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

29.

It's better to be an authentic loser than a false success, and to die alive than to live dead.

Markiewicz, William

30.

Life is full and overflowing with the new. But it is necessary to empty out the old to make room for the new to enter.

Caddy, Eileen

31.

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

Carlyle, Thomas

32.

Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step, but most of the time we are taking small, seemingly insignificant steps on the stairway of life.

Ransom, Ralph

33.

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

34.

Live as if everything you do will eventually be known.

Prather, Hugh

35.

To live is not breathing it is action.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

36.

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)

37.

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

38.

Don't brood. Get on with living and loving. You don't have forever.

Rexford, Eben Eugene

39.

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

40.

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

Brendan Gill

41.

Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.

Jordan, David Starr

42.

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

43.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

Weil, Simone

44.

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.

Blake, William

45.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

46.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

Gauguin, Paul

47.

Live today for tomorrow it will all be history.

Proverb

48.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head.

Twain, Mark

49.

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

50.

Life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable.

Allen, Woody