Motivational Quotes

Life

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

- Christopher Morley

Best Quotes about Life

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

Camus, Albert

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

Jordan, David Starr

Well, take your time and don't live too fast. Troubles will come and they will pass. Find a woman and you'll find love. Don't forget, son, there is someone up above.

Skynard, Lynard

Can't nothing make your life work if you ain't the architect.

McMillan, Terry

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.

Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.

Nouwen, Henri

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I think that what we're really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Campbell, Joseph

Making a life comes before making a living.

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning -- in other words, of absurdity --the more energetically meaning is sought.

Havel, Vaclav

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Life is full of surprises and and serendipity. Being open to unexpected turns in the road is an important part of success. If you try to plan every step, you may miss those wonderful twists and turns. Just find your next adventure-do it well, enjoy it-and then, not now, think about what comes next.

Condoleeza Rice

14.

If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I'm sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for.

Thoreau, Henry David

15.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.

Baudrillard, Jean

17.

Life is an uphill business for the guy who's not on the level.

Welsh, John

18.

Were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults in the first.

Franklin, Benjamin

19.

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

Fuller, Thomas

20.

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.

Allen, Fred A.

21.

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others

Keller, Helen

22.

Every morning I wake up saying, I'm still alive; a miracle. And so I keep on pushing.

Cousteau, Jacques

23.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

Jefferson, Thomas

24.

Life is like wine, the longer you take to enjoy it the more chance you've got of tasting vinegar.

25.

When we speak the word life, it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

Artaud, Antonin

26.

People do not live nowadays. They get about 10% out of life.

Duncan, Isadora

27.

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

Ben Stein

28.

Man's course begins in a garden, but it ends in a city.

Maclaren, Alexander

29.

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

30.

It is a good thing that life is not as serious as it seems to a waiter.

Herold, Don

31.

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

William Shakespeare

32.

Living, just by itself -- what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting --or he'll come along and nibble your brain.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

33.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

34.

Life is very interesting if you make mistakes.

Carpentier, Georges

35.

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

Baudelaire, Charles

36.

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

37.

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

Kornfield, Jack

38.

Not only is life a bitch, but it is always having puppies.

Gusoff, Adrienne

39.

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump; you have to get it right the first time.

Mead, Margaret

40.

Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.

Frankl, Viktor E.

41.

There is no shortcut to life. To the end of our days, life is a lesson imperfectly learned.

Salisbury, Harrison

42.

In matters of self-control as we shall see again and again, speed kills. But a little friction really can save lives.

Daniel Akst

43.

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

Lao-Tzu

44.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

James, William

45.

Life is real! Life is earnest! And death is not its goal. Dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

46.

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

Wright, Steven

47.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

48.

This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness... they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

49.

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

50.

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

Erhard, Werner