Motivational Quotes

Life

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

- Christopher Morley

Best Quotes about Life

Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.

Baudrillard, Jean

Making a life comes before making a living.

In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you're told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.

Hoggart, Simon

To live is to go on a journey; to die is to come back home.

Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.

Reed, Lou

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

Washington is a city of people doing badly what should not be done at all.

Gurney, Robert

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

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

10.

Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

11.

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived --forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

12.

The city is recruited from the country.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

Rimbaud, Arthur

14.

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.

Woody Allen

15.

This tattered life is my only robe; the wind my only refuge.

Mountain, Marian

16.

In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.

Spengler, Oswald

17.

Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on us.

Holdcroft, Thomas L.

18.

Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing.

Seneca

19.

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

Herold, Don

20.

There are three stages in a person's life, birth, their life and death. They are not conscious of birth submit to death and forget to live.

La Bruyere, Jean De

21.

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

22.

Life is a state of mind.

Warden, Jack

23.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

24.

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

25.

New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.

Carson, Johnny

26.

We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.

Sir Winston Churchill

27.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

28.

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

Anderson, Hans Christian

29.

Life is a horizontal fall.

Cocteau, Jean

30.

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

Camus, Albert

31.

Dare to err and to dream. Deep meaning often lies in childish plays.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

32.

It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it's one damn thing over and over.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

33.

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

34.

The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living that are desired when dying.

35.

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

Wilde, Oscar

36.

The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

Crowley, Aleister

37.

Lord, how the day passes! It is like a life, so quickly when we don't watch it, and so slowly if we do.

Steinbeck, John

38.

First I was dying to finish high-school and start college. Then I was dying to finish college and start working. Next, I was dying for my children to grow old enough for school, so I could return to work. Finally, I was dying to retire. And now, I am dying

39.

To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

40.

Life is raw material. We are artisans. We can sculpt our existence into something beautiful, or debase it into ugliness. It's in our hands.

Better, Cathy

41.

The surrender of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledgment of inferiority.

Calhoun, John C.

42.

We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.

Menander of Athens

43.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

Bacon, Francis

44.

One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.

Canetti, Elias

45.

This also -- that I live, I consider a gift of God.

Ovid

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Life is supposed to get tough.

Grammer, Kelsey

49.

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

Santayana, George

50.

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

Blake, William