Motivational Quotes

Life

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

- Cowper, William

Best Quotes about Life

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

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

Bacon, Francis

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Hemingway, Ernest

Life is an onion and one cries while peeling it.

Proverb, French

There is only one way to get ready for immortality, and that is to love this life and live it as bravely and faithfully and cheerfully as we can.

Dyke, Henry Van

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

Those who live are those who fight.

Hugo, Victor

On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

The simplification of life is one of the steps to inner peace. A persistent simplification will create an inner and outer well-being that places harmony in one's life.

Pilgrim, Peace

10.

May God bless you to live as long as you want to; and want to as long as you live!

Proverb, Scottish

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

Jefferson, Thomas

14.

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Gandhi, Mahatma

15.

Life is very interesting if you make mistakes.

Carpentier, Georges

16.

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

Herzen, Alexander

17.

Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only in proportion as we are desirous of living more do we really live.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

18.

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.

Stark, Freya

19.

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

James, William

20.

Life is given for wisdom, and yet we are not wise; for goodness, and we are not good; for overcoming evil, and evil remains; for patience and sympathy and love, and yet we are fretful and hard and weak and selfish. We are keyed not to attainment, but to the struggle toward it.

Munger, Thornton T.

21.

We come into this world head first and go out feet first; in between, it is all a matter of balance.

Boese, Paul

22.

Maxim for life: You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you.

Dyer, Wayne

23.

See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little.

Pope John XXIII

24.

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

25.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Calvino, Italo

26.

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

Wright, Steven

27.

The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

Aristotle

28.

Life's enchanted cup sparkles near the brim.

Byron, Lord

29.

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)

30.

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Delacroix, Eugene

31.

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

Hume, David

32.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

33.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Christopher Morley

34.

Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live; Not where I love, but where I am, I die.

Southey, Robert

35.

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

Rimbaud, Arthur

36.

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

Giles, Henry

37.

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

Mankiewicz, Joseph L.

38.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

39.

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

40.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

41.

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

42.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

43.

Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

44.

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

Dante Alighieri

46.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

47.

Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

Saroyan, William

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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