Motivational Quotes

Life

When we exercise self-control on a given occasion, we win for ourselves a little credibility we can rely on the next time around. Pretty soon we develop a reputation to ourselves that we want badly to uphold. With each test that we meet, our resolve gains momentum, fueled by the fear that we may succumb and establish a damaging precedent for our own weakness.

- Daniel Akst

Best Quotes about Life

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

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

Living Life Tomorrow's fate, though thou be wise, Thou canst not tell nor yet surmise; Pass, therefore, not today in vain, For it will never come again.

Khayyam, Omar

I found Rome brick, I left it marble.

Augustus, Caesar

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

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

James, William

How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

Not by gain our life is measured, But by what we've lost 'Tis scored; 'Tis not how much wine is drunken But how much has been outpoured. For the strength of love never standeth In the sacrifice we bear; He who has the greatest suffering Ever has the most to share.

Nee, Watchman

10.

New York is not Mecca. It just smells like it.

Simon, Neil

11.

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

12.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

13.

Man values life as a sacred jewel in such a way that he reveres him most who haughtily scorns it.

Platen

14.

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

McMillan, Terry

15.

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

Lawrence, D. H.

16.

To a wise man every day is a new life.

17.

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

Kornfield, Jack

18.

Order your soul; reduce your wants; live in charity; associate in Christian community; obey the laws; trust in Providence.

Augustine, St.

19.

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

20.

Where there is life there is wishful thinking.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

21.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

Camus, Albert

22.

The crime problem in New York is getting really serious. The other day the Statue of Liberty had both hands up.

Leno, Jay

23.

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.

Larkin, Philip

24.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Woolf, Virginia

25.

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

Duncan, Isadora

26.

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

27.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.

28.

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

29.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

30.

Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.

Lennon, John

31.

One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.

Wolfe, Thomas

32.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

33.

The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.

Lin-Chi

34.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

35.

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

36.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

Santayana, George

37.

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Steve Jobs

39.

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

40.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: I'm with you kid. Let's go.

Angelou, Maya

41.

Plunge boldly into the thick of life, and seize it where you will, it is always interesting.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

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

43.

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

Herrick, Robert

44.

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

45.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

Weil, Simone

46.

Life's but a day at most.

Burns, George

47.

When I hear somebody sigh that Life is hard, I am always tempted to ask, Compared to what?

Harris, Sidney J.

48.

The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.

Wilde, Oscar

49.

It is not how many years we live, but rather what we do with them.

Booth, Evangeline Cory

50.

Daniel Akst