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

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

Boese, Paul

Life was mostly made up of things you couldn't control, full of surprises, and they weren't always good. Life wasn't what you made it. You were what life made you.

Sara Zarr

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Christopher Morley

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

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

Life -- No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.

Forster, Edward M.

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

Ben Stein

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.

Aleichem, Sholom

Refrain from asking what going to happen tomorrow, and everyday that fortune grants you, count as gain.

Horace

10.

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.

Mills, C. Wright

11.

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

Angelou, Maya

12.

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

13.

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

14.

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

Eliot, T. S.

15.

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

Holdcroft, Thomas L.

16.

Life is a series of little deaths out of which life always returns.

Feidelson, Charles

17.

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

18.

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth.

Einstein, Albert

19.

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

20.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat... the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

21.

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

22.

Live today for tomorrow it will all be history.

Proverb

23.

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

Whitehead, Alfred North

24.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

Jefferson, Thomas

25.

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

Herrick, Robert

26.

The best things in life are never rationed. Friendship, loyalty, and love. They do not require coupons.

Hewitt, George T.

27.

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really merely commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outer results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

28.

Live for those who love me, For those who know me true, For the Heaven that smiles above me, And awaits my coming too; For the cause that lacks resistance, For the future and the distance, And the good that I can do.

29.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

30.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

31.

Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

Forster, Edward M.

32.

The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist -- this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul -- a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.

Mead, Margaret

33.

He who is not busy being born is busy dying.

Dylan, Bob

34.

Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.

Huxtable, Ada Louise

35.

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

36.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Tremain, Rose

37.

Who goes to Rome a beast returns a beast.

Proverb, Italian

38.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

Kennedy, John F.

39.

Life never becomes a habit to me. It's always a marvel.

Mansfield, Katherine

40.

I can't be bitter. No one has a contract on life.

Heath, David M.

41.

Do not take life too seriously; you will never get out of it alive.

Hubbard, Elbert

42.

Life begins when you get out of the grandstand into the game.

Debevoise, P. L.

43.

Life -- how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

Pritchett, V. S.

44.

Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.

Rivarol, Antoine

45.

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

Fuller, Thomas

46.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

47.

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late

Franklin, Benjamin

48.

Through this broad street, restless ever, ebbs and flows a human tide, wave on wave a living river; wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide.

Whittier, John Greenleaf

49.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

Life is at its best when it's shaken and stirred.

Facult, F. Paul