Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

Ellis, Havelock

It is vanity to desire a long life and to take no heed of a good life.

Kempis, Thomas

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

Connolly, Cyril

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

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

Platen

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Elbert Hubbard

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.

Make your life a happy one. That is where success is possible to every man.

Powell, Robert

If our life is unhappy it is painful to bear; if it is happy it is horrible to lose, So the one is pretty equal to the other.

La Bruyere, Jean De

10.

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around.

Hepburn, Katharine

11.

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

Erhard, Werner

12.

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.

Mccarthy, Mary

13.

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

Brendan Gill

14.

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

15.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

William Shakespeare

16.

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

17.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

18.

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.

Drummond, Henry

19.

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

20.

The mountains, rivers, earth, grasses, trees, and forests are always emanating a subtle, precious light, day and night, always emanating a subtle, precious sound, demonstrating and expounding to all people the unsurpassed ultimate truth.

Yuan-Sou

21.

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

22.

Optimism and humor are the grease and glue of life. Without both of them we would never have survived our captivity.

Butler, Philip

23.

Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.

Sheen, Fulton John

24.

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

Augustine, St.

25.

Paris is the caf? of Europe.

Galiani, Ferdinando

26.

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Ackerman, Diane

28.

The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy.

Shinn, Florence Scovel

29.

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

30.

Who goes to Rome a beast returns a beast.

Proverb, Italian

31.

Our life's journey of self-discovery is not a straight-line rise from one level of consciousness to another. Instead, it is a series of steep climbs and flat plateaus, then further climbs. Even though we all approach the journey from different directions, certain of the journey's characteristics are common to all of us.

Wilde, Stuart

32.

There is only one way to come into this world; there are too many ways to leave it.

Harington, Donald

33.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

Truman Capote

34.

All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it -- an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.

Conrad, Peter

35.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

36.

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

Mumford, Lewis

37.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

Epictetus

38.

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

Pritchett, V. S.

39.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

40.

I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital... not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground. The crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

Ruskin, John

41.

Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life.

Pirandello, Luigi

42.

Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it's the transparency that counts.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

43.

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

44.

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.

Klee, Paul

45.

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

Santayana, George

46.

Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.

Brecht, Bertolt

47.

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

Kornfield, Jack

48.

My art and profession is to live.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

49.

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

Mead, Margaret

50.

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