Motivational Quotes

Life

I'm impressed with the people from Chicago. Hollywood is hype, New York is talk, Chicago is work.

- Douglas, Michael

Best Quotes about Life

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

Kempis, Thomas

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

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

A life is like a tree -- if you don't make it straight when its young and green, you'll never do it when it's old and dry.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

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

Wilde, Oscar

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs...

Epicurus

Take life as you find it, but don't leave it that way

10.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

11.

There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.

Norris, Kathleen

12.

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

13.

Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.

Fran Lebowitz

14.

This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.

Dickens, Charles

15.

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end

16.

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

17.

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

Buechner, Frederick

18.

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

19.

This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness... they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

20.

Living the truth in your heart without compromise brings kindness into the world. Attempts at kindness that compromise your heart cause only sadness.

21.

Not only is life a bitch, but it is always having puppies.

Gusoff, Adrienne

22.

Best to live lightly, unthinkingly.

Sophocles

23.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

Camus, Albert

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.

Life is a rollercoaster. Try to eat a light lunch.

Schmaltz, David A.

26.

Live life fully while you're here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You're going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process. Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it. Don't try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human.

Robbins, Anthony

27.

Real life seems to have no plots.

Burnett, Ivy Compton

28.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

29.

We Japanese enjoy the small pleasures, not extravagance. I believe a man should have a simple lifestyle -- even if he can afford more.

Ibuka, Massaru

30.

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

Morley, Christopher

31.

Life flows on within you and without you.

Harrison, George

32.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

33.

The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.

Baudrillard, Jean

34.

Any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.

Plato

35.

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.

Pasternak, Boris

36.

If I had been present at creation, I would have given some useful hints.

Wise, Alfonso The

37.

On life's journey faith is nourishment, virtuous deeds are a shelter, wisdom is the light by day and right mindfulness is the protection by night. If a man lives a pure life, nothing can destroy him.

Buddha

38.

Life is just a bowl of pits.

Rodney Dangerfield

39.

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

Pritchett, V. S.

40.

Life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable.

Allen, Woody

41.

The good life is one inspired by life and guided by knowledge.

Russell, Bertrand

42.

The old Quaker was right: I expect to pass through life but once. If there is any kindness, or any good thing I can do to my fellow beings, let me do it now. I shall pass this way but once.

Gannett, W. C.

43.

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.

Disraeli, Benjamin

45.

What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction. And the greatest good is trivial; for all life is a dream and all dreams are dreams.

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro

46.

Live today for tomorrow it will all be history.

Proverb

47.

So in all these little ways we spin a web, a cocoon, around ourselves. The cocoon becomes nice and snug and comfortable because it is very familiar. We know every little corner of our life; we can even write poetry about it. We may also have ideas about the great mystery which religions speak of, which gives our cocoon an especial sense of security: we can worship the great mystery outside of it and feel good about that. The cocoon is safe, bounded, claustrophobic, and a little stale. We settle into it and live our lives.

Hayward, Jeremy W.

48.

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

49.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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