Motivational Quotes

Life

When I consider life, it is all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, people favor this deceit.

- Dryden, John

Best Quotes about Life

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

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.

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

Life is something that everyone should try at least once.

Henry J. Tillman

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

Camus, Albert

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

Difficulties come when you don't pay attention to life's whisper. Life always whispers to you first, but if you ignore the whisper, sooner or later you'll get a scream.

Oprah Winfrey

Life is like a taxi. The meter just keeps a-ticking whether you are getting somewhere or just standing still.

Erickson, Lou

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

Gauguin, Paul

10.

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness, and small obligations given habitually, are what preserve the heart and secure comfort.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

11.

Live today for tomorrow it will all be history.

Proverb

12.

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

Santayana, George

13.

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

14.

Life is not always not always what one wants it to be., but to make the best of it as it is the only way of being happy.

Churchill, Jennie Jerome

15.

We never live, but we hope to live; and as we are always arranging to be happy, it must be that we never are so.

Pascal, Blaise

16.

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

Butler, Philip

17.

The less routine the more life.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

18.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

Johnson, Samuel

19.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

20.

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the Earth are never alone or weary of life.

Carson, Rachel

21.

Attack life, it's going to kill you anyway.

Coallier, Steven

22.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

23.

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

24.

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

25.

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

Eliot, T. S.

26.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

27.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

Epictetus

28.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

Thoreau, Henry David

29.

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

30.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

31.

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

32.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

Huxley, Aldous

33.

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.

Benjamin, Walter

34.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

Rimbaud, Arthur

35.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

36.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to save it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

37.

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

38.

The world has so many lessons to teach you. I consider the world, our earth, to be like a school, and our life, the classrooms. Sometimes on our planet life school, the lessons often come dressed up as detours and road blocks and sometimes as full blown crises. And the secret I've learned to getting ahead is being open to the lessons.

Oprah Winfrey

39.

The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.

Kempton, Murray

40.

Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement.

Dimnet, Ernest

41.

I think we're here for each other.

Burnett, Carol

42.

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

Conrad, Joseph

43.

Life marches by, I suggest you get on with it.

Baluch, Joy

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

47.

In the game of life it's a good idea to have a few early losses, which relieves you of the pressure of trying to maintain an undefeated season.

Baughan, Bill

48.

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

Prochnow, Herbert

49.

A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.

Huxley, Aldous

50.

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

Wise, Alfonso The