Motivational Quotes

Life

Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to the brass tacks.

- Eliot, T. S.

Best Quotes about Life

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

Bachelard, Gaston

We dribble away our life, little by little, in small packages -- we don't throw it away all at once.

Cook, Robert A.

May you live as long as you want and not want as long as you live.

Hanks, Tom

Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination

Isherwood, Christopher

Most of us fall short much more by omission than by commission. While the world perishes we go our way: purposeless, passionless, day after day.

Pilgrim, Peace

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

Gauguin, Paul

What life means to us is determined, not so much by what life brings to us as by the attitude we bring to life; not so much by what happens to us as by our reaction to what happens.

Dunnington, Lewis L

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

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

10.

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.

Moses, Grandma

11.

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

Kafka, Franz

12.

Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it.

Stoppard, Tom

13.

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

14.

Life is an earnest business, and no one every became good or great on a diet of broad grins.

Blackie, Professor

15.

And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour,we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale.

William Shakespeare

16.

All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

17.

The purpose of life is the expansion of happiness.

Yogi, Maharishi Mahesh

18.

The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.

Norman Thomas

19.

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.

Rogers, Carl

20.

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

21.

Some people seem to go through life standing at the complaint counter.

Propp Jr., Fred

22.

There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.

Herold, Don

23.

Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step, but most of the time we are taking small, seemingly insignificant steps on the stairway of life.

Ransom, Ralph

24.

Life at the greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humored and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.

Goldsmith, Oliver

25.

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

26.

Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.

Reed, Lou

27.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

28.

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

29.

Man's course begins in a garden, but it ends in a city.

Maclaren, Alexander

30.

What else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?

Henry, O.

31.

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

32.

All things may be bought in Rome with money.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

33.

Life is uncharted territory. It reveals its story one moment at a time.

Buscaglia, Leo

34.

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.

Woolf, Virginia

35.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

36.

We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.

Kennedy, John F.

37.

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

Augustine, St.

38.

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

39.

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

Benjamin, Walter

40.

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Shaw, George Bernard

41.

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

42.

After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.

Poe, Edgar Allan

43.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

Stone, Robert

44.

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

45.

Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies.

Landers, Ann

46.

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