Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Life

Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live; Not where I love, but where I am, I die.

Southey, Robert

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

Herold, Don

The drama of life begins with a wail and ends with a sigh.

Antrim, Minna

In between goals is a thing called life, that has to be lived and enjoyed.

Caesar, Sid

The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

Mumford, Lewis

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

Forster, Edward M.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Isaac Asimov

10.

There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insect's wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The clatter only seems to insult the ears.

Seattle, Chief

11.

Nature has invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward. As a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life.

Louis Schwartzberg

12.

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

13.

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.

James, William

14.

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

Mille, Agnes De

15.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Thoreau, Henry David

16.

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

Propp Jr., Fred

17.

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

18.

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

Erhard, Werner

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Life is but a game and we are the playthings of the gods.

22.

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.

Blake, William

23.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

John Lennon

24.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

25.

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

Camus, Albert

26.

I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday.

Fields, W. C.

27.

The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.

Russell, Bertrand

28.

To live is not breathing it is action.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

29.

Dance like no one is watching, Love like you'll never be hurt, Sing like no one is listening, Live like it's heaven on earth.

Purkey, William

30.

To live is to go on a journey; to die is to come back home.

31.

On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

32.

Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.

May, Rollo

33.

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

Kempis, Thomas

34.

It is very certain that the desire of life prolongs it.

Byron, Lord

35.

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

Cook, Robert A.

36.

The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living that are desired when dying.

37.

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

38.

Life is something that everyone should try at least once.

Henry J. Tillman

39.

I believe that life is a journey, often difficult and sometimes incredibly cruel, but we are well equipped for it if only we tap into our talents and gifts and allow them to blossom.

Brown, Les

40.

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.

41.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

42.

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

43.

Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.

Lehrer, Tom

44.

We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.

Osler, Sir William

45.

Only those live who do good.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

46.

One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.

Canetti, Elias

47.

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

Brendan Gill

48.

The only reason they come to see me is that I know that life is great -- and they know I know it.

Gable, Clark

49.

The City attaches an exaggerated importance to the healing power of lunch.

Fieldes, Christopher

50.

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