Motivational Quotes

Life

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Life

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

Kempis, Thomas

Lord, how the day passes! It is like a life, so quickly when we don't watch it, and so slowly if we do.

Steinbeck, John

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.

We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do -- it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much.

Lawrence, D. H.

You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can decide how you're going to live now.

Baez, Joan

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

Canetti, Elias

One of the most appalling comments on our present way of life is that half of all the beds in our hospitals are reserved for patients with nervous and mental troubles, patients who have collapsed under the crushing burden of accumulated yesterdays and fearful tomorrows. Yet a vast majority of those people would be walking the streets today, leading happy, useful lives, if they had only heeded the words of Jesus: Have no anxiety about the morrow; or the words of Sir William Osler; Live in day-tight compartments.

Carnegie, Dale

We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.

Menander of Athens

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

10.

The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.

Edison, Thomas A.

11.

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

Lebowitz, Fran

12.

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

13.

The simplification of life is one of the steps to inner peace. A persistent simplification will create an inner and outer well-being that places harmony in one's life.

Pilgrim, Peace

14.

Too often man handles life as he does the bad weather, He whiles away the time as he waits for it to stop.

Polgar, Alfred

15.

The cloud-capp'd towers,the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare

16.

Give a man a dollar and you cheer his heart. Give him a dream and you challenge his heart. Give him Christ and you change his heart. Then the dollar and the dream become meaningful to him, and to others.

Strait, C. Neil

17.

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

Pritchett, V. S.

18.

My life is a battle.

Voltaire

19.

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

Norman Thomas

20.

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

Isaac Asimov

21.

My art and profession is to live.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

22.

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

23.

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

24.

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

Hume, David

25.

It's not how long life is but the quality of our life that is important.

Dawson, Roger

26.

In matters of self-control as we shall see again and again, speed kills. But a little friction really can save lives.

Daniel Akst

27.

Three keys to more abundant living: caring about others, daring for others, sharing with others.

Ward, William A.

28.

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

Augustine, St.

29.

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Curie, Madame Marie

30.

All that man has will he give for his life.

Bible

31.

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

32.

Every morning I wake up saying, I'm still alive; a miracle. And so I keep on pushing.

Cousteau, Jacques

33.

Life is a series of little deaths out of which life always returns.

Feidelson, Charles

34.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Brodsky, Joseph

35.

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

36.

Life flows on within you and without you.

Harrison, George

37.

Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.

Frankl, Viktor E.

38.

There is one thing that matters -- to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

39.

Life loves the liver of it.

Angelou, Maya

40.

For what is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. [James 4:14]

Bible

41.

Live virtuously, and you cannot not die too soon, or live too long.

Russell, Lady R.

42.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

Frankl, Viktor E.

43.

There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war, and some men are wounded, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or personal life to assure complete equality. Life

Kennedy, John F.

44.

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

Russell, Bertrand

45.

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

Herzen, Alexander

46.

Life is a classroom in which each of us is being tested, tried, and passed.

Thibodeau, Robert

47.

I can't be bitter. No one has a contract on life.

Heath, David M.

48.

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

Erhard, Werner

49.

Life is indeed difficult, partly because of the real difficulties we must overcome in order to survive, and partly because of our own innate desire to always do better, to overcome new challenges, to self-actualize. Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor.

Albert Ellis, Michael Abrams, Lidia Dengelegi

50.

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