Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Life

Live today for tomorrow it will all be history.

Proverb

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

The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.

Lin-Chi

Life isn't simple. But the beauty of it is, you can always start over. It'll get easier.

Alacia Bessette

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

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

Lebowitz, Fran

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late

Franklin, Benjamin

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

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.

Shields, Carol

10.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Jacobs, Jane

11.

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

Baudelaire, Charles

12.

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

Crisp, Quentin

13.

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

Life is supposed to get tough.

Grammer, Kelsey

15.

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

Russell, Lady R.

16.

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

17.

You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Percy, Walker

18.

Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.

Mumford, Lewis

19.

In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you're told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.

Hoggart, Simon

20.

The world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open.

William Shakespeare

21.

Life is like playing the violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Butler, Samuel

22.

To attain inner peace you must actually give your life, not just your possessions. When you at last give your life -- bringing into alignment your beliefs and the way you live then, and only then, can you begin to find inner peace.

Pilgrim, Peace

23.

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

Bible

24.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

25.

The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.

Wilde, Oscar

26.

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.

Cabell, James Branch

27.

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

Gauguin, Paul

28.

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Gauguin, Paul

29.

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

30.

Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.

Allen, Fred A.

31.

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.

32.

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

Lawrence, D. H.

33.

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

34.

Don't worry about your life; what you shall eat, or drink, or the clothing for your body. [Matthew 6:31]

Bible

35.

Simply the thing I am shall make me live.

Shakespeare, William

36.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.

Huxtable, Ada Louise

40.

Life is full and overflowing with the new. But it is necessary to empty out the old to make room for the new to enter.

Caddy, Eileen

41.

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

42.

Live as you would have wished to live when you come to die.

Gellert

43.

In the morning of life, work; in the mid day give council; in the evening, pray.

Proverb, German

44.

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

William Shakespeare

45.

My art and profession is to live.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

46.

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

47.

In the book of life every page has two sides: we human beings fill the upper side with our plans, hopes and wishes, but providence writes on the other side, and what it ordains is seldom our goal.

Nisami

48.

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

49.

If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

50.

When we speak the word life, it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

Artaud, Antonin