Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Life

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.

Steve Jobs

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

Mumford, Lewis

We don't beat the Grim Reaper by living longer, we beat the Reaper by living well and living fully, for the Reaper will come for all of us. The question is what do we do between the time we are born and the time he shows up. It's too late to do all the things that you're gonna kinda get around to.

Randy Pausch

All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it -- an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.

Conrad, Peter

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

May, Rollo

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

Allen, Fred A.

If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I'm sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for.

Thoreau, Henry David

Life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable.

Allen, Woody

10.

Half my life is an act of revision.

Irving, John

11.

The sad souls of those who lived without blame and without praise.

Dante Alighieri

12.

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump; you have to get it right the first time.

Mead, Margaret

13.

I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.

Stevenson, Robert Louis

14.

Life's but a day at most.

Burns, George

15.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Kant, Immanuel

16.

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.

Michelangelo

17.

What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

I used to trouble about what life was for -- now being alive seems sufficient reason.

Field, Joanna

23.

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

William Shakespeare

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Live today for tomorrow it will all be history.

Proverb

27.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, 'Come on in, the living's fine,' and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

Baker, Russell (Wayne)

28.

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

29.

Life is a gift, and it offers us the privilege, opportunity, and responsibility to give something back by becoming more.

Robbins, Anthony

30.

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

Daniel Akst

31.

Don't brood. Get on with living and loving. You don't have forever.

Rexford, Eben Eugene

32.

The four stages of life are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence.

Linkletter, Art

33.

We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.

Sir Winston Churchill

34.

If you believed more in life you would fling yourself less to the moment.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

35.

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

Kempton, Murray

36.

I have an existential map; it has you are here written all over it.

Wright, Steven

37.

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

38.

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

Cabell, James Branch

39.

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

40.

So in all these little ways we spin a web, a cocoon, around ourselves. The cocoon becomes nice and snug and comfortable because it is very familiar. We know every little corner of our life; we can even write poetry about it. We may also have ideas about the great mystery which religions speak of, which gives our cocoon an especial sense of security: we can worship the great mystery outside of it and feel good about that. The cocoon is safe, bounded, claustrophobic, and a little stale. We settle into it and live our lives.

Hayward, Jeremy W.

41.

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

Dryden, John

42.

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

Hoagland, Edward

43.

Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

44.

One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.

Austen, Jane

45.

Life is but a moment, death also is but another.

Schuller, Robert H.

46.

The less routine the more life.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

47.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

48.

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

Fran Lebowitz

49.

He who allows his day to pass by without practicing generosity and enjoying life's pleasures is like a blacksmith's bellows. He breathes, but does not live.

Proverb

50.

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.

Santayana, George