Motivational Quotes

Life

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

- Epictetus

Best Quotes about Life

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

Hanks, Tom

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

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

Life is a glass given to us to fill; a busy life is filling it with as much as it can hold; a hurried life has had more poured into it than it can contain.

Brown, William Adams

Life is not so much a matter of position as of disposition

Attack life, it's going to kill you anyway.

Coallier, Steven

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning -- in other words, of absurdity --the more energetically meaning is sought.

Havel, Vaclav

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

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

10.

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

11.

Half my life is an act of revision.

Irving, John

12.

Best to live lightly, unthinkingly.

Sophocles

13.

Today's city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.

Oppenheimer, Martin

14.

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

15.

Simply the thing I am shall make me live.

Shakespeare, William

16.

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

Southey, Robert

17.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

18.

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.

19.

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

John Lennon

20.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

Kennedy, John F.

21.

Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.

Camus, Albert

22.

The essence of life is finding something you really love and then making the daily experience worthwhile.

Waitley, Denis

23.

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

Curie, Madame Marie

24.

The purpose of life is to fight maturity.

Dick Werthimer

25.

The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

Aristotle

26.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

27.

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

28.

We come into this world head first and go out feet first; in between, it is all a matter of balance.

Boese, Paul

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Cabell, James Branch

32.

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

33.

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

34.

The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph.

Miller, Henry

35.

Life never becomes a habit to me. It's always a marvel.

Mansfield, Katherine

36.

It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it is one damn thing over and over.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

37.

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

Kempton, Murray

38.

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

39.

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

40.

In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.

Spengler, Oswald

41.

Live poor so you can die rich.

42.

There are three stages in a person's life, birth, their life and death. They are not conscious of birth submit to death and forget to live.

La Bruyere, Jean De

43.

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

Carlyle, Thomas

44.

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

Kant, Immanuel

45.

Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.

Jordan, David Starr

46.

Live life fully while you're here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You're going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process. Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it. Don't try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human.

Robbins, Anthony

47.

The old Quaker was right: I expect to pass through life but once. If there is any kindness, or any good thing I can do to my fellow beings, let me do it now. I shall pass this way but once.

Gannett, W. C.

48.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

49.

Where there is life there is wishful thinking.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

50.

Real life seems to have no plots.

Burnett, Ivy Compton