Motivational Quotes

Life

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

- Epictetus

Best Quotes about Life

What life means to us is determined, not so much by what life brings to us as by the attitude we bring to life; not so much by what happens to us as by our reaction to what happens.

Dunnington, Lewis L

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to save it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

Isaac Asimov

Life is a state of mind.

Warden, Jack

The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.

Mankiewicz, Joseph L.

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

Huxtable, Ada Louise

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

Life without meaning cannot be borne. We find a mission to which we're sworn

Life is an onion and one cries while peeling it.

Proverb, French

10.

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.

Kundera, Milan

11.

Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.

Sheen, Fulton John

12.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

Santayana, George

13.

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

14.

Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.

Diane Ackerman

15.

Life is a long lesson in humility.

James M. Barrie

16.

Dare to err and to dream. Deep meaning often lies in childish plays.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

17.

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

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.

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

Sartre, Jean-Paul

20.

I found Rome brick, I left it marble.

Augustus, Caesar

21.

All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

22.

The best things in life are never rationed. Friendship, loyalty, and love. They do not require coupons.

Hewitt, George T.

23.

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

Cook, Robert A.

24.

Life's but a day at most.

Burns, George

25.

Living, just by itself -- what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting --or he'll come along and nibble your brain.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

26.

Life is like eating artichokes, you have got to go through so much to get so little.

Dorgan, Thomas A.

27.

New York is not Mecca. It just smells like it.

Simon, Neil

28.

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

Antrim, Minna

29.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

30.

The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.

Hayes, Helen

31.

The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

Whitman, Walt

32.

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.

33.

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

Camus, Albert

34.

Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

35.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

36.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Drives my green age that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer.

Thomas, Dylan

37.

Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.

Reed, Lou

38.

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.

39.

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

Hayakawa, S. I.

40.

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

Thibodeau, Robert

41.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

42.

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

43.

Walk through life eager and open to self-improvement and that which is going to best help you evolve, because that's really why were here: to evolve as human beings.

Oprah Winfrey

44.

Life was mostly made up of things you couldn't control, full of surprises, and they weren't always good. Life wasn't what you made it. You were what life made you.

Sara Zarr

45.

Man values life as a sacred jewel in such a way that he reveres him most who haughtily scorns it.

Platen

46.

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Delacroix, Eugene

47.

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

48.

Life is an earnest business, and no one every became good or great on a diet of broad grins.

Blackie, Professor

49.

It is a good thing that life is not as serious as it seems to a waiter.

Herold, Don

50.

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

James, William