Motivational Quotes

Life

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs...

- Epicurus

Best Quotes about Life

There are nine requisites for contented living: HEALTH enough to make work a pleasure; WEALTH enough to support your needs; STRENGTH enough to battle with difficulties and forsake them; GRACE enough to confess your sins and overcome them; PATIENCE enough to toil until some good is accomplished; CHARITY enough to see some good in your neighbor; LOVE enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others; FAITH enough to make real the things of God; HOPE enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Life is too short to learn German.

Porson, R.

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

Buechner, Frederick

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.

Huxley, Aldous

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

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

10.

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- that myth is more potent than history. I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts -- That hope always triumphs over experience -- That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

Fulghum, Robert

11.

We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim -- objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.

Wilde, Oscar

12.

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

13.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

Camus, Albert

14.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

Huxley, Aldous

15.

We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.

Osler, Sir William

16.

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

17.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Calvino, Italo

18.

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

Hewitt, George T.

19.

Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies.

Landers, Ann

20.

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

Cook, Robert A.

21.

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

22.

We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on but where life, in its real sense, is lost.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

23.

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

Lebowitz, Fran

24.

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

Herzen, Alexander

25.

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

Wolfe, Thomas

26.

The purpose of life is the expansion of happiness.

Yogi, Maharishi Mahesh

27.

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

Gellert

28.

Best to live lightly, unthinkingly.

Sophocles

29.

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

30.

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

Coallier, Steven

31.

Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

32.

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

33.

She fights and vanquishes in me, and I live and breathe in her, and I have life and being.

Cervantes, Miguel De

34.

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

Hume, David

35.

Young people talk of what they are doing; old people of what they have done; and fools of what they have a mind to do.

Proverb

36.

This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with the powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers, of families: read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life: re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books, and dismiss whatever insults your soul.

Whitman, Walt

37.

To a wise man every day is a new life.

38.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears -- as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

39.

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

William Shakespeare

40.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

Rimbaud, Arthur

41.

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

Herrick, Robert

42.

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

Lennon, John

43.

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around.

Hepburn, Katharine

44.

Optimism and humor are the grease and glue of life. Without both of them we would never have survived our captivity.

Butler, Philip

45.

Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing.

Seneca

46.

If you're not in New York, you're camping out.

Dewey, Thomas E.

47.

Living the truth in your heart without compromise brings kindness into the world. Attempts at kindness that compromise your heart cause only sadness.

48.

Nobody's journey is seamless or smooth. We all stumble. We all have setbacks. It's just life's way of saying, "Time to change course."

Oprah Winfrey

49.

Those who live are those who fight.

Hugo, Victor

50.

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

Kafka, Franz