Motivational Quotes

Life

This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what's so.

- Erhard, Werner

Best Quotes about Life

A man's life is 20 years of having his mother ask him where he is going, 40 years of having his wife ask the same question and, at the end, perhaps having the mourners wondering too.

This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness... they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

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

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

Miller, Henry

Life It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.

Shakespeare, William

Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life's ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets.

Miller, Henry

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

Bible

The life of every person is like a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.

Barrie, Sir James M.

Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step, but most of the time we are taking small, seemingly insignificant steps on the stairway of life.

Ransom, Ralph

10.

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

Gauguin, Paul

11.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

12.

The person who does not know how to live while they are making a living is a poorer person after their wealth is won than when they started.

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

13.

I'm impressed with the people from Chicago. Hollywood is hype, New York is talk, Chicago is work.

Douglas, Michael

14.

Real life seems to have no plots.

Burnett, Ivy Compton

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Not by gain our life is measured, But by what we've lost 'Tis scored; 'Tis not how much wine is drunken But how much has been outpoured. For the strength of love never standeth In the sacrifice we bear; He who has the greatest suffering Ever has the most to share.

Nee, Watchman

18.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Baudrillard, Jean

19.

We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.

Menander of Athens

20.

Can't nothing make your life work if you ain't the architect.

McMillan, Terry

21.

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

Miller, Henry

22.

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

Prochnow, Herbert

23.

Life isn't like a book. Life isn't logical or sensible or orderly. Life is a mess most of the time. And theology must be lived in the midst of that mess.

Colton, Charles Caleb

24.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

Schweitzer, Albert

25.

Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.

Nash, Ogden

26.

Making a life comes before making a living.

27.

Our life's journey of self-discovery is not a straight-line rise from one level of consciousness to another. Instead, it is a series of steep climbs and flat plateaus, then further climbs. Even though we all approach the journey from different directions, certain of the journey's characteristics are common to all of us.

Wilde, Stuart

28.

In the early days all I hoped was to make a living out of what I did best. But, since there's no real market for masturbation I had to fall back on my bass playing abilities.

Claypool, Les

29.

In making a living today, many no longer leave room for life.

Sizoo, Joseph R.

30.

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I think that what we're really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Campbell, Joseph

31.

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Gandhi, Mahatma

32.

Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it.

Proverb, Indian

33.

My life is a battle.

Voltaire

34.

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

Samuel Butler

35.

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

36.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

37.

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.

38.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Woolf, Virginia

39.

Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it.

Stoppard, Tom

40.

Do not take life too seriously; you will never get out of it alive.

Hubbard, Elbert

41.

Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.

Baudrillard, Jean

42.

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

Boom, Corrie Ten

43.

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

44.

Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to the brass tacks.

Eliot, T. S.

45.

Dance like no one is watching, Love like you'll never be hurt, Sing like no one is listening, Live like it's heaven on earth.

Purkey, William

46.

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

Camus, Albert

47.

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

Bible

48.

Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.

Frankl, Viktor E.

49.

Life in the Fast Lane Playing in Traffic intense stressful challenging overwhelming fulfilling demanding exciting nerve-wrecking entrepreneurial unrelenting empowered exposed: no place to hide flexible confusing results compensation sweatshop team ascendancy ego suppression flat organizations who's my boss no titles no status customer focus self-abnegation decentralized decision making chaos the end of tenure the end of security no complacency fear ongoing change burnout

50.

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

Franklin, Benjamin