Motivational Quotes

Life

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.

Best Quotes about Life

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

I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital... not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground. The crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

Ruskin, John

I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday.

Fields, W. C.

Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

Forster, Edward M.

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

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

Be glad of life because it gives you a chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at stars.

Dyke, Henry Van

Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.

Frankl, Viktor E.

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

10.

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

11.

And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour,we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale.

William Shakespeare

12.

The continuous invention of new ways of observing is man's special secret of living.

Young, J. Z.

13.

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

14.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

15.

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

16.

So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.

Seneca

17.

In the morning of life, work; in the mid day give council; in the evening, pray.

Proverb, German

18.

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.

Shields, Carol

19.

The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

Aristotle

20.

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

First I was dying to finish high-school and start college. Then I was dying to finish college and start working. Next, I was dying for my children to grow old enough for school, so I could return to work. Finally, I was dying to retire. And now, I am dying

22.

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end

23.

On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

24.

Everyone is trying to accomplish something big, not realizing that life is made up of little things.

Clark, Frank A.

25.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

26.

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

Hayes, Helen

27.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

Frankl, Viktor E.

28.

Through this broad street, restless ever, ebbs and flows a human tide, wave on wave a living river; wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide.

Whittier, John Greenleaf

29.

Paris is the caf? of Europe.

Galiani, Ferdinando

30.

Life is a campaign not a battle, and has its defeats as well as its victories.

Piatt, Don

31.

The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.

Norman Thomas

32.

When we exercise self-control on a given occasion, we win for ourselves a little credibility we can rely on the next time around. Pretty soon we develop a reputation to ourselves that we want badly to uphold. With each test that we meet, our resolve gains momentum, fueled by the fear that we may succumb and establish a damaging precedent for our own weakness.

Daniel Akst

33.

Every man's life is a fairy tale written by God's finger.

Anderson, Hans Christian

34.

One of the most appalling comments on our present way of life is that half of all the beds in our hospitals are reserved for patients with nervous and mental troubles, patients who have collapsed under the crushing burden of accumulated yesterdays and fearful tomorrows. Yet a vast majority of those people would be walking the streets today, leading happy, useful lives, if they had only heeded the words of Jesus: Have no anxiety about the morrow; or the words of Sir William Osler; Live in day-tight compartments.

Carnegie, Dale

35.

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis: I am always in the convalescent stage.

Shaw, George Bernard

36.

Life itself is the proper binge.

Child, Julia

37.

Paris, a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief. [About Paris]

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

38.

There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.

Norris, Kathleen

39.

Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.

Brooke, Rupert

40.

Life is like wine, the longer you take to enjoy it the more chance you've got of tasting vinegar.

41.

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

42.

Where there is life there is wishful thinking.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

43.

One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.

Canetti, Elias

44.

The city is recruited from the country.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

Platen

46.

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.

Baudrillard, Jean

47.

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

Lao-Tzu

48.

The lessons this life has planted in my heart pertain more to caring than crops, more to Golden Rule than gold, more to the proper choice than to the popular choice.

Kirby Larson

49.

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

Delacroix, Eugene

50.

If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth