Motivational Quotes

Life

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.

Best Quotes about Life

Life is like riding a bicycle. You don't fall off unless you stop peddling.

Pepper, Claude D.

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

Brendan Gill

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

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

Miller, Henry

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

William Shakespeare

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

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

Butler, Samuel

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

Prochnow, Herbert

Feelings are really your GPS system for life. When your supposed to do something, or not supposed to do something, your emotional guidance system lets you know.

Oprah Winfrey

10.

Life is difficult and complicated and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

J.K. Rowling

11.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

12.

It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

13.

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

Kant, Immanuel

14.

The art of living lies not in eliminating but in growing with troubles.

Baruch, Bernard M.

15.

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.

Austen, Jane

16.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

17.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, 'Come on in, the living's fine,' and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

Baker, Russell (Wayne)

18.

If God exists and we are made in his image we can have real meaning, and we can have real knowledge through what he has communicated to us.

Schaeffer, Francis

19.

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

20.

Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.

Disraeli, Benjamin

21.

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

22.

Where the criminals cover their crimes by making them legal. [On Washington D. C.]

Dane, Frank

23.

Life marches by, I suggest you get on with it.

Baluch, Joy

24.

I think we're here for each other.

Burnett, Carol

25.

This city now doth, like a garment, wear the beauty of the morning; silent bare, ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie open unto the fields and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Wordsworth, William

26.

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

27.

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived --forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

28.

The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing; the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unseen attack.

Aurelius, Marcus

29.

The crime problem in New York is getting really serious. The other day the Statue of Liberty had both hands up.

Leno, Jay

30.

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the Earth are never alone or weary of life.

Carson, Rachel

31.

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

Santayana, George

32.

Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination

Isherwood, Christopher

33.

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

34.

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

Piatt, Don

35.

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

36.

Life -- how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

Pritchett, V. S.

37.

The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

38.

The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist -- this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul -- a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.

Mead, Margaret

39.

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

Huxley, Aldous

40.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

Thoreau, Henry David

41.

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

42.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

Temple, Sir William

43.

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

44.

The surrender of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledgment of inferiority.

Calhoun, John C.

45.

Anything for the quick life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse.

Dickens, Charles

46.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

47.

To live lightheartedly but not recklessly; to be gay without being boisterous; to be courageous without being bold; to show trust and cheerful resignation without fatalism -- this is the art of living.

La Fontaine, Jean De

48.

We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.

Kennedy, John F.

49.

My life is a battle.

Voltaire

50.

The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mode of happiness. but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed the change; happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow Up.

Morgan, Charles