Motivational Quotes

Life

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

- Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

Best Quotes about Life

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

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

Johnson, Samuel

Life is uncharted territory. It reveals its story one moment at a time.

Buscaglia, Leo

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.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earthly things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one's power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God; this is what man's journey is about, I think.

Smith, Lillian

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Gandhi, Mahatma

Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on us.

Holdcroft, Thomas L.

There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insect's wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The clatter only seems to insult the ears.

Seattle, Chief

10.

Live poor so you can die rich.

11.

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.

Pasternak, Boris

12.

It is not how many years we live, but rather what we do with them.

Booth, Evangeline Cory

13.

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

14.

My life is a battle.

Voltaire

15.

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

16.

The life of man is a journey; a journey that must be traveled, however bad the roads or the accommodation.

Goldsmith, Oliver

17.

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

Osler, Sir William

18.

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

Delacroix, Eugene

19.

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

20.

My kids idea of a hard life is to live in a house with only one phone.

Foreman, George

21.

Reality is the crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.

Tomlin, Lily

22.

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

23.

Life isn't simple. But the beauty of it is, you can always start over. It'll get easier.

Alacia Bessette

24.

Some people seem to go through life standing at the complaint counter.

Propp Jr., Fred

25.

If our life is unhappy it is painful to bear; if it is happy it is horrible to lose, So the one is pretty equal to the other.

La Bruyere, Jean De

26.

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

27.

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.

Stark, Freya

28.

To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one.

Kornfield, Jack

29.

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Gauguin, Paul

30.

The world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open.

William Shakespeare

31.

He who is not busy being born is busy dying.

Dylan, Bob

32.

You're alive. Do something. The directive in life, the moral imperative was so uncomplicated. It could be expressed in single words, not complete sentences. It sounded like this: Look. Listen. Choose. Act.

Barbara Hall

33.

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

34.

I can't be bitter. No one has a contract on life.

Heath, David M.

35.

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.

Moses, Grandma

36.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

Epictetus

37.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

38.

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

39.

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

Stoppard, Tom

40.

I believe that life is a journey, often difficult and sometimes incredibly cruel, but we are well equipped for it if only we tap into our talents and gifts and allow them to blossom.

Brown, Les

41.

Refrain from asking what going to happen tomorrow, and everyday that fortune grants you, count as gain.

Horace

42.

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. [Psalms 90:10]

Bible

43.

There are four things every person has more of than they know; sins, debt, years, and foes.

Proverb, Persian

44.

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

Gauguin, Paul

45.

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

Boom, Corrie Ten

46.

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