Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

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

Austen, Jane

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

Mumford, Lewis

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Jacobs, Jane

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.

Mills, C. Wright

Lord, how the day passes! It is like a life, so quickly when we don't watch it, and so slowly if we do.

Steinbeck, John

He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many fold in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale.

Johnson, Samuel

Life is a glass given to us to fill; a busy life is filling it with as much as it can hold; a hurried life has had more poured into it than it can contain.

Brown, William Adams

10.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

11.

The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

Whitman, Walt

12.

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

Lennon, John

13.

See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little.

Pope John XXIII

14.

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

15.

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

Miller, Henry

16.

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

Bible

17.

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

18.

Life was mostly made up of things you couldn't control, full of surprises, and they weren't always good. Life wasn't what you made it. You were what life made you.

Sara Zarr

19.

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

20.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

21.

It is vanity to desire a long life and to take no heed of a good life.

Kempis, Thomas

22.

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

Hewitt, George T.

23.

Life is a reciprocal exchange. To move forward, you have to give back.

Oprah Winfrey

24.

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

Camus, Albert

25.

May God bless you to live as long as you want to; and want to as long as you live!

Proverb, Scottish

26.

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

27.

Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

29.

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning -- in other words, of absurdity --the more energetically meaning is sought.

Havel, Vaclav

30.

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

William Shakespeare

31.

There is no shortcut to life. To the end of our days, life is a lesson imperfectly learned.

Salisbury, Harrison

32.

Take life as you find it, but don't leave it that way

33.

Life. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.

Bierce, Ambrose

34.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

Jefferson, Thomas

35.

Half my life is an act of revision.

Irving, John

36.

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

Mumford, Lewis

37.

People do not live nowadays. They get about 10% out of life.

Duncan, Isadora

38.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

Stone, Robert

39.

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

Clark, Frank A.

40.

Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.

Frankl, Viktor E.

41.

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.

Woody Allen

42.

Life is a long lesson in humility.

James M. Barrie

43.

Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

Saroyan, William

44.

The major justification for a life is the happiness and reward it brings to other lives.

45.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.

Cioran, E. M.

46.

The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

47.

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

Foreman, George

48.

Give a man a dollar and you cheer his heart. Give him a dream and you challenge his heart. Give him Christ and you change his heart. Then the dollar and the dream become meaningful to him, and to others.

Strait, C. Neil

49.

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

50.

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

Heath, David M.