Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

If you're not in New York, you're camping out.

Dewey, Thomas E.

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.

Aleichem, Sholom

It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it is one damn thing over and over.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Live poor so you can die rich.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

Camus, Albert

Life is something that everyone should try at least once.

Henry J. Tillman

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure its worth watching.

Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.

Rivarol, Antoine

10.

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

Herzen, Alexander

11.

Life is something you do when you can't get to sleep.

Lebowitz, Fran

12.

We come into this world head first and go out feet first; in between, it is all a matter of balance.

Boese, Paul

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

Rimbaud, Arthur

16.

If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

17.

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

Pasternak, Boris

18.

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

19.

Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.

Osler, Sir William

20.

Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only in proportion as we are desirous of living more do we really live.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

21.

Life is very interesting if you make mistakes.

Carpentier, Georges

22.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

23.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

24.

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

Rimbaud, Arthur

25.

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

26.

Life is not one thing after another. It's the same damn thing over and over!

27.

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

28.

Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.

Camus, Albert

29.

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.

Kundera, Milan

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.

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

32.

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

Peter De Vries

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Look to the future, because that is where you'll spend the rest of your life.

Burns, George

36.

We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.

Sir Winston Churchill

37.

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

Samuel Butler

38.

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump; you have to get it right the first time.

Mead, Margaret

39.

One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.

Austen, Jane

40.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Calvino, Italo

41.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

43.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Christopher Morley

44.

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

O'Neill, Eugene

45.

Life is full of surprises and and serendipity. Being open to unexpected turns in the road is an important part of success. If you try to plan every step, you may miss those wonderful twists and turns. Just find your next adventure-do it well, enjoy it-and then, not now, think about what comes next.

Condoleeza Rice

46.

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

Mead, Margaret

47.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

Camus, Albert

48.

Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.

Nouwen, Henri

49.

He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.

Horace

50.

When we speak the word life, it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

Artaud, Antonin