Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Goldsmith, Oliver

Best Quotes about Life

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

Camus, Albert

This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness... they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

The finest lives in my opinion are the common model, without miracle and without extravagance.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing.

Seneca

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

Seneca

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.

Robert Heinlein

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

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

10.

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

Herrick, Robert

11.

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

12.

People should always have something which they prefer to life.

Seume, Johann G.

13.

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

Huxley, Aldous

14.

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

John Lennon

15.

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

16.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Pound, Ezra

17.

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.

18.

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

William Shakespeare

19.

Life. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.

Bierce, Ambrose

20.

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

21.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs

22.

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.

Michelangelo

24.

If you believed more in life you would fling yourself less to the moment.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

25.

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

Santayana, George

26.

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

Forster, Edward M.

27.

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

28.

Today's city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.

Oppenheimer, Martin

29.

I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.

Stevenson, Robert Louis

30.

The man who says he has exhausted life generally means that life has exhausted him.

Wilde, Oscar

31.

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Curie, Madame Marie

32.

There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war, and some men are wounded, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or personal life to assure complete equality. Life

Kennedy, John F.

33.

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

Lebowitz, Fran

34.

It is very certain that the desire of life prolongs it.

Byron, Lord

35.

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

36.

Life It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.

Shakespeare, William

37.

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

38.

We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on but where life, in its real sense, is lost.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

39.

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.

Benjamin, Walter

40.

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

41.

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

42.

There is only one way to get ready for immortality, and that is to love this life and live it as bravely and faithfully and cheerfully as we can.

Dyke, Henry Van

43.

Well, take your time and don't live too fast. Troubles will come and they will pass. Find a woman and you'll find love. Don't forget, son, there is someone up above.

Skynard, Lynard

44.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Baudrillard, Jean

45.

We Japanese enjoy the small pleasures, not extravagance. I believe a man should have a simple lifestyle -- even if he can afford more.

Ibuka, Massaru

46.

Life's enchanted cup sparkles near the brim.

Byron, Lord

47.

Only those live who do good.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

48.

Life is really about a spiritual unfolding that is personal and enchanting -- an unfolding that no science or philosophy or religion has yet fully clarified.

Redfield, James

49.

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

Pritchett, V. S.

50.

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

Havel, Vaclav