Motivational Quotes

Life

Washington is a city of people doing badly what should not be done at all.

- Gurney, Robert

Best Quotes about Life

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

The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.

Hayes, Helen

Life is but a game and we are the playthings of the gods.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

Weil, Simone

For what is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. [James 4:14]

Bible

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

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

To live is to go on a journey; to die is to come back home.

10.

The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph.

Miller, Henry

11.

Our life's journey of self-discovery is not a straight-line rise from one level of consciousness to another. Instead, it is a series of steep climbs and flat plateaus, then further climbs. Even though we all approach the journey from different directions, certain of the journey's characteristics are common to all of us.

Wilde, Stuart

12.

The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living that are desired when dying.

13.

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

Oppenheimer, Martin

14.

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

Wolfe, Thomas

15.

All things may be bought in Rome with money.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

16.

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

17.

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

Boese, Paul

18.

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

19.

People should always have something which they prefer to life.

Seume, Johann G.

20.

Can't nothing make your life work if you ain't the architect.

McMillan, Terry

21.

I found Rome brick, I left it marble.

Augustus, Caesar

22.

Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.

Baudrillard, Jean

23.

Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel.

Walpole, Horace

24.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.

25.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Percy, Walker

26.

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

27.

Life is indeed difficult, partly because of the real difficulties we must overcome in order to survive, and partly because of our own innate desire to always do better, to overcome new challenges, to self-actualize. Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor.

Albert Ellis, Michael Abrams, Lidia Dengelegi

28.

Life is not so much a matter of position as of disposition

29.

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

Lao-Tzu

30.

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

Pope John XXIII

31.

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

32.

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

Austen, Jane

33.

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.

Cabell, James Branch

34.

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

Boom, Corrie Ten

35.

Life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable.

Allen, Woody

36.

Life is a rollercoaster. Try to eat a light lunch.

Schmaltz, David A.

37.

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

38.

To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

39.

In the early days of the Indian Territory, there were no such things as birth certificates. You being there was certificate enough.

Rogers, Will

40.

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

Piatt, Don

41.

The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

Crowley, Aleister

42.

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

Hume, David

43.

Attack life, it's going to kill you anyway.

Coallier, Steven

44.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

45.

In the book of life every page has two sides: we human beings fill the upper side with our plans, hopes and wishes, but providence writes on the other side, and what it ordains is seldom our goal.

Nisami

46.

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

47.

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

Isherwood, Christopher

48.

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

Galbraith, John Kenneth

49.

Dance like no one is watching, Love like you'll never be hurt, Sing like no one is listening, Live like it's heaven on earth.

Purkey, William

50.

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