Motivational Quotes

Life

In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you're told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.

- Hoggart, Simon

Best Quotes about Life

The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experiences.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

Life is supposed to get tough.

Grammer, Kelsey

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

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

The life of every person is like a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.

Barrie, Sir James M.

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

Salisbury, Harrison

If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I'm sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for.

Thoreau, Henry David

Only those live who do good.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

10.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

11.

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

12.

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.

Blake, William

13.

Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

14.

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

Austen, Jane

15.

I found Rome brick, I left it marble.

Augustus, Caesar

16.

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

17.

Life without meaning cannot be borne. We find a mission to which we're sworn

18.

Life flows on within you and without you.

Harrison, George

19.

It is advisable that a person know at least three things, where they are, where they are going, and what they had best do under the circumstances.

Ruskin, John

20.

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

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

23.

After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.

Poe, Edgar Allan

24.

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

25.

If God exists and we are made in his image we can have real meaning, and we can have real knowledge through what he has communicated to us.

Schaeffer, Francis

26.

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

27.

Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.

Diane Ackerman

28.

Life is an onion and one cries while peeling it.

Proverb, French

29.

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

Lao-Tzu

30.

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

31.

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

Mead, Margaret

32.

Life marches by, I suggest you get on with it.

Baluch, Joy

33.

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

Mille, Agnes De

34.

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

35.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Thoreau, Henry David

36.

Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies.

Landers, Ann

37.

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

Herzen, Alexander

38.

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

Heath, David M.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

Morley, Christopher

42.

Live, let live, and help live

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.

Dickens, Charles

44.

Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.