Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

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

Hayes, Helen

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

Camus, Albert

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

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

Carlyle, Thomas

Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.

Sheen, Fulton John

The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.

Wilde, Oscar

What is a city, but the people; true the people are the city.

Coriolanus III

Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.

Lehrer, Tom

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

Lebowitz, Fran

10.

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

Lennon, John

11.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

Bachelard, Gaston

12.

The drama of life begins with a wail and ends with a sigh.

Antrim, Minna

13.

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.

Boulanger, Nadia

14.

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

Edna St. Vincent Millay

15.

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

16.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

Gauguin, Paul

17.

Life is at its best when it's shaken and stirred.

Facult, F. Paul

18.

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

19.

The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

Mumford, Lewis

20.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

21.

Life is real! Life is earnest! And death is not its goal. Dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

22.

I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday.

Fields, W. C.

23.

We dribble away our life, little by little, in small packages -- we don't throw it away all at once.

Cook, Robert A.

24.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Isaac Asimov

25.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

26.

People should always have something which they prefer to life.

Seume, Johann G.

27.

The crime problem in New York is getting really serious. The other day the Statue of Liberty had both hands up.

Leno, Jay

28.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, 'Come on in, the living's fine,' and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

Baker, Russell (Wayne)

29.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life... I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau, Henry David

30.

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

Hoagland, Edward

31.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Christopher Morley

32.

Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.

Jordan, David Starr

33.

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

34.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

Kennedy, John F.

35.

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

Woody Allen

36.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

37.

Where the criminals cover their crimes by making them legal. [On Washington D. C.]

Dane, Frank

38.

The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mode of happiness. but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed the change; happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow Up.

Morgan, Charles

39.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

Jefferson, Thomas

40.

A man's life is 20 years of having his mother ask him where he is going, 40 years of having his wife ask the same question and, at the end, perhaps having the mourners wondering too.

41.

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

42.

To live is not breathing it is action.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

43.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

44.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Pound, Ezra

45.

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

46.

Living, just by itself -- what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting --or he'll come along and nibble your brain.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

47.

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

Mead, Margaret

48.

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

49.

Optimism and humor are the grease and glue of life. Without both of them we would never have survived our captivity.

Butler, Philip

50.

It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell