Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Horace

Best Quotes about Life

To live lightheartedly but not recklessly; to be gay without being boisterous; to be courageous without being bold; to show trust and cheerful resignation without fatalism -- this is the art of living.

La Fontaine, Jean De

Half my life is an act of revision.

Irving, John

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

Lao-Tzu

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

Kennedy, John F.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears -- as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

We don't beat the Grim Reaper by living longer, we beat the Reaper by living well and living fully, for the Reaper will come for all of us. The question is what do we do between the time we are born and the time he shows up. It's too late to do all the things that you're gonna kinda get around to.

Randy Pausch

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

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

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to save it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

10.

There is one thing that matters -- to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

11.

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

Woody Allen

12.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

13.

They that have lived a single day have lived an age.

La Bruyere, Jean De

14.

Threescore years and ten is enough; if a man can't suffer all the misery he wants in that time, he must be numb.

Billings, Josh

15.

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

16.

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

Lennon, John

17.

In the early days all I hoped was to make a living out of what I did best. But, since there's no real market for masturbation I had to fall back on my bass playing abilities.

Claypool, Les

18.

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

Boom, Corrie Ten

19.

There are three stages in a person's life, birth, their life and death. They are not conscious of birth submit to death and forget to live.

La Bruyere, Jean De

20.

Life never becomes a habit to me. It's always a marvel.

Mansfield, Katherine

21.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Steve Jobs

22.

Remember, a dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream.

Fields, W. C.

23.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

24.

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.

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

27.

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Hemingway, Ernest

28.

I used to trouble about what life was for -- now being alive seems sufficient reason.

Field, Joanna

29.

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

William Shakespeare

30.

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

Baudelaire, Charles

31.

Life is uncharted territory. It reveals its story one moment at a time.

Buscaglia, Leo

32.

Live as you would have wished to live when you come to die.

Gellert

33.

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.

Rogers, Carl

34.

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

35.

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

Blake, William

36.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head.

Twain, Mark

37.

Every man's life is a fairy tale written by God's finger.

Anderson, Hans Christian

38.

Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it's the transparency that counts.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

39.

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

40.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

Schweitzer, Albert

41.

One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.

Wolfe, Thomas

42.

In the morning of life, work; in the mid day give council; in the evening, pray.

Proverb, German

43.

Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life.

Pirandello, Luigi

44.

Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five years and you pay it back and then -- one day -- you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then -- one day -- you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.

Leary, Denis

45.

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

46.

In matters of self-control as we shall see again and again, speed kills. But a little friction really can save lives.

Daniel Akst

47.

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late

Franklin, Benjamin

48.

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

49.

The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist -- this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul -- a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.

Mead, Margaret

50.

What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction. And the greatest good is trivial; for all life is a dream and all dreams are dreams.

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro