Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Huxley, Aldous

Best Quotes about Life

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

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

My life is a battle.

Voltaire

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

Dane, Frank

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim -- objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.

Wilde, Oscar

Those who live are those who fight.

Hugo, Victor

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

Life is like riding a bicycle. You don't fall off unless you stop peddling.

Pepper, Claude D.

10.

Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.

Mumford, Lewis

11.

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

12.

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

Kafka, Franz

13.

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

14.

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

Barrie, Sir James M.

15.

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

16.

The mountains, rivers, earth, grasses, trees, and forests are always emanating a subtle, precious light, day and night, always emanating a subtle, precious sound, demonstrating and expounding to all people the unsurpassed ultimate truth.

Yuan-Sou

17.

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

Baluch, Joy

18.

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

Coriolanus III

19.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Calvino, Italo

20.

Life is a continual process of remaking ourselves.

21.

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

22.

The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.

Lin-Chi

23.

Feelings are really your GPS system for life. When your supposed to do something, or not supposed to do something, your emotional guidance system lets you know.

Oprah Winfrey

24.

Life is an onion and one cries while peeling it.

Proverb, French

25.

The only reason they come to see me is that I know that life is great -- and they know I know it.

Gable, Clark

26.

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

Thornton Wilder

27.

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

28.

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

Pope John XXIII

29.

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

Field, Joanna

30.

This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with the powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers, of families: read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life: re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books, and dismiss whatever insults your soul.

Whitman, Walt

31.

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

32.

One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure its worth watching.

33.

Life is like wine, the longer you take to enjoy it the more chance you've got of tasting vinegar.

34.

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.

Larkin, Philip

35.

Life is like playing the violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Butler, Samuel

36.

First I was dying to finish high-school and start college. Then I was dying to finish college and start working. Next, I was dying for my children to grow old enough for school, so I could return to work. Finally, I was dying to retire. And now, I am dying

37.

Life is a reciprocal exchange. To move forward, you have to give back.

Oprah Winfrey

38.

Live, let live, and help live

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

40.

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

Boese, Paul

41.

The major justification for a life is the happiness and reward it brings to other lives.

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Tremain, Rose

45.

Half my life is an act of revision.

Irving, John

46.

Simply the thing I am shall make me live.

Shakespeare, William

47.

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Ackerman, Diane

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Fields, W. C.