Motivational Quotes

Life

In real life, however, you don't react to what someone did; you react only to what you think she did, and the gap between action and perception is bridged by the art of impression management. If life itself is but what you deem it, then why not focus your efforts on persuading others to believe that you are a virtuous and trustworthy cooperator?

- Jonathan Haidt

Best Quotes about Life

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

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

Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.

Reed, Lou

Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.

Radner, Gilda

A life is like a tree -- if you don't make it straight when its young and green, you'll never do it when it's old and dry.

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness, and small obligations given habitually, are what preserve the heart and secure comfort.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

Lao-Tzu

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

Oppenheimer, Martin

Life is just a journey

Diana, Princess of Wales

10.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

11.

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

12.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

13.

Best to live lightly, unthinkingly.

Sophocles

14.

I think we're here for each other.

Burnett, Carol

15.

In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.

Socrates

16.

Difficulties come when you don't pay attention to life's whisper. Life always whispers to you first, but if you ignore the whisper, sooner or later you'll get a scream.

Oprah Winfrey

17.

There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.

Norris, Kathleen

18.

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

Baluch, Joy

19.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

Thoreau, Henry David

20.

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

McMillan, Terry

21.

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.

Lorca, Federico Garcia

22.

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

23.

Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.

Nabokov, Vladimir

24.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

25.

You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Percy, Walker

26.

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

Coriolanus III

27.

So in all these little ways we spin a web, a cocoon, around ourselves. The cocoon becomes nice and snug and comfortable because it is very familiar. We know every little corner of our life; we can even write poetry about it. We may also have ideas about the great mystery which religions speak of, which gives our cocoon an especial sense of security: we can worship the great mystery outside of it and feel good about that. The cocoon is safe, bounded, claustrophobic, and a little stale. We settle into it and live our lives.

Hayward, Jeremy W.

28.

Life is too short to learn German.

Porson, R.

29.

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

Mumford, Lewis

30.

Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live; Not where I love, but where I am, I die.

Southey, Robert

31.

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

32.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it.

Proverb, Indian

34.

Life is very interesting if you make mistakes.

Carpentier, Georges

35.

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

Miller, Henry

36.

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

37.

The continuous invention of new ways of observing is man's special secret of living.

Young, J. Z.

38.

To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one.

Kornfield, Jack

39.

Take life as you find it, but don't leave it that way

40.

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

41.

The essence of life is finding something you really love and then making the daily experience worthwhile.

Waitley, Denis

42.

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.

Robert Heinlein

43.

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

Buechner, Frederick

44.

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

45.

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

Austen, Jane

46.

Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only in proportion as we are desirous of living more do we really live.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

47.

Life is a long lesson in humility.

James M. Barrie

48.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

49.

Making a life comes before making a living.

50.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.