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

The lessons this life has planted in my heart pertain more to caring than crops, more to Golden Rule than gold, more to the proper choice than to the popular choice.

Kirby Larson

Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

James, William

There is only one way to get ready for immortality, and that is to love this life and live it as bravely and faithfully and cheerfully as we can.

Dyke, Henry Van

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

People should always have something which they prefer to life.

Seume, Johann G.

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

10.

Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. Their families came and took them away. Eighty years later, by a bizarre coincidence, they lay in the same hospital, on their deathbeds, next to each other. One of them looked at the other and said,so. What did you think?

Wright, Steven

11.

We never live, but we hope to live; and as we are always arranging to be happy, it must be that we never are so.

Pascal, Blaise

12.

The purpose of life is the expansion of happiness.

Yogi, Maharishi Mahesh

13.

Life is a glass given to us to fill; a busy life is filling it with as much as it can hold; a hurried life has had more poured into it than it can contain.

Brown, William Adams

14.

Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.

Baudrillard, Jean

15.

I have an existential map; it has you are here written all over it.

Wright, Steven

16.

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

Woody Allen

17.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

Epictetus

18.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Baudrillard, Jean

19.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

20.

The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.

Edison, Thomas A.

21.

Life is something that everyone should try at least once.

Henry J. Tillman

22.

Life is a dead-end street.

Mencken, H. L.

23.

Life is but a moment, death also is but another.

Schuller, Robert H.

24.

Living the truth in your heart without compromise brings kindness into the world. Attempts at kindness that compromise your heart cause only sadness.

25.

Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to the brass tacks.

Eliot, T. S.

26.

Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel.

Walpole, Horace

27.

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

28.

Those who live are those who fight.

Hugo, Victor

29.

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

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

30.

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

31.

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.

Cabell, James Branch

32.

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

Young, J. Z.

33.

There is only one way to come into this world; there are too many ways to leave it.

Harington, Donald

34.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs

35.

One of the most appalling comments on our present way of life is that half of all the beds in our hospitals are reserved for patients with nervous and mental troubles, patients who have collapsed under the crushing burden of accumulated yesterdays and fearful tomorrows. Yet a vast majority of those people would be walking the streets today, leading happy, useful lives, if they had only heeded the words of Jesus: Have no anxiety about the morrow; or the words of Sir William Osler; Live in day-tight compartments.

Carnegie, Dale

36.

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

37.

Who goes to Rome a beast returns a beast.

Proverb, Italian

38.

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

39.

Life is an earnest business, and no one every became good or great on a diet of broad grins.

Blackie, Professor

40.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

41.

Life does not happen to us, it happens from us.

Wickett, Michael

42.

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

Butler, Philip

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Life is really about a spiritual unfolding that is personal and enchanting -- an unfolding that no science or philosophy or religion has yet fully clarified.

Redfield, James

46.

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.

Pasternak, Boris

47.

We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.

Kennedy, John F.

48.

The average person living to age 70 has 613, 000 hours of life. This is too long a period not to have fun.

49.

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

Camus, Albert