Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

Herzen, Alexander

In the book of life every page has two sides: we human beings fill the upper side with our plans, hopes and wishes, but providence writes on the other side, and what it ordains is seldom our goal.

Nisami

Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.

Brecht, Bertolt

We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.

Fuller, Thomas

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

Huxley, Aldous

The tragedy of life is not that a man loses, but that he almost wins.

Broun, Heywood

Life is not one thing after another. It's the same damn thing over and over!

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

Wickett, Michael

This also -- that I live, I consider a gift of God.

Ovid

10.

Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step, but most of the time we are taking small, seemingly insignificant steps on the stairway of life.

Ransom, Ralph

11.

This life of separateness may be compared to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.

Buddha

12.

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.

Aleichem, Sholom

13.

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

Camus, Albert

14.

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

Horace

15.

All of life is a foreign country.

Kerouac, Jack

16.

Live as if everything you do will eventually be known.

Prather, Hugh

17.

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.

Allen, Fred A.

18.

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

Larkin, Philip

19.

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs...

Epicurus

20.

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

21.

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

Socrates

22.

The finest lives in my opinion are the common model, without miracle and without extravagance.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

23.

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.

24.

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

25.

My art and profession is to live.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

26.

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

Waitley, Denis

27.

Washington is a city of people doing badly what should not be done at all.

Gurney, Robert

28.

In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.

Spengler, Oswald

29.

May God bless you to live as long as you want to; and want to as long as you live!

Proverb, Scottish

30.

Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on us.

Holdcroft, Thomas L.

31.

Real life seems to have no plots.

Burnett, Ivy Compton

32.

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

33.

He who allows his day to pass by without practicing generosity and enjoying life's pleasures is like a blacksmith's bellows. He breathes, but does not live.

Proverb

34.

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

Hayakawa, S. I.

35.

If I had been present at creation, I would have given some useful hints.

Wise, Alfonso The

36.

Live, let live, and help live

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

38.

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

Prochnow, Herbert

39.

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

Hume, David

40.

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

41.

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

42.

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

Mumford, Lewis

43.

Life is not so much a matter of position as of disposition

44.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

45.

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.

46.

Either these [unsaved] people are to be evangelized, or the leaven of communism and infidelity will assume such enormous proportions that it will break you in a reign of terror such as this country has never known.

Moody, Dwight L.

47.

The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.

Miller, Henry

48.

The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.

Norman Thomas

49.

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

50.

So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.

Seneca