Motivational Quotes

Life

It is vanity to desire a long life and to take no heed of a good life.

- Kempis, Thomas

Best Quotes about Life

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.

Brodsky, Joseph

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.

Live, let live, and help live

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

To a wise man every day is a new life.

Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.

Frankl, Viktor E.

Simply the thing I am shall make me live.

Shakespeare, William

10.

You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can decide how you're going to live now.

Baez, Joan

11.

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

Dane, Frank

12.

All of life is a foreign country.

Kerouac, Jack

13.

Life's a bitch, and life's got lots of sisters.

Presser, Ross

14.

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

Peter De Vries

15.

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others

Keller, Helen

16.

Our life's journey of self-discovery is not a straight-line rise from one level of consciousness to another. Instead, it is a series of steep climbs and flat plateaus, then further climbs. Even though we all approach the journey from different directions, certain of the journey's characteristics are common to all of us.

Wilde, Stuart

17.

Living, just by itself -- what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting --or he'll come along and nibble your brain.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

18.

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

19.

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

20.

I found Rome brick, I left it marble.

Augustus, Caesar

21.

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Gandhi, Mahatma

22.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

Truman Capote

23.

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

Oppenheimer, Martin

24.

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

Horace

25.

There is no shortcut to life. To the end of our days, life is a lesson imperfectly learned.

Salisbury, Harrison

26.

People do not live nowadays. They get about 10% out of life.

Duncan, Isadora

27.

Make your life a happy one. That is where success is possible to every man.

Powell, Robert

28.

Not only is life a bitch, but it is always having puppies.

Gusoff, Adrienne

29.

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

Walpole, Horace

30.

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump; you have to get it right the first time.

Mead, Margaret

31.

The less routine the more life.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

32.

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

Larkin, Philip

33.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

34.

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

Aleichem, Sholom

35.

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Gauguin, Paul

36.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Jacobs, Jane

37.

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

38.

Every morning I wake up saying, I'm still alive; a miracle. And so I keep on pushing.

Cousteau, Jacques

39.

Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

40.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things

Rilke, Rainer Maria

41.

It is very certain that the desire of life prolongs it.

Byron, Lord

42.

Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement.

Dimnet, Ernest

43.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Tremain, Rose

44.

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.

45.

In the game of life it's a good idea to have a few early losses, which relieves you of the pressure of trying to maintain an undefeated season.

Baughan, Bill

46.

Live for those who love me, For those who know me true, For the Heaven that smiles above me, And awaits my coming too; For the cause that lacks resistance, For the future and the distance, And the good that I can do.

47.

Life is like eating artichokes, you have got to go through so much to get so little.

Dorgan, Thomas A.

48.

Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

49.

The purpose of life is to fight maturity.

Dick Werthimer

50.

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.

Baudrillard, Jean