Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Kierkegaard, S°ren

Best Quotes about Life

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

Life was mostly made up of things you couldn't control, full of surprises, and they weren't always good. Life wasn't what you made it. You were what life made you.

Sara Zarr

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

I found Rome brick, I left it marble.

Augustus, Caesar

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

Temple, Sir William

The best things in life are never rationed. Friendship, loyalty, and love. They do not require coupons.

Hewitt, George T.

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Gandhi, Mahatma

If God exists and we are made in his image we can have real meaning, and we can have real knowledge through what he has communicated to us.

Schaeffer, Francis

10.

Refrain from asking what going to happen tomorrow, and everyday that fortune grants you, count as gain.

Horace

11.

If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

12.

Life is too short to learn German.

Porson, R.

13.

We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.

Osler, Sir William

14.

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

Larkin, Philip

15.

New York is not Mecca. It just smells like it.

Simon, Neil

16.

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.

Michelangelo

17.

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

18.

The drama of life begins with a wail and ends with a sigh.

Antrim, Minna

19.

You have to do what you love to do, not get stuck in that comfort zone of a regular job. Life is not a dress rehearsal. This is it.

Basset, Lucinda

20.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

21.

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

22.

The old Quaker was right: I expect to pass through life but once. If there is any kindness, or any good thing I can do to my fellow beings, let me do it now. I shall pass this way but once.

Gannett, W. C.

23.

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

24.

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

Blackie, Professor

25.

Some people go through life trying to find out what the world holds for them only to find out too late that it's what they bring to the world that really counts. OR It's not what the world holds for you it's what you bring to it

Gables, Anne Of Green

26.

One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.

Wolfe, Thomas

27.

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end

28.

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

29.

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

30.

This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness... they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

31.

If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I'm sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for.

Thoreau, Henry David

32.

Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.

Rivarol, Antoine

33.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

34.

In making a living today, many no longer leave room for life.

Sizoo, Joseph R.

35.

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

Fuller, Thomas

36.

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

37.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Percy, Walker

38.

It is not how many years we live, but rather what we do with them.

Booth, Evangeline Cory

39.

We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do -- it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much.

Lawrence, D. H.

40.

In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you're told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.

Hoggart, Simon

41.

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

Aleichem, Sholom

42.

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

Epicurus

43.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

Saroyan, William

47.

The world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open.

William Shakespeare

48.

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

Brendan Gill

49.

Life is something that everyone should try at least once.

Henry J. Tillman

50.

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.