Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Kierkegaard, S°ren

Best Quotes about Life

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

Pasternak, Boris

Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.

Leacock, Stephen B.

This city now doth, like a garment, wear the beauty of the morning; silent bare, ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie open unto the fields and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Wordsworth, William

This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.

Dickens, Charles

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.

Mccarthy, Mary

The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph.

Miller, Henry

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.

Life isn't simple. But the beauty of it is, you can always start over. It'll get easier.

Alacia Bessette

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis: I am always in the convalescent stage.

Shaw, George Bernard

10.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Kant, Immanuel

11.

Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.

Steve Jobs

12.

The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.

Mankiewicz, Joseph L.

13.

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

14.

In the morning of life, work; in the mid day give council; in the evening, pray.

Proverb, German

15.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head.

Twain, Mark

16.

Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Samuel Butler

17.

If you're not in New York, you're camping out.

Dewey, Thomas E.

18.

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.

Klee, Paul

19.

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

Hume, David

20.

Youth is too tumultuous for felicity; old age too insecure for happiness. The period most favorable to enjoyment, in a vigorous, fortunate, and generous life, is that between forty and sixty.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

21.

The good life is one inspired by life and guided by knowledge.

Russell, Bertrand

22.

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

All things may be bought in Rome with money.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

24.

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.

25.

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

Hewitt, George T.

26.

Live poor so you can die rich.

27.

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

28.

The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

29.

It's not how long life is but the quality of our life that is important.

Dawson, Roger

30.

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

Coriolanus III

31.

Order your soul; reduce your wants; live in charity; associate in Christian community; obey the laws; trust in Providence.

Augustine, St.

32.

My art and profession is to live.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

33.

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

William Shakespeare

34.

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

35.

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

36.

The purpose of life is to fight maturity.

Dick Werthimer

37.

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

38.

Every time I look into the eyes of an animal I see life; the force of life and the beauty of creation

O'Reilly, Radar

39.

What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.

Lin-Chi

41.

It is a good thing that life is not as serious as it seems to a waiter.

Herold, Don

42.

I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital... not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground. The crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

Ruskin, John

43.

Life begins when you get out of the grandstand into the game.

Debevoise, P. L.

44.

I found Rome brick, I left it marble.

Augustus, Caesar

45.

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

46.

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.

Stark, Freya

47.

People should always have something which they prefer to life.

Seume, Johann G.

48.

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.

49.

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

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

50.

First I was dying to finish high-school and start college. Then I was dying to finish college and start working. Next, I was dying for my children to grow old enough for school, so I could return to work. Finally, I was dying to retire. And now, I am dying