Motivational Quotes

Life

There are three stages in a person's life, birth, their life and death. They are not conscious of birth submit to death and forget to live.

- La Bruyere, Jean De

Best Quotes about Life

Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.

Diane Ackerman

We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.

Menander of Athens

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

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Life without meaning cannot be borne. We find a mission to which we're sworn

If you believed more in life you would fling yourself less to the moment.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone is too far from home.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

Plunge boldly into the thick of life, and seize it where you will, it is always interesting.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

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

Butler, Philip

11.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Tremain, Rose

12.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

Santayana, George

13.

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.

14.

Making a life comes before making a living.

15.

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

16.

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

17.

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Curie, Madame Marie

18.

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

19.

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

Holdcroft, Thomas L.

20.

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

21.

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived --forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

22.

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

23.

Simply the thing I am shall make me live.

Shakespeare, William

24.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

25.

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.

Rogers, Carl

26.

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

27.

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

28.

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

Mead, Margaret

29.

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

Gusoff, Adrienne

30.

Living Life Tomorrow's fate, though thou be wise, Thou canst not tell nor yet surmise; Pass, therefore, not today in vain, For it will never come again.

Khayyam, Omar

31.

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

32.

Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.

Lehrer, Tom

33.

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

Waitley, Denis

34.

Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.

Frankl, Viktor E.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Life is too short to learn German.

Porson, R.

39.

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

Seneca

40.

Life is a state of mind.

Warden, Jack

41.

You're alive. Do something. The directive in life, the moral imperative was so uncomplicated. It could be expressed in single words, not complete sentences. It sounded like this: Look. Listen. Choose. Act.

Barbara Hall

42.

The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

Whitman, Walt

43.

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

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

44.

My life is a battle.

Voltaire

45.

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