Motivational Quotes

Life

If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.

- Lamartine, Alphonse De

Best Quotes about Life

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

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.

Drummond, Henry

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

To live is not breathing it is action.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

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

Herzen, Alexander

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

Prochnow, Herbert

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

Life is given for wisdom, and yet we are not wise; for goodness, and we are not good; for overcoming evil, and evil remains; for patience and sympathy and love, and yet we are fretful and hard and weak and selfish. We are keyed not to attainment, but to the struggle toward it.

Munger, Thornton T.

10.

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth.

Einstein, Albert

11.

My kids idea of a hard life is to live in a house with only one phone.

Foreman, George

12.

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

Pavese, Cesare

13.

We Japanese enjoy the small pleasures, not extravagance. I believe a man should have a simple lifestyle -- even if he can afford more.

Ibuka, Massaru

14.

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

Dawson, Roger

15.

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

Morley, Christopher

16.

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

17.

We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim -- objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.

Wilde, Oscar

18.

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Delacroix, Eugene

19.

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

Epicurus

20.

Remember, a dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream.

Fields, W. C.

21.

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

22.

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

Antrim, Minna

23.

Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

William Goldman

24.

Life is not always not always what one wants it to be., but to make the best of it as it is the only way of being happy.

Churchill, Jennie Jerome

25.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Thoreau, Henry David

26.

Life is a dead-end street.

Mencken, H. L.

27.

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

Curie, Madame Marie

28.

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Shaw, George Bernard

29.

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

30.

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

Aleichem, Sholom

31.

One recipe for a longer life; Never exceed the speed limit.

32.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

William Shakespeare

33.

Nature has invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward. As a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life.

Louis Schwartzberg

34.

There is only one way to come into this world; there are too many ways to leave it.

Harington, Donald

35.

The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mode of happiness. but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed the change; happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow Up.

Morgan, Charles

36.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

Miller, Henry

37.

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.

Boulanger, Nadia

38.

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

39.

Life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable.

Allen, Woody

40.

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

Herrick, Robert

41.

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

Horace

42.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.

43.

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

Osler, Sir William

44.

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

Huxley, Aldous

45.

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

46.

The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing; the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unseen attack.

Aurelius, Marcus

47.

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.

48.

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

Benjamin, Walter

49.

The City attaches an exaggerated importance to the healing power of lunch.

Fieldes, Christopher

50.

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