Motivational Quotes

Life

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

- Lao-Tzu

Best Quotes about Life

Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five years and you pay it back and then -- one day -- you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then -- one day -- you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.

Leary, Denis

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

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

The crime problem in New York is getting really serious. The other day the Statue of Liberty had both hands up.

Leno, Jay

Life is not a matter of place, things or comfort; rather, it concerns the basic human rights of family, country, justice and human dignity.

Marcos, Imelda

May you live as long as you want and not want as long as you live.

Hanks, Tom

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Drives my green age that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer.

Thomas, Dylan

Either these [unsaved] people are to be evangelized, or the leaven of communism and infidelity will assume such enormous proportions that it will break you in a reign of terror such as this country has never known.

Moody, Dwight L.

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

10.

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

Antrim, Minna

11.

Life is a dead-end street.

Mencken, H. L.

12.

The life of every person is like a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.

Barrie, Sir James M.

13.

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

14.

The average person living to age 70 has 613, 000 hours of life. This is too long a period not to have fun.

15.

They that have lived a single day have lived an age.

La Bruyere, Jean De

16.

Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.

Brooke, Rupert

17.

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

Samuel Butler

18.

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

19.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

Most of us fall short much more by omission than by commission. While the world perishes we go our way: purposeless, passionless, day after day.

Pilgrim, Peace

21.

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

22.

Life -- how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

Pritchett, V. S.

23.

Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic

Wilde, Oscar

24.

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

25.

The only reason they come to see me is that I know that life is great -- and they know I know it.

Gable, Clark

26.

Some people seem to go through life standing at the complaint counter.

Propp Jr., Fred

27.

Well, take your time and don't live too fast. Troubles will come and they will pass. Find a woman and you'll find love. Don't forget, son, there is someone up above.

Skynard, Lynard

28.

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

29.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, 'Come on in, the living's fine,' and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

Baker, Russell (Wayne)

30.

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

31.

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

Dane, Frank

32.

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around.

Hepburn, Katharine

33.

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

34.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

35.

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning -- in other words, of absurdity --the more energetically meaning is sought.

Havel, Vaclav

36.

The art of living lies not in eliminating but in growing with troubles.

Baruch, Bernard M.

37.

The major justification for a life is the happiness and reward it brings to other lives.

38.

I think we're here for each other.

Burnett, Carol

39.

Don't brood. Get on with living and loving. You don't have forever.

Rexford, Eben Eugene

40.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Baudrillard, Jean

41.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

Gauguin, Paul

42.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

Bachelard, Gaston

43.

Eternal truths will be neither true nor eternal unless they have fresh meaning for every new social situation.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

44.

We come into this world head first and go out feet first; in between, it is all a matter of balance.

Boese, Paul

45.

Difficulties come when you don't pay attention to life's whisper. Life always whispers to you first, but if you ignore the whisper, sooner or later you'll get a scream.

Oprah Winfrey

46.

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

47.

Real life seems to have no plots.

Burnett, Ivy Compton

48.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

49.

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

Buechner, Frederick

50.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

Frankl, Viktor E.