Motivational Quotes

Life

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

- Lawrence, D. H.

Best Quotes about Life

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

Carlyle, Thomas

The world has so many lessons to teach you. I consider the world, our earth, to be like a school, and our life, the classrooms. Sometimes on our planet life school, the lessons often come dressed up as detours and road blocks and sometimes as full blown crises. And the secret I've learned to getting ahead is being open to the lessons.

Oprah Winfrey

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears -- as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

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

Pritchett, V. S.

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

Seneca

Life is a continual process of remaking ourselves.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

10.

To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earthly things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one's power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God; this is what man's journey is about, I think.

Smith, Lillian

11.

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

12.

Life is indeed difficult, partly because of the real difficulties we must overcome in order to survive, and partly because of our own innate desire to always do better, to overcome new challenges, to self-actualize. Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor.

Albert Ellis, Michael Abrams, Lidia Dengelegi

13.

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

14.

Life is short, but it's long enough to ruin any man who wants to be ruined.

Billings, Josh

15.

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

Frankl, Viktor E.

16.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

Truman Capote

17.

Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it.

Stoppard, Tom

18.

Life is an uphill business for the guy who's not on the level.

Welsh, John

19.

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.

Woolf, Virginia

20.

Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

Forster, Edward M.

21.

Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing.

Seneca

22.

Life is a state of mind.

Warden, Jack

23.

Don't worry about your life; what you shall eat, or drink, or the clothing for your body. [Matthew 6:31]

Bible

24.

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

Miller, Henry

25.

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

Butler, Philip

26.

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

27.

There is one thing that matters -- to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

28.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

Camus, Albert

29.

The city is recruited from the country.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

It's better to be an authentic loser than a false success, and to die alive than to live dead.

Markiewicz, William

31.

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

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

I am sure care's an enemy to life.

William Shakespeare

34.

Life is difficult and complicated and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

J.K. Rowling

35.

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

Mumford, Lewis

36.

Life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable.

Allen, Woody

37.

To attain inner peace you must actually give your life, not just your possessions. When you at last give your life -- bringing into alignment your beliefs and the way you live then, and only then, can you begin to find inner peace.

Pilgrim, Peace

38.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

39.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

41.

The purpose of life is the expansion of happiness.

Yogi, Maharishi Mahesh

42.

Live, let live, and help live

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.

Ciardi, John

44.

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

Fuller, Thomas

45.

Taken in any context, except seriously, life on earth is palatable and positively enjoyable.

46.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

Epictetus

47.

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

48.

I can't be bitter. No one has a contract on life.

Heath, David M.

49.

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

Prochnow, Herbert

50.

What else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?

Henry, O.