Motivational Quotes

Life

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.

Best Quotes about Life

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

A life is like a tree -- if you don't make it straight when its young and green, you'll never do it when it's old and dry.

Life was mostly made up of things you couldn't control, full of surprises, and they weren't always good. Life wasn't what you made it. You were what life made you.

Sara Zarr

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

Santayana, George

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.

Larkin, Philip

Our life's journey of self-discovery is not a straight-line rise from one level of consciousness to another. Instead, it is a series of steep climbs and flat plateaus, then further climbs. Even though we all approach the journey from different directions, certain of the journey's characteristics are common to all of us.

Wilde, Stuart

People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live because life is so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly

Warhol, Andy

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

Thornton Wilder

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

Hume, David

10.

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

Camus, Albert

11.

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

Billings, Josh

12.

To live is not breathing it is action.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

13.

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

14.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life... I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau, Henry David

15.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

16.

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Steve Jobs

18.

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.

19.

If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

20.

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

21.

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

Dawson, Roger

22.

Life is full of surprises and and serendipity. Being open to unexpected turns in the road is an important part of success. If you try to plan every step, you may miss those wonderful twists and turns. Just find your next adventure-do it well, enjoy it-and then, not now, think about what comes next.

Condoleeza Rice

23.

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late

Franklin, Benjamin

24.

It is very certain that the desire of life prolongs it.

Byron, Lord

25.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Truman Capote

29.

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

Harington, Donald

30.

The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

31.

The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

Mumford, Lewis

32.

Give a man a dollar and you cheer his heart. Give him a dream and you challenge his heart. Give him Christ and you change his heart. Then the dollar and the dream become meaningful to him, and to others.

Strait, C. Neil

33.

One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure its worth watching.

34.

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I think that what we're really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Campbell, Joseph

35.

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

36.

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

Propp Jr., Fred

37.

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

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

38.

The finest lives in my opinion are the common model, without miracle and without extravagance.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

39.

Life is a reciprocal exchange. To move forward, you have to give back.

Oprah Winfrey

40.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things

Rilke, Rainer Maria

41.

Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to the brass tacks.

Eliot, T. S.

42.

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Elbert Hubbard

43.

This tattered life is my only robe; the wind my only refuge.

Mountain, Marian

44.

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

Dickens, Charles

45.

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Ackerman, Diane

46.

Life is a state of mind.

Warden, Jack

47.

In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you're told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.

Hoggart, Simon

48.

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

Dane, Frank

49.

Lawrence, D. H.

50.

There are nine requisites for contented living: HEALTH enough to make work a pleasure; WEALTH enough to support your needs; STRENGTH enough to battle with difficulties and forsake them; GRACE enough to confess your sins and overcome them; PATIENCE enough to toil until some good is accomplished; CHARITY enough to see some good in your neighbor; LOVE enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others; FAITH enough to make real the things of God; HOPE enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von