Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Lehrer, Tom

Best Quotes about Life

Live poor so you can die rich.

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

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

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

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)

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

There are four things every person has more of than they know; sins, debt, years, and foes.

Proverb, Persian

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

Temple, Sir William

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

Forster, Edward M.

10.

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

11.

Reality is the crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.

Tomlin, Lily

12.

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others

Keller, Helen

13.

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

O'Neill, Eugene

14.

Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

Raban, Jonathan

15.

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

Peter De Vries

16.

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

Samuel Butler

17.

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

18.

What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.

Brodsky, Joseph

19.

Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.

Brecht, Bertolt

20.

Real life seems to have no plots.

Burnett, Ivy Compton

21.

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

Rexford, Eben Eugene

22.

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

23.

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

24.

The sad souls of those who lived without blame and without praise.

Dante Alighieri

25.

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.

26.

Every man's life is a fairy tale written by God's finger.

Anderson, Hans Christian

27.

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

Boom, Corrie Ten

28.

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

Conrad, Joseph

29.

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

30.

This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with the powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers, of families: read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life: re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books, and dismiss whatever insults your soul.

Whitman, Walt

31.

Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement.

Dimnet, Ernest

32.

Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life's ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets.

Miller, Henry

33.

It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

34.

Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.

Nash, Ogden

35.

Life is uncharted territory. It reveals its story one moment at a time.

Buscaglia, Leo

36.

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

Herzen, Alexander

37.

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness, and small obligations given habitually, are what preserve the heart and secure comfort.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

38.

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

39.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Washington is a city of people doing badly what should not be done at all.

Gurney, Robert

43.

Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.

Berenson, Bernard

44.

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

45.

People do not live nowadays. They get about 10% out of life.

Duncan, Isadora

46.

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

47.

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really merely commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outer results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

48.

To live is to go on a journey; to die is to come back home.

49.

It is not how many years we live, but rather what we do with them.

Booth, Evangeline Cory

50.

The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

Aristotle