Motivational Quotes

Life

Life is real! Life is earnest! And death is not its goal. Dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul.

- Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Best Quotes about Life

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)

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

Life isn't like a book. Life isn't logical or sensible or orderly. Life is a mess most of the time. And theology must be lived in the midst of that mess.

Colton, Charles Caleb

The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.

Mankiewicz, Joseph L.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

Santayana, George

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat... the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Elbert Hubbard

10.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

Bacon, Francis

11.

The good life is one inspired by life and guided by knowledge.

Russell, Bertrand

12.

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

Camus, Albert

13.

The surrender of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledgment of inferiority.

Calhoun, John C.

14.

Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

Temple, Sir William

16.

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

17.

Life is a long lesson in humility.

James M. Barrie

18.

My life is a battle.

Voltaire

19.

To a wise man every day is a new life.

20.

He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.

Horace

21.

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Gandhi, Mahatma

22.

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

23.

I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday.

Fields, W. C.

24.

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

Hanks, Tom

25.

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

26.

You can have peace of mind, improved health and an ever-increasing flow of energy. Life can be full of joy and satisfaction.

Peale, Norman Vincent

27.

Life is like a taxi. The meter just keeps a-ticking whether you are getting somewhere or just standing still.

Erickson, Lou

28.

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

29.

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

Stoppard, Tom

30.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Christopher Morley

31.

Nobody's journey is seamless or smooth. We all stumble. We all have setbacks. It's just life's way of saying, "Time to change course."

Oprah Winfrey

32.

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

William Goldman

33.

The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.

Wilde, Oscar

34.

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

Epicurus

35.

Live this day as if it will be your last. Remember that you will only find tomorrow on the calendars of fools. Forget yesterday's defeats and ignore the problems of tomorrow. This is it. Doomsday. All you have. Make it the best day of your year. The saddest words you can ever utter are, If I had my life to live over again. Take the baton, now. Run with it! This is your day! Beginning today, treat everyone you meet, friend or foe, loved one or stranger, as if they were going to be dead at midnight. Extend to each person, no matter how trivial the contact, all the care and kindness and understanding and love that you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.

Mandino, Og

36.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

37.

Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.

May, Rollo

38.

This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness... they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

39.

What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction. And the greatest good is trivial; for all life is a dream and all dreams are dreams.

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro

40.

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

41.

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

42.

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

43.

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

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.

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.

46.

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

47.

The life of man is a journey; a journey that must be traveled, however bad the roads or the accommodation.

Goldsmith, Oliver

48.

It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

Ellis, Havelock

49.

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

Keller, Helen

50.

One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.

Canetti, Elias