Motivational Quotes

Life

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.

- Lorca, Federico Garcia

Best Quotes about Life

Life is a classroom in which each of us is being tested, tried, and passed.

Thibodeau, Robert

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.

Nouwen, Henri

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Life is like wine, the longer you take to enjoy it the more chance you've got of tasting vinegar.

Life's a bitch, and life's got lots of sisters.

Presser, Ross

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

Herzen, Alexander

We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim -- objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.

Wilde, Oscar

10.

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.

Kundera, Milan

11.

Too often man handles life as he does the bad weather, He whiles away the time as he waits for it to stop.

Polgar, Alfred

12.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.

13.

Live as you would have wished to live when you come to die.

Gellert

14.

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

15.

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- that myth is more potent than history. I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts -- That hope always triumphs over experience -- That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

Fulghum, Robert

16.

Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.

Fran Lebowitz

17.

Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.

Baudrillard, Jean

18.

Young people talk of what they are doing; old people of what they have done; and fools of what they have a mind to do.

Proverb

19.

We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.

Kennedy, John F.

20.

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

21.

He who is not busy being born is busy dying.

Dylan, Bob

22.

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

Crisp, Quentin

23.

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.

Allen, Fred A.

24.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

25.

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

26.

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

27.

The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.

Zeno

28.

If God exists and we are made in his image we can have real meaning, and we can have real knowledge through what he has communicated to us.

Schaeffer, Francis

29.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

John Lennon

30.

It doesn't matter much where you live. It only matters how well you live when you're there

31.

The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mode of happiness. but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed the change; happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow Up.

Morgan, Charles

32.

The old Quaker was right: I expect to pass through life but once. If there is any kindness, or any good thing I can do to my fellow beings, let me do it now. I shall pass this way but once.

Gannett, W. C.

33.

There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insect's wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The clatter only seems to insult the ears.

Seattle, Chief

34.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

35.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

36.

Life is not always not always what one wants it to be., but to make the best of it as it is the only way of being happy.

Churchill, Jennie Jerome

37.

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

Camus, Albert

38.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: I'm with you kid. Let's go.

Angelou, Maya

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

42.

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

Stoppard, Tom

43.

Life never becomes a habit to me. It's always a marvel.

Mansfield, Katherine

44.

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

Heath, David M.

45.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to save it.