Motivational Quotes

Life

Can't nothing make your life work if you ain't the architect.

- McMillan, Terry

Best Quotes about Life

Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.

Huxtable, Ada Louise

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

Conrad, Joseph

The man who says he has exhausted life generally means that life has exhausted him.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Hume, David

This life of separateness may be compared to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.

Buddha

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

Live virtuously, and you cannot not die too soon, or live too long.

Russell, Lady R.

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

Life is an earnest business, and no one every became good or great on a diet of broad grins.

Blackie, Professor

10.

Paris, a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief. [About Paris]

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

11.

The major justification for a life is the happiness and reward it brings to other lives.

12.

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

Anderson, Hans Christian

13.

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.

14.

All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it -- an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.

Conrad, Peter

15.

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

Proverb, Persian

16.

Life is not so much a matter of position as of disposition

17.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

Camus, Albert

18.

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

Russell, Bertrand

19.

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.

Michelangelo

20.

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

21.

New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.

Carson, Johnny

22.

Life is given for wisdom, and yet we are not wise; for goodness, and we are not good; for overcoming evil, and evil remains; for patience and sympathy and love, and yet we are fretful and hard and weak and selfish. We are keyed not to attainment, but to the struggle toward it.

Munger, Thornton T.

23.

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

24.

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

Horace

25.

To live lightheartedly but not recklessly; to be gay without being boisterous; to be courageous without being bold; to show trust and cheerful resignation without fatalism -- this is the art of living.

La Fontaine, Jean De

26.

One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.

Austen, Jane

27.

Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.

Frankl, Viktor E.

28.

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

29.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

30.

All that man has will he give for his life.

Bible

31.

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

Epicurus

32.

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

Lebowitz, Fran

33.

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

Berenson, Bernard

34.

When I consider life, it is all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, people favor this deceit.

Dryden, John

35.

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end

36.

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

37.

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

Aristotle

38.

In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.

Socrates

39.

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

40.

We don't beat the Grim Reaper by living longer, we beat the Reaper by living well and living fully, for the Reaper will come for all of us. The question is what do we do between the time we are born and the time he shows up. It's too late to do all the things that you're gonna kinda get around to.

Randy Pausch

41.

There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war, and some men are wounded, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or personal life to assure complete equality. Life

Kennedy, John F.

42.

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

43.

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

Oprah Winfrey

44.

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.

Boulanger, Nadia

45.

Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.

Jordan, David Starr

46.

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

47.

Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.

Nabokov, Vladimir

48.

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

49.

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

The truest end of life, is to find the life that doesn't end.