Motivational Quotes

Life

We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.

- Menander of Athens

Best Quotes about Life

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Brodsky, Joseph

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

Samuel Butler

I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.

Stevenson, Robert Louis

Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step, but most of the time we are taking small, seemingly insignificant steps on the stairway of life.

Ransom, Ralph

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

Feelings are really your GPS system for life. When your supposed to do something, or not supposed to do something, your emotional guidance system lets you know.

Oprah Winfrey

When I hear somebody sigh that Life is hard, I am always tempted to ask, Compared to what?

Harris, Sidney J.

We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.

Sir Winston Churchill

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.

Mills, C. Wright

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Life isn't simple. But the beauty of it is, you can always start over. It'll get easier.

Alacia Bessette

13.

We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.

Markham, Edwin

14.

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

Hoagland, Edward

15.

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

Mankiewicz, Joseph L.

16.

Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.

Diane Ackerman

17.

In making a living today, many no longer leave room for life.

Sizoo, Joseph R.

18.

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

19.

Real life seems to have no plots.

Burnett, Ivy Compton

20.

Life is something that everyone should try at least once.

Henry J. Tillman

21.

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

22.

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

Russell, Lady R.

23.

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

24.

Live poor so you can die rich.

25.

Live today for tomorrow it will all be history.

Proverb

26.

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

27.

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

28.

Life is a rollercoaster. Try to eat a light lunch.

Schmaltz, David A.

29.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

30.

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

Dante Alighieri

31.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

Gauguin, Paul

32.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

33.

Today's city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.

Oppenheimer, Martin

34.

The city is recruited from the country.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Life is just a bowl of pits.

Rodney Dangerfield

38.

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.

Baudrillard, Jean

39.

Plunge boldly into the thick of life, and seize it where you will, it is always interesting.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

Even when I'm sick and depressed, I love life.

Rubinstein, Arthur

41.

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

Erickson, Lou

42.

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

May, Rollo

43.

One of the most appalling comments on our present way of life is that half of all the beds in our hospitals are reserved for patients with nervous and mental troubles, patients who have collapsed under the crushing burden of accumulated yesterdays and fearful tomorrows. Yet a vast majority of those people would be walking the streets today, leading happy, useful lives, if they had only heeded the words of Jesus: Have no anxiety about the morrow; or the words of Sir William Osler; Live in day-tight compartments.

Carnegie, Dale

44.

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

Calhoun, John C.

45.

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.

Aleichem, Sholom

46.

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

Austen, Jane

47.

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

48.

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

49.

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

Sartre, Jean-Paul

50.

Life is a horizontal fall.

Cocteau, Jean