Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Menander of Athens

Best Quotes about Life

Who goes to Rome a beast returns a beast.

Proverb, Italian

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

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things

Rilke, Rainer Maria

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

Stone, Robert

Life is fickle; the fair man doesn't invariably win.

Mark Hodder

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

This city now doth, like a garment, wear the beauty of the morning; silent bare, ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie open unto the fields and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Wordsworth, William

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

10.

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

Nash, Ogden

11.

Only those live who do good.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

12.

The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

Mumford, Lewis

13.

Live for those who love me, For those who know me true, For the Heaven that smiles above me, And awaits my coming too; For the cause that lacks resistance, For the future and the distance, And the good that I can do.

14.

Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies.

Landers, Ann

15.

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

Dimnet, Ernest

16.

The purpose of life is the expansion of happiness.

Yogi, Maharishi Mahesh

17.

To live is not breathing it is action.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

18.

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

19.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

20.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

Kennedy, John F.

21.

In the morning of life, work; in the mid day give council; in the evening, pray.

Proverb, German

22.

It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts!

Stevenson, Adlai E.

23.

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

Lebowitz, Fran

24.

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

Schmaltz, David A.

25.

We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on but where life, in its real sense, is lost.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

26.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

27.

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

Keller, Helen

28.

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

Buscaglia, Leo

29.

The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.

Hayes, Helen

30.

We come into this world head first and go out feet first; in between, it is all a matter of balance.

Boese, Paul

31.

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.

32.

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.

Franklin, Benjamin

33.

How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

34.

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

35.

Everyone is trying to accomplish something big, not realizing that life is made up of little things.

Clark, Frank A.

36.

I'm impressed with the people from Chicago. Hollywood is hype, New York is talk, Chicago is work.

Douglas, Michael

37.

Any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.

Plato

38.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

Rimbaud, Arthur

39.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

40.

We dribble away our life, little by little, in small packages -- we don't throw it away all at once.

Cook, Robert A.

41.

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

42.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

43.

If I had been present at creation, I would have given some useful hints.

Wise, Alfonso The

44.

Life is too short to learn German.

Porson, R.

45.

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

William Goldman

46.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

Bachelard, Gaston

47.

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

Gauguin, Paul

48.

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

Lennon, John

49.

If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

50.

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. [Psalms 90:10]

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