Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Menander of Athens

Best Quotes about Life

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

Jordan, David Starr

What else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?

Henry, O.

The trouble with life is that there are so many beautiful women and so little time.

Barrymore, John

Life is difficult and complicated and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

J.K. Rowling

For what is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. [James 4:14]

Bible

Life is a continual process of remaking ourselves.

Life is a campaign not a battle, and has its defeats as well as its victories.

Piatt, Don

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Tremain, Rose

The essence of life is finding something you really love and then making the daily experience worthwhile.

Waitley, Denis

10.

Life marches by, I suggest you get on with it.

Baluch, Joy

11.

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

William Goldman

12.

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

13.

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

Lao-Tzu

14.

Life is full and overflowing with the new. But it is necessary to empty out the old to make room for the new to enter.

Caddy, Eileen

15.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

16.

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

17.

Life was mostly made up of things you couldn't control, full of surprises, and they weren't always good. Life wasn't what you made it. You were what life made you.

Sara Zarr

18.

Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.

Sheen, Fulton John

19.

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

20.

Life is but a game and we are the playthings of the gods.

21.

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

Proverb, Persian

22.

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

23.

The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

Crowley, Aleister

24.

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

25.

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

26.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

27.

Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to the brass tacks.

Eliot, T. S.

28.

The four stages of life are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence.

Linkletter, Art

29.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

30.

In the early days of the Indian Territory, there were no such things as birth certificates. You being there was certificate enough.

Rogers, Will

31.

In the book of life every page has two sides: we human beings fill the upper side with our plans, hopes and wishes, but providence writes on the other side, and what it ordains is seldom our goal.

Nisami

32.

The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

Whitman, Walt

33.

The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist -- this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul -- a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.

Mead, Margaret

34.

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

Boulanger, Nadia

35.

Reality is the crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.

Tomlin, Lily

36.

Every time I look into the eyes of an animal I see life; the force of life and the beauty of creation

O'Reilly, Radar

37.

When we exercise self-control on a given occasion, we win for ourselves a little credibility we can rely on the next time around. Pretty soon we develop a reputation to ourselves that we want badly to uphold. With each test that we meet, our resolve gains momentum, fueled by the fear that we may succumb and establish a damaging precedent for our own weakness.

Daniel Akst

38.

I used to trouble about what life was for -- now being alive seems sufficient reason.

Field, Joanna

39.

Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

40.

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

Bacon, Francis

41.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

42.

And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour,we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale.

William Shakespeare

43.

Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

44.

My kids idea of a hard life is to live in a house with only one phone.

Foreman, George

45.

On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

46.

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.

Santayana, George

47.

The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.

Miller, Henry

48.

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

49.

We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.

Osler, Sir William

50.

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