Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Menander of Athens

Best Quotes about Life

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

Herrick, Robert

A man's life is 20 years of having his mother ask him where he is going, 40 years of having his wife ask the same question and, at the end, perhaps having the mourners wondering too.

Life is not one thing after another. It's the same damn thing over and over!

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

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

Life. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.

Bierce, Ambrose

Don't worry about your life; what you shall eat, or drink, or the clothing for your body. [Matthew 6:31]

Bible

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

Wolfe, Thomas

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

Nash, Ogden

10.

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

11.

The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.

Lin-Chi

12.

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

Sartre, Jean-Paul

13.

It is vanity to desire a long life and to take no heed of a good life.

Kempis, Thomas

14.

The purpose of life is the expansion of happiness.

Yogi, Maharishi Mahesh

15.

To live is to go on a journey; to die is to come back home.

16.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life... I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau, Henry David

17.

Life is a continual process of remaking ourselves.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.

Cabell, James Branch

21.

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning -- in other words, of absurdity --the more energetically meaning is sought.

Havel, Vaclav

22.

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

Baluch, Joy

23.

Life is raw material. We are artisans. We can sculpt our existence into something beautiful, or debase it into ugliness. It's in our hands.

Better, Cathy

24.

In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.

Spengler, Oswald

25.

Walk through life eager and open to self-improvement and that which is going to best help you evolve, because that's really why were here: to evolve as human beings.

Oprah Winfrey

26.

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I think that what we're really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Campbell, Joseph

27.

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

28.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

Crisp, Quentin

30.

Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

Forster, Edward M.

31.

The drama of life begins with a wail and ends with a sigh.

Antrim, Minna

32.

Life is really about a spiritual unfolding that is personal and enchanting -- an unfolding that no science or philosophy or religion has yet fully clarified.

Redfield, James

33.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs

34.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

35.

Remember, a dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream.

Fields, W. C.

36.

You really haven't changed, you've just become more of yourself. That is really what were all trying to do: become more of ourselves.

Oprah Winfrey

37.

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.

Moses, Grandma

38.

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

39.

The tragedy of life is not that a man loses, but that he almost wins.

Broun, Heywood

40.

Paris is the caf? of Europe.

Galiani, Ferdinando

41.

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

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

42.

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.