Motivational Quotes

Life

Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.

- Mumford, Lewis

Best Quotes about Life

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

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]

Bible

If you seek, how is that different from pursuing sound and form? If you don't seek, how are you different from earth, wood, or stone? You must seek without seeking.

Fo-Yan

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

Moses, Grandma

Washington is a place where politicians don't know which way is up and taxes don't know which way is down.

Orben, Robert

Life at the top is financially rewarding, spiritually draining, physically exhausting, and short.

Newman, Peter C.

It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

The life of man is a journey; a journey that must be traveled, however bad the roads or the accommodation.

Goldsmith, Oliver

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

Wilde, Oscar

10.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

Thoreau, Henry David

11.

Live poor so you can die rich.

12.

Well, take your time and don't live too fast. Troubles will come and they will pass. Find a woman and you'll find love. Don't forget, son, there is someone up above.

Skynard, Lynard

13.

When we speak the word life, it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

Artaud, Antonin

14.

Live as you would have wished to live when you come to die.

Gellert

15.

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

16.

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

Michelangelo

17.

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

Schmaltz, David A.

18.

The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy.

Shinn, Florence Scovel

19.

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

20.

Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing.

Seneca

21.

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

22.

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

Sartre, Jean-Paul

23.

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

24.

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

Benjamin, Walter

25.

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.

26.

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

Oppenheimer, Martin

27.

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

Morley, Christopher

28.

If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I'm sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for.

Thoreau, Henry David

29.

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

Antrim, Minna

30.

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

32.

Don't brood. Get on with living and loving. You don't have forever.

Rexford, Eben Eugene

33.

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

Rimbaud, Arthur

34.

Life loves the liver of it.

Angelou, Maya

35.

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

36.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

37.

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

Whitehead, Alfred North

38.

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.

Larkin, Philip

39.

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

Boese, Paul

40.

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

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

41.

Order your soul; reduce your wants; live in charity; associate in Christian community; obey the laws; trust in Providence.

Augustine, St.

42.

Who goes to Rome a beast returns a beast.

Proverb, Italian

43.

To attain inner peace you must actually give your life, not just your possessions. When you at last give your life -- bringing into alignment your beliefs and the way you live then, and only then, can you begin to find inner peace.

Pilgrim, Peace

44.

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

45.

Life is like riding a bicycle. You don't fall off unless you stop peddling.

Pepper, Claude D.

46.

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

Bacon, Francis

47.

Life is very interesting if you make mistakes.

Carpentier, Georges

48.

If you're not in New York, you're camping out.