Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about 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

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

Pasternak, Boris

Today, you have 100% of your life left.

Hopkins, Tom

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

Thornton Wilder

It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

Ellis, Havelock

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

Thoreau, Henry David

The city is recruited from the country.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

10.

Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

11.

I have an existential map; it has you are here written all over it.

Wright, Steven

12.

I can't be bitter. No one has a contract on life.

Heath, David M.

13.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

14.

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

Rubinstein, Arthur

15.

You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Percy, Walker

16.

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

17.

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

William Goldman

18.

Live, let live, and help live

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs...

Epicurus

20.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Woolf, Virginia

21.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head.

Twain, Mark

22.

The crime problem in New York is getting really serious. The other day the Statue of Liberty had both hands up.

Leno, Jay

23.

Be glad of life because it gives you a chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at stars.

Dyke, Henry Van

24.

Life's enchanted cup sparkles near the brim.

Byron, Lord

25.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

Jefferson, Thomas

26.

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.

Rogers, Carl

27.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Calvino, Italo

28.

Life's a bitch, and life's got lots of sisters.

Presser, Ross

29.

The purpose of life is to fight maturity.

Dick Werthimer

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

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

34.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu

35.

Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

Raban, Jonathan

36.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

Buechner, Frederick

38.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Baudrillard, Jean

39.

The cloud-capp'd towers,the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare

40.

He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.

Horace

41.

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

42.

This life of separateness may be compared to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.

Buddha

43.

Nobody's journey is seamless or smooth. We all stumble. We all have setbacks. It's just life's way of saying, "Time to change course."

Oprah Winfrey

44.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat... the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Can't nothing make your life work if you ain't the architect.

McMillan, Terry

49.

I believe that life is a journey, often difficult and sometimes incredibly cruel, but we are well equipped for it if only we tap into our talents and gifts and allow them to blossom.

Brown, Les

50.

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

Michelangelo