Motivational Quotes

Life

Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.

- Nabokov, Vladimir

Best Quotes about Life

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

Lebowitz, Fran

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Jacobs, Jane

The major justification for a life is the happiness and reward it brings to other lives.

It's better to be an authentic loser than a false success, and to die alive than to live dead.

Markiewicz, William

In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.

Socrates

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

Conrad, Joseph

Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel.

Walpole, Horace

The truest end of life, is to find the life that doesn't end.

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

10.

Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only in proportion as we are desirous of living more do we really live.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

11.

We don't beat the Grim Reaper by living longer, we beat the Reaper by living well and living fully, for the Reaper will come for all of us. The question is what do we do between the time we are born and the time he shows up. It's too late to do all the things that you're gonna kinda get around to.

Randy Pausch

12.

It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it's one damn thing over and over.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

13.

To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one.

Kornfield, Jack

14.

The good life is one inspired by life and guided by knowledge.

Russell, Bertrand

15.

Most of us fall short much more by omission than by commission. While the world perishes we go our way: purposeless, passionless, day after day.

Pilgrim, Peace

16.

So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.

Seneca

17.

New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.

Carson, Johnny

18.

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

Oppenheimer, Martin

19.

Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life.

Pirandello, Luigi

20.

Who goes to Rome a beast returns a beast.

Proverb, Italian

21.

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

Rexford, Eben Eugene

22.

Anything for the quick life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse.

Dickens, Charles

23.

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

Wise, Alfonso The

24.

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

25.

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

Field, Joanna

26.

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

Heath, David M.

27.

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

28.

Not by gain our life is measured, But by what we've lost 'Tis scored; 'Tis not how much wine is drunken But how much has been outpoured. For the strength of love never standeth In the sacrifice we bear; He who has the greatest suffering Ever has the most to share.

Nee, Watchman

29.

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

Schmaltz, David A.

30.

The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.

Norman Thomas

31.

Life is a horizontal fall.

Cocteau, Jean

32.

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

33.

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

34.

What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

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

36.

Three keys to more abundant living: caring about others, daring for others, sharing with others.

Ward, William A.

37.

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.

Drummond, Henry

38.

Life is a long lesson in humility.

James M. Barrie

39.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

40.

After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.

Poe, Edgar Allan

41.

Life isn't simple. But the beauty of it is, you can always start over. It'll get easier.

Alacia Bessette

42.

The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

43.

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

44.

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

Michelangelo

45.

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

Aristotle

46.

This tattered life is my only robe; the wind my only refuge.

Mountain, Marian

47.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

Truman Capote

48.

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.

49.

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around.

Hepburn, Katharine

50.

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