Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Nash, Ogden

Best Quotes about Life

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

Temple, Sir William

Life isn't like a book. Life isn't logical or sensible or orderly. Life is a mess most of the time. And theology must be lived in the midst of that mess.

Colton, Charles Caleb

This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.

Dickens, Charles

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

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

Peter De Vries

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

Thoreau, Henry David

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

Brendan Gill

In real life, however, you don't react to what someone did; you react only to what you think she did, and the gap between action and perception is bridged by the art of impression management. If life itself is but what you deem it, then why not focus your efforts on persuading others to believe that you are a virtuous and trustworthy cooperator?

Jonathan Haidt

I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital... not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground. The crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

Ruskin, John

10.

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

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

12.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

13.

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

Boulanger, Nadia

14.

Some people seem to go through life standing at the complaint counter.

Propp Jr., Fred

15.

The lessons this life has planted in my heart pertain more to caring than crops, more to Golden Rule than gold, more to the proper choice than to the popular choice.

Kirby Larson

16.

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

Seneca

17.

I am sure care's an enemy to life.

William Shakespeare

18.

Life is very interesting if you make mistakes.

Carpentier, Georges

19.

To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

20.

If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

21.

Life is uncharted territory. It reveals its story one moment at a time.

Buscaglia, Leo

22.

The world has so many lessons to teach you. I consider the world, our earth, to be like a school, and our life, the classrooms. Sometimes on our planet life school, the lessons often come dressed up as detours and road blocks and sometimes as full blown crises. And the secret I've learned to getting ahead is being open to the lessons.

Oprah Winfrey

23.

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

Pasternak, Boris

24.

The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

25.

Everyone is trying to accomplish something big, not realizing that life is made up of little things.

Clark, Frank A.

26.

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

Rimbaud, Arthur

27.

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

28.

The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.

Baudrillard, Jean

29.

Life is an earnest business, and no one every became good or great on a diet of broad grins.

Blackie, Professor

30.

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

31.

May you live as long as you want and not want as long as you live.

Hanks, Tom

32.

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump; you have to get it right the first time.

Mead, Margaret

33.

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

34.

Eternal truths will be neither true nor eternal unless they have fresh meaning for every new social situation.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

35.

Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.

Brecht, Bertolt

36.

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

Edna St. Vincent Millay

37.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

38.

Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement.

Dimnet, Ernest

39.

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

40.

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.

Austen, Jane

41.

There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone is too far from home.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

42.

We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.

Sir Winston Churchill

43.

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.

44.

Life is a reciprocal exchange. To move forward, you have to give back.

Oprah Winfrey

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.