Motivational Quotes

Life

This also -- that I live, I consider a gift of God.

- Ovid

Best Quotes about Life

This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness... they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

Who goes to Rome a beast returns a beast.

Proverb, Italian

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

Herzen, Alexander

Life is supposed to get tough.

Grammer, Kelsey

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

Mumford, Lewis

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

Rimbaud, Arthur

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

Lebowitz, Fran

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

The life of every person is like a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.

Barrie, Sir James M.

10.

Life -- how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

Pritchett, V. S.

11.

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

12.

All of life is a foreign country.

Kerouac, Jack

13.

Feelings are really your GPS system for life. When your supposed to do something, or not supposed to do something, your emotional guidance system lets you know.

Oprah Winfrey

14.

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

15.

Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies.

Landers, Ann

16.

Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

Saroyan, William

17.

There are nine requisites for contented living: HEALTH enough to make work a pleasure; WEALTH enough to support your needs; STRENGTH enough to battle with difficulties and forsake them; GRACE enough to confess your sins and overcome them; PATIENCE enough to toil until some good is accomplished; CHARITY enough to see some good in your neighbor; LOVE enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others; FAITH enough to make real the things of God; HOPE enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

18.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Pound, Ezra

19.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Isaac Asimov

20.

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

Aristotle

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live; Not where I love, but where I am, I die.

Southey, Robert

23.

Only those live who do good.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

24.

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

Peter De Vries

25.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

26.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Percy, Walker

27.

The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.

Edison, Thomas A.

28.

This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with the powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers, of families: read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life: re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books, and dismiss whatever insults your soul.

Whitman, Walt

29.

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

Connolly, Cyril

30.

Making a life comes before making a living.

31.

Life. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.

Bierce, Ambrose

32.

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

33.

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

Miller, Henry

34.

Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.

Osler, Sir William

35.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

Thoreau, Henry David

36.

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

37.

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.

38.

The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

Crowley, Aleister

39.

Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.

Rivarol, Antoine

40.

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

41.

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

Schmaltz, David A.

42.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

Frankl, Viktor E.

43.

Life flows on within you and without you.

Harrison, George

44.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

45.

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

Heath, David M.

46.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

Schweitzer, Albert

47.

Live as if everything you do will eventually be known.

Prather, Hugh

48.

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

Baudelaire, Charles

49.

There is no shortcut to life. To the end of our days, life is a lesson imperfectly learned.

Salisbury, Harrison

50.

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