Motivational Quotes

Life

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

- Pavese, Cesare

Best Quotes about Life

The continuous invention of new ways of observing is man's special secret of living.

Young, J. Z.

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

Wright, Steven

We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.

Osler, Sir William

The simplification of life is one of the steps to inner peace. A persistent simplification will create an inner and outer well-being that places harmony in one's life.

Pilgrim, Peace

Life is difficult and complicated and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

J.K. Rowling

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

Thoreau, Henry David

Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.

Frankl, Viktor E.

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

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

10.

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

11.

Life itself is the proper binge.

Child, Julia

12.

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

13.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: I'm with you kid. Let's go.

Angelou, Maya

14.

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

Salisbury, Harrison

15.

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.

Klee, Paul

16.

Remember, a dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream.

Fields, W. C.

17.

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

Herzen, Alexander

18.

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

19.

Those who live are those who fight.

Hugo, Victor

20.

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

Camus, Albert

21.

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

Ward, William A.

22.

In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.

Spengler, Oswald

23.

We dribble away our life, little by little, in small packages -- we don't throw it away all at once.

Cook, Robert A.

24.

To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earthly things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one's power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God; this is what man's journey is about, I think.

Smith, Lillian

25.

People should always have something which they prefer to life.

Seume, Johann G.

26.

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

27.

Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.

Brooke, Rupert

28.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Thoreau, Henry David

29.

Life's but a day at most.

Burns, George

30.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

Epictetus

31.

Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

32.

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

33.

Life is like eating artichokes, you have got to go through so much to get so little.

Dorgan, Thomas A.

34.

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.

Mills, C. Wright

35.

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

36.

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

Ovid

37.

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

Thornton Wilder

38.

The world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open.

William Shakespeare

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late

Franklin, Benjamin

43.

Life is something that everyone should try at least once.

Henry J. Tillman

44.

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

Michelangelo

45.

Simply the thing I am shall make me live.

Shakespeare, William

46.

One recipe for a longer life; Never exceed the speed limit.

47.

Live virtuously, and you cannot not die too soon, or live too long.

Russell, Lady R.

48.

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

Brendan Gill

49.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to save it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

50.

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