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

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

Angelou, Maya

Where there is life there is wishful thinking.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday.

Fields, W. C.

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

Osler, Sir William

One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.

Austen, Jane

Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.

Radner, Gilda

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

Oppenheimer, Martin

We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on but where life, in its real sense, is lost.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.

Robert Heinlein

10.

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

Mead, Margaret

11.

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

12.

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

Heath, David M.

13.

The old Quaker was right: I expect to pass through life but once. If there is any kindness, or any good thing I can do to my fellow beings, let me do it now. I shall pass this way but once.

Gannett, W. C.

14.

Life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable.

Allen, Woody

15.

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others

Keller, Helen

16.

Life marches by, I suggest you get on with it.

Baluch, Joy

17.

Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

The finest lives in my opinion are the common model, without miracle and without extravagance.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

19.

When I hear somebody sigh that Life is hard, I am always tempted to ask, Compared to what?

Harris, Sidney J.

20.

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

21.

To live is to go on a journey; to die is to come back home.

22.

Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.

Lehrer, Tom

23.

Lord, how the day passes! It is like a life, so quickly when we don't watch it, and so slowly if we do.

Steinbeck, John

24.

Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life's ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets.

Miller, Henry

25.

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.

26.

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

Austen, Jane

27.

Where the criminals cover their crimes by making them legal. [On Washington D. C.]

Dane, Frank

28.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

Stone, Robert

29.

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

30.

Living, just by itself -- what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting --or he'll come along and nibble your brain.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

31.

Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.

Nouwen, Henri

32.

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

33.

Any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.

Plato

34.

Through this broad street, restless ever, ebbs and flows a human tide, wave on wave a living river; wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide.

Whittier, John Greenleaf

35.

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.

Woolf, Virginia

36.

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

37.

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

38.

People creep into childhood, bound into youth, sober in adulthood, and soften into old age.

Giles, Henry

39.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.

40.

Do not take life too seriously; you will never get out of it alive.

Hubbard, Elbert

41.

There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insect's wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The clatter only seems to insult the ears.

Seattle, Chief

42.

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis: I am always in the convalescent stage.

Shaw, George Bernard

43.

When we speak the word life, it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

Artaud, Antonin

44.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

45.

I found Rome brick, I left it marble.

Augustus, Caesar

46.

Life is a series of little deaths out of which life always returns.

Feidelson, Charles

47.

There are four things every person has more of than they know; sins, debt, years, and foes.

Proverb, Persian

48.

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

Crisp, Quentin

49.

Our life's journey of self-discovery is not a straight-line rise from one level of consciousness to another. Instead, it is a series of steep climbs and flat plateaus, then further climbs. Even though we all approach the journey from different directions, certain of the journey's characteristics are common to all of us.

Wilde, Stuart

50.

The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.

Lin-Chi