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

Oprah Winfrey

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Calvino, Italo

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

Wolfe, Thomas

Life is short, but it's long enough to ruin any man who wants to be ruined.

Billings, Josh

You have to do what you love to do, not get stuck in that comfort zone of a regular job. Life is not a dress rehearsal. This is it.

Basset, Lucinda

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

Connolly, Cyril

It's not how long life is but the quality of our life that is important.

Dawson, Roger

10.

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

11.

The cloud-capp'd towers,the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare

12.

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.

13.

Even when I'm sick and depressed, I love life.

Rubinstein, Arthur

14.

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

Lebowitz, Fran

15.

Life is very interesting if you make mistakes.

Carpentier, Georges

16.

Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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

18.

Life is a classroom in which each of us is being tested, tried, and passed.

Thibodeau, Robert

19.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life... I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau, Henry David

20.

What life means to us is determined, not so much by what life brings to us as by the attitude we bring to life; not so much by what happens to us as by our reaction to what happens.

Dunnington, Lewis L

21.

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.

Blake, William

22.

Today, you have 100% of your life left.

Hopkins, Tom

23.

Life is given for wisdom, and yet we are not wise; for goodness, and we are not good; for overcoming evil, and evil remains; for patience and sympathy and love, and yet we are fretful and hard and weak and selfish. We are keyed not to attainment, but to the struggle toward it.

Munger, Thornton T.

24.

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.

25.

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

Austen, Jane

26.

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

Hume, David

27.

All of life is a foreign country.

Kerouac, Jack

28.

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

Seneca

30.

Order your soul; reduce your wants; live in charity; associate in Christian community; obey the laws; trust in Providence.

Augustine, St.

31.

He who is not busy being born is busy dying.

Dylan, Bob

32.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.

Cioran, E. M.

33.

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

Feidelson, Charles

34.

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Gauguin, Paul

35.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

36.

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

Lehrer, Tom

37.

The crime problem in New York is getting really serious. The other day the Statue of Liberty had both hands up.

Leno, Jay

38.

First I was dying to finish high-school and start college. Then I was dying to finish college and start working. Next, I was dying for my children to grow old enough for school, so I could return to work. Finally, I was dying to retire. And now, I am dying

39.

Making a life comes before making a living.

40.

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

Fields, W. C.

41.

Life is a dead-end street.

Mencken, H. L.

42.

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

O'Neill, Eugene

43.

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

44.

Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.

Mumford, Lewis

45.

If God exists and we are made in his image we can have real meaning, and we can have real knowledge through what he has communicated to us.

Schaeffer, Francis

46.

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

48.

A life is like a tree -- if you don't make it straight when its young and green, you'll never do it when it's old and dry.