Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Ackerman, Diane

It is vanity to desire a long life and to take no heed of a good life.

Kempis, Thomas

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

Camus, Albert

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really merely commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outer results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Simply the thing I am shall make me live.

Shakespeare, William

Where there is life there is wishful thinking.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

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

10.

Best to live lightly, unthinkingly.

Sophocles

11.

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.

12.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears -- as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

13.

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

Russell, Lady R.

14.

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Gandhi, Mahatma

15.

We don't beat the Grim Reaper by living longer, we beat the Reaper by living well and living fully, for the Reaper will come for all of us. The question is what do we do between the time we are born and the time he shows up. It's too late to do all the things that you're gonna kinda get around to.

Randy Pausch

16.

Living the truth in your heart without compromise brings kindness into the world. Attempts at kindness that compromise your heart cause only sadness.

17.

Life It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.

Shakespeare, William

18.

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

19.

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. [Psalms 90:10]

Bible

20.

She fights and vanquishes in me, and I live and breathe in her, and I have life and being.

Cervantes, Miguel De

21.

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

Lin-Chi

22.

Life is like wine, the longer you take to enjoy it the more chance you've got of tasting vinegar.

23.

Half my life is an act of revision.

Irving, John

24.

If you seek, how is that different from pursuing sound and form? If you don't seek, how are you different from earth, wood, or stone? You must seek without seeking.

Fo-Yan

25.

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

Austen, Jane

26.

Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.

Frankl, Viktor E.

27.

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

Aristotle

28.

If you believed more in life you would fling yourself less to the moment.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

29.

All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it -- an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.

Conrad, Peter

30.

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived --forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

31.

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

Hume, David

32.

The tragedy of life is not that a man loses, but that he almost wins.

Broun, Heywood

33.

The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy.

Shinn, Florence Scovel

34.

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.

Baudrillard, Jean

35.

Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only in proportion as we are desirous of living more do we really live.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

36.

The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living that are desired when dying.

37.

Most of us fall short much more by omission than by commission. While the world perishes we go our way: purposeless, passionless, day after day.

Pilgrim, Peace

38.

When I consider life, it is all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, people favor this deceit.

Dryden, John

39.

Not by gain our life is measured, But by what we've lost 'Tis scored; 'Tis not how much wine is drunken But how much has been outpoured. For the strength of love never standeth In the sacrifice we bear; He who has the greatest suffering Ever has the most to share.

Nee, Watchman

40.

Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.

May, Rollo

41.

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

42.

In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.

Socrates

43.

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

44.

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

Prochnow, Herbert

45.

What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction. And the greatest good is trivial; for all life is a dream and all dreams are dreams.

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro

46.

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

Wright, Steven

47.

Life is a dead-end street.

Mencken, H. L.

48.

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

It is a good thing that life is not as serious as it seems to a waiter.