Motivational Quotes

Life

The enjoyments of this life are not equal to its evils.

- Pliny The Elder

Best Quotes about Life

The sad souls of those who lived without blame and without praise.

Dante Alighieri

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

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

Michelangelo

Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.

Camus, Albert

Life is an onion and one cries while peeling it.

Proverb, French

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

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

Seneca

One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.

Canetti, Elias

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

10.

If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

11.

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

12.

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Curie, Madame Marie

13.

Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.

Sheen, Fulton John

14.

In the early days all I hoped was to make a living out of what I did best. But, since there's no real market for masturbation I had to fall back on my bass playing abilities.

Claypool, Les

15.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

16.

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.

Drummond, Henry

17.

They that have lived a single day have lived an age.

La Bruyere, Jean De

18.

Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step, but most of the time we are taking small, seemingly insignificant steps on the stairway of life.

Ransom, Ralph

19.

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

20.

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

21.

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

22.

Where there is life there is wishful thinking.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

23.

Life without meaning cannot be borne. We find a mission to which we're sworn

24.

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs...

Epicurus

25.

The person who does not know how to live while they are making a living is a poorer person after their wealth is won than when they started.

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

26.

Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.

Jordan, David Starr

27.

Life is uncharted territory. It reveals its story one moment at a time.

Buscaglia, Leo

28.

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

Oprah Winfrey

29.

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

30.

The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.

Baudrillard, Jean

31.

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

32.

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

Fran Lebowitz

33.

Life is a gift, and it offers us the privilege, opportunity, and responsibility to give something back by becoming more.

Robbins, Anthony

34.

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

35.

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

36.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Pound, Ezra

37.

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

Nouwen, Henri

38.

And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour,we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale.

William Shakespeare

39.

Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to the brass tacks.

Eliot, T. S.

40.

He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.

Horace

41.

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

42.

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

Carlyle, Thomas

43.

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

44.

Nobody's journey is seamless or smooth. We all stumble. We all have setbacks. It's just life's way of saying, "Time to change course."

Oprah Winfrey

45.

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

46.

Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.

Disraeli, Benjamin

47.

The best things in life are never rationed. Friendship, loyalty, and love. They do not require coupons.

Hewitt, George T.

48.

A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.

Huxley, Aldous

49.

Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.

Berenson, Bernard

50.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

Kennedy, John F.