Motivational Quotes

Life

Too often man handles life as he does the bad weather, He whiles away the time as he waits for it to stop.

- Polgar, Alfred

Best Quotes about Life

The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

Aristotle

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.

Cabell, James Branch

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

He who allows his day to pass by without practicing generosity and enjoying life's pleasures is like a blacksmith's bellows. He breathes, but does not live.

Proverb

The man who says he has exhausted life generally means that life has exhausted him.

Wilde, Oscar

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.

Allen, Fred A.

All of life is a foreign country.

Kerouac, Jack

Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.

Osler, Sir William

The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.

Ben Stein

10.

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

Young, J. Z.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

William Shakespeare

14.

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning -- in other words, of absurdity --the more energetically meaning is sought.

Havel, Vaclav

15.

This city now doth, like a garment, wear the beauty of the morning; silent bare, ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie open unto the fields and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Wordsworth, William

16.

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

17.

See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little.

Pope John XXIII

18.

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

Oprah Winfrey

19.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Jacobs, Jane

20.

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

21.

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Shaw, George Bernard

22.

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around.

Hepburn, Katharine

23.

This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what's so.

Erhard, Werner

24.

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

Leno, Jay

25.

The good life is one inspired by life and guided by knowledge.

Russell, Bertrand

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Live as you would have wished to live when you come to die.

Gellert

29.

There is only one way to come into this world; there are too many ways to leave it.

Harington, Donald

30.

It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it is one damn thing over and over.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

31.

It is not how many years we live, but rather what we do with them.

Booth, Evangeline Cory

32.

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

Canetti, Elias

33.

All that man has will he give for his life.

Bible

34.

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.

35.

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

Fran Lebowitz

36.

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

Kempis, Thomas

37.

Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it.

Proverb, Indian

38.

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

39.

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

Mumford, Lewis

40.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

Weil, Simone

41.

Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

42.

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

43.

Life is a horizontal fall.

Cocteau, Jean

44.

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

Baluch, Joy

45.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

47.

The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experiences.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

48.

To a wise man every day is a new life.

49.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

Frankl, Viktor E.

50.

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

Seneca