Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.

Huxtable, Ada Louise

Eternal truths will be neither true nor eternal unless they have fresh meaning for every new social situation.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

In the morning of life, work; in the mid day give council; in the evening, pray.

Proverb, German

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

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

Dawson, Roger

Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.

Frankl, Viktor E.

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

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.

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

10.

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, 'Come on in, the living's fine,' and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

Baker, Russell (Wayne)

12.

Man values life as a sacred jewel in such a way that he reveres him most who haughtily scorns it.

Platen

13.

Life is a glass given to us to fill; a busy life is filling it with as much as it can hold; a hurried life has had more poured into it than it can contain.

Brown, William Adams

14.

I found Rome brick, I left it marble.

Augustus, Caesar

15.

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

16.

Life is a rollercoaster. Try to eat a light lunch.

Schmaltz, David A.

17.

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

Wright, Steven

18.

The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.

Kempton, Murray

19.

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

Osler, Sir William

20.

The only reason they come to see me is that I know that life is great -- and they know I know it.

Gable, Clark

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Fran Lebowitz

24.

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

Crisp, Quentin

25.

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

Benjamin, Walter

26.

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

27.

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

28.

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

Edna St. Vincent Millay

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

The purpose of life is to fight maturity.

Dick Werthimer

33.

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

34.

Life -- how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

Pritchett, V. S.

35.

This tattered life is my only robe; the wind my only refuge.

Mountain, Marian

36.

Life is like eating artichokes, you have got to go through so much to get so little.

Dorgan, Thomas A.

37.

Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel.

Walpole, Horace

38.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

39.

Simply the thing I am shall make me live.

Shakespeare, William

40.

Live, let live, and help live

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

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

Pope John XXIII

42.

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

43.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

Epicurus

45.

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

Austen, Jane

46.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

Temple, Sir William

47.

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

48.

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

49.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

Thoreau, Henry David

50.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De