Motivational Quotes

Life

There are four things every person has more of than they know; sins, debt, years, and foes.

- Proverb, Persian

Best Quotes about Life

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

Epicurus

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

Thibodeau, Robert

Live this day as if it will be your last. Remember that you will only find tomorrow on the calendars of fools. Forget yesterday's defeats and ignore the problems of tomorrow. This is it. Doomsday. All you have. Make it the best day of your year. The saddest words you can ever utter are, If I had my life to live over again. Take the baton, now. Run with it! This is your day! Beginning today, treat everyone you meet, friend or foe, loved one or stranger, as if they were going to be dead at midnight. Extend to each person, no matter how trivial the contact, all the care and kindness and understanding and love that you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.

Mandino, Og

The purpose of life is the expansion of happiness.

Yogi, Maharishi Mahesh

If our life is unhappy it is painful to bear; if it is happy it is horrible to lose, So the one is pretty equal to the other.

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

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

Havel, Vaclav

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

Optimism and humor are the grease and glue of life. Without both of them we would never have survived our captivity.

Butler, Philip

10.

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- that myth is more potent than history. I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts -- That hope always triumphs over experience -- That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

Fulghum, Robert

11.

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

12.

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.

13.

Give a man a dollar and you cheer his heart. Give him a dream and you challenge his heart. Give him Christ and you change his heart. Then the dollar and the dream become meaningful to him, and to others.

Strait, C. Neil

14.

To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earthly things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one's power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God; this is what man's journey is about, I think.

Smith, Lillian

15.

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.

Robert Heinlein

16.

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

17.

It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts!

Stevenson, Adlai E.

18.

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

Pritchett, V. S.

19.

We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity... what is still lacking here is a grasp of the connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order itself.

Einstein, Albert

20.

The art of living lies not in eliminating but in growing with troubles.

Baruch, Bernard M.

21.

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

22.

To a wise man every day is a new life.

23.

It is advisable that a person know at least three things, where they are, where they are going, and what they had best do under the circumstances.

Ruskin, John

24.

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

Gable, Clark

25.

Maxim for life: You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you.

Dyer, Wayne

26.

In between goals is a thing called life, that has to be lived and enjoyed.

Caesar, Sid

27.

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

Wright, Steven

28.

Every time I look into the eyes of an animal I see life; the force of life and the beauty of creation

O'Reilly, Radar

29.

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

30.

The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing; the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unseen attack.

Aurelius, Marcus

31.

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.

Aleichem, Sholom

32.

Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Samuel Butler

33.

Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.

Diane Ackerman

34.

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

Mountain, Marian

35.

Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.

Brecht, Bertolt

36.

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

Dryden, John

37.

Life is at its best when it's shaken and stirred.

Facult, F. Paul

38.

This also -- that I live, I consider a gift of God.

Ovid

39.

Life is too short to learn German.

Porson, R.

40.

Life loves the liver of it.

Angelou, Maya

41.

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

42.

Life is a campaign not a battle, and has its defeats as well as its victories.

Piatt, Don

43.

Life is like one big Mardi Gras. But instead of showing your boobs, show people your brain, and if they like what they'll, you'll have more beads than you know what to do with.

Ellen DeGeneres

44.

Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

William Goldman

45.

Every morning I wake up saying, I'm still alive; a miracle. And so I keep on pushing.

Cousteau, Jacques

46.

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

Curie, Madame Marie

47.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Tremain, Rose

48.

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

Buechner, Frederick

49.

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

50.

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

Whitehead, Alfred North