Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it.

Stoppard, Tom

You really haven't changed, you've just become more of yourself. That is really what were all trying to do: become more of ourselves.

Oprah Winfrey

Life is indeed difficult, partly because of the real difficulties we must overcome in order to survive, and partly because of our own innate desire to always do better, to overcome new challenges, to self-actualize. Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor.

Albert Ellis, Michael Abrams, Lidia Dengelegi

Life is a dead-end street.

Mencken, H. L.

Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.

Radner, Gilda

In the book of life every page has two sides: we human beings fill the upper side with our plans, hopes and wishes, but providence writes on the other side, and what it ordains is seldom our goal.

Nisami

We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.

Fuller, Thomas

Life's but a day at most.

Burns, George

10.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

John Lennon

11.

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

Sheen, Fulton John

12.

Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. Their families came and took them away. Eighty years later, by a bizarre coincidence, they lay in the same hospital, on their deathbeds, next to each other. One of them looked at the other and said,so. What did you think?

Wright, Steven

13.

Life does not happen to us, it happens from us.

Wickett, Michael

14.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

15.

It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

Ellis, Havelock

16.

The old Quaker was right: I expect to pass through life but once. If there is any kindness, or any good thing I can do to my fellow beings, let me do it now. I shall pass this way but once.

Gannett, W. C.

17.

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

18.

What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.

Brodsky, Joseph

19.

Three keys to more abundant living: caring about others, daring for others, sharing with others.

Ward, William A.

20.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

James, William

21.

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.

Blake, William

22.

Life is full and overflowing with the new. But it is necessary to empty out the old to make room for the new to enter.

Caddy, Eileen

23.

Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.

Lennon, John

24.

Life is not one thing after another. It's the same damn thing over and over!

25.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to save it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

26.

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

27.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Kant, Immanuel

28.

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

Herold, Don

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.

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

Dyer, Wayne

31.

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

Nouwen, Henri

32.

You can have peace of mind, improved health and an ever-increasing flow of energy. Life can be full of joy and satisfaction.

Peale, Norman Vincent

33.

The surrender of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledgment of inferiority.

Calhoun, John C.

34.

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

Hayakawa, S. I.

35.

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

Samuel Butler

36.

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late

Franklin, Benjamin

37.

Life is very interesting if you make mistakes.

Carpentier, Georges

38.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

Johnson, Samuel

39.

Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

40.

Half my life is an act of revision.

Irving, John

41.

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

42.

Life is like a taxi. The meter just keeps a-ticking whether you are getting somewhere or just standing still.

Erickson, Lou

43.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

44.

Life begins when you get out of the grandstand into the game.

Debevoise, P. L.

45.

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

Erhard, Werner

46.

Life is just a bowl of pits.

Rodney Dangerfield

47.

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.

Drummond, Henry

48.

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

Herzen, Alexander

49.

Our life's journey of self-discovery is not a straight-line rise from one level of consciousness to another. Instead, it is a series of steep climbs and flat plateaus, then further climbs. Even though we all approach the journey from different directions, certain of the journey's characteristics are common to all of us.

Wilde, Stuart

50.

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

Kafka, Franz