Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

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

Gellert

We come into this world head first and go out feet first; in between, it is all a matter of balance.

Boese, Paul

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

Canetti, Elias

To live is not breathing it is action.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

Pope John XXIII

Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five years and you pay it back and then -- one day -- you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then -- one day -- you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.

Leary, Denis

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

Camus, Albert

Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement.

Dimnet, Ernest

You're alive. Do something. The directive in life, the moral imperative was so uncomplicated. It could be expressed in single words, not complete sentences. It sounded like this: Look. Listen. Choose. Act.

Barbara Hall

10.

Life is something that everyone should try at least once.

Henry J. Tillman

11.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things

Rilke, Rainer Maria

12.

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

Proverb, German

13.

Attack life, it's going to kill you anyway.

Coallier, Steven

14.

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

Austen, Jane

15.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Isaac Asimov

16.

In the early days of the Indian Territory, there were no such things as birth certificates. You being there was certificate enough.

Rogers, Will

17.

Can't nothing make your life work if you ain't the architect.

McMillan, Terry

18.

In real life, however, you don't react to what someone did; you react only to what you think she did, and the gap between action and perception is bridged by the art of impression management. If life itself is but what you deem it, then why not focus your efforts on persuading others to believe that you are a virtuous and trustworthy cooperator?

Jonathan Haidt

19.

Through this broad street, restless ever, ebbs and flows a human tide, wave on wave a living river; wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide.

Whittier, John Greenleaf

20.

We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.

Kennedy, John F.

21.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: I'm with you kid. Let's go.

Angelou, Maya

22.

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

23.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat... the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

24.

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

25.

Washington is a place where politicians don't know which way is up and taxes don't know which way is down.

Orben, Robert

26.

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

27.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Woolf, Virginia

28.

One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.

Austen, Jane

29.

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

William Shakespeare

30.

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.

Franklin, Benjamin

31.

Only those live who do good.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

32.

Live for those who love me, For those who know me true, For the Heaven that smiles above me, And awaits my coming too; For the cause that lacks resistance, For the future and the distance, And the good that I can do.

33.

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.

Drummond, Henry

34.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

Truman Capote

35.

Not only is life a bitch, but it is always having puppies.

Gusoff, Adrienne

36.

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

Ward, William A.

37.

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.

38.

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

Seneca

39.

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

Eliot, T. S.

40.

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

Nouwen, Henri

41.

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

Herrick, Robert

42.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

43.

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.

44.

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

Conrad, Joseph

45.

There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.

Herold, Don

46.

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

47.

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

Cousteau, Jacques

48.

The truest end of life, is to find the life that doesn't end.

49.

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

50.

We don't beat the Grim Reaper by living longer, we beat the Reaper by living well and living fully, for the Reaper will come for all of us. The question is what do we do between the time we are born and the time he shows up. It's too late to do all the things that you're gonna kinda get around to.

Randy Pausch