Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

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

Herold, Don

My art and profession is to live.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

Order your soul; reduce your wants; live in charity; associate in Christian community; obey the laws; trust in Providence.

Augustine, St.

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

Osler, Sir William

The City attaches an exaggerated importance to the healing power of lunch.

Fieldes, Christopher

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

Epicurus

Life is given for wisdom, and yet we are not wise; for goodness, and we are not good; for overcoming evil, and evil remains; for patience and sympathy and love, and yet we are fretful and hard and weak and selfish. We are keyed not to attainment, but to the struggle toward it.

Munger, Thornton T.

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

Herzen, Alexander

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

10.

All of life is a foreign country.

Kerouac, Jack

11.

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.

12.

Life isn't like a book. Life isn't logical or sensible or orderly. Life is a mess most of the time. And theology must be lived in the midst of that mess.

Colton, Charles Caleb

13.

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

14.

Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

15.

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

16.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

Weil, Simone

17.

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

Butler, Samuel

18.

The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

Mumford, Lewis

19.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Steve Jobs

20.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

21.

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.

Rogers, Carl

22.

Life at the greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humored and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.

Goldsmith, Oliver

23.

The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.

Wilde, Oscar

24.

Do not take life too seriously; you will never get out of it alive.

Hubbard, Elbert

25.

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

26.

This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness... they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

27.

Don't worry about your life; what you shall eat, or drink, or the clothing for your body. [Matthew 6:31]

Bible

28.

Live today for tomorrow it will all be history.

Proverb

29.

To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

30.

Life -- No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.

Forster, Edward M.

31.

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

Mumford, Lewis

32.

Live as if everything you do will eventually be known.

Prather, Hugh

33.

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

34.

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

Pritchett, V. S.

35.

Well, take your time and don't live too fast. Troubles will come and they will pass. Find a woman and you'll find love. Don't forget, son, there is someone up above.

Skynard, Lynard

36.

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

37.

The sad souls of those who lived without blame and without praise.

Dante Alighieri

38.

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

Sartre, Jean-Paul

39.

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.

Pasternak, Boris

40.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

41.

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

Leno, Jay

42.

Most of us fall short much more by omission than by commission. While the world perishes we go our way: purposeless, passionless, day after day.

Pilgrim, Peace

43.

You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Percy, Walker

44.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

45.

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

46.

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.

Baudrillard, Jean

47.

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

Eliot, T. S.

48.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu

49.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

50.

The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.

Galbraith, John Kenneth