Motivational Quotes

Life

Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step, but most of the time we are taking small, seemingly insignificant steps on the stairway of life.

- Ransom, Ralph

Best Quotes about Life

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

Leno, Jay

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

Robert Heinlein

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.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

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

The life of man is a journey; a journey that must be traveled, however bad the roads or the accommodation.

Goldsmith, Oliver

This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with the powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers, of families: read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life: re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books, and dismiss whatever insults your soul.

Whitman, Walt

Taken in any context, except seriously, life on earth is palatable and positively enjoyable.

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Delacroix, Eugene

10.

Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.

Mumford, Lewis

11.

Live life fully while you're here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You're going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process. Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it. Don't try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human.

Robbins, Anthony

12.

The good life is one inspired by life and guided by knowledge.

Russell, Bertrand

13.

We Japanese enjoy the small pleasures, not extravagance. I believe a man should have a simple lifestyle -- even if he can afford more.

Ibuka, Massaru

14.

The major justification for a life is the happiness and reward it brings to other lives.

15.

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

16.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

Huxley, Aldous

17.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.

Cioran, E. M.

18.

Simply the thing I am shall make me live.

Shakespeare, William

19.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

20.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

William Shakespeare

21.

Life is a gift, and it offers us the privilege, opportunity, and responsibility to give something back by becoming more.

Robbins, Anthony

22.

Best to live lightly, unthinkingly.

Sophocles

23.

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

John Lennon

24.

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.

Woody Allen

25.

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.

Stark, Freya

26.

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

Mead, Margaret

27.

He who is not busy being born is busy dying.

Dylan, Bob

28.

People creep into childhood, bound into youth, sober in adulthood, and soften into old age.

Giles, Henry

29.

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

Pavese, Cesare

30.

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

31.

If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

32.

Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.

Steve Jobs

33.

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

Rogers, Will

34.

The lessons this life has planted in my heart pertain more to caring than crops, more to Golden Rule than gold, more to the proper choice than to the popular choice.

Kirby Larson

35.

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

36.

Life is a horizontal fall.

Cocteau, Jean

37.

Life marches by, I suggest you get on with it.

Baluch, Joy

38.

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

39.

The world has so many lessons to teach you. I consider the world, our earth, to be like a school, and our life, the classrooms. Sometimes on our planet life school, the lessons often come dressed up as detours and road blocks and sometimes as full blown crises. And the secret I've learned to getting ahead is being open to the lessons.

Oprah Winfrey

40.

The essence of life is finding something you really love and then making the daily experience worthwhile.

Waitley, Denis

41.

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

42.

Life without meaning cannot be borne. We find a mission to which we're sworn

43.

Youth is too tumultuous for felicity; old age too insecure for happiness. The period most favorable to enjoyment, in a vigorous, fortunate, and generous life, is that between forty and sixty.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

44.

There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insect's wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The clatter only seems to insult the ears.

Seattle, Chief

45.

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

Platen

46.

Life is like riding a bicycle. You don't fall off unless you stop peddling.

Pepper, Claude D.

47.

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

49.

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

Thornton Wilder

50.

Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.

Osler, Sir William