Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Life

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

My art and profession is to live.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

There is one thing that matters -- to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

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

Sartre, Jean-Paul

There is no shortcut to life. To the end of our days, life is a lesson imperfectly learned.

Salisbury, Harrison

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

Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

Forster, Edward M.

The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.

Zeno

It doesn't matter much where you live. It only matters how well you live when you're there

10.

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

Butler, Samuel

11.

He who is not busy being born is busy dying.

Dylan, Bob

12.

Half my life is an act of revision.

Irving, John

13.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

Thoreau, Henry David

14.

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

Facult, F. Paul

15.

Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel.

Walpole, Horace

16.

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

Debevoise, P. L.

17.

Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.

Huxtable, Ada Louise

18.

Living, just by itself -- what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting --or he'll come along and nibble your brain.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

19.

To live lightheartedly but not recklessly; to be gay without being boisterous; to be courageous without being bold; to show trust and cheerful resignation without fatalism -- this is the art of living.

La Fontaine, Jean De

20.

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

Lennon, John

21.

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.

22.

To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one.

Kornfield, Jack

23.

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

24.

Life flows on within you and without you.

Harrison, George

25.

We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.

Menander of Athens

26.

There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone is too far from home.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

27.

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

O'Neill, Eugene

28.

In the game of life it's a good idea to have a few early losses, which relieves you of the pressure of trying to maintain an undefeated season.

Baughan, Bill

29.

A life is like a tree -- if you don't make it straight when its young and green, you'll never do it when it's old and dry.

30.

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

Calhoun, John C.

31.

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

Curie, Madame Marie

32.

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

Robbins, Anthony

33.

Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

35.

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

Herold, Don

36.

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Gauguin, Paul

37.

Life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable.

Allen, Woody

38.

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

Angelou, Maya

39.

Were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults in the first.

Franklin, Benjamin

40.

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

Caesar, Sid

41.

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

42.

We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.

Sir Winston Churchill

43.

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

Gable, Clark

44.

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

Boom, Corrie Ten

45.

The less routine the more life.