Motivational Quotes

Life

Life is just a bowl of pits.

- Rodney Dangerfield

Best Quotes about Life

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head.

Twain, Mark

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

William Shakespeare

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

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

Herold, Don

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

Erhard, Werner

Life is fickle; the fair man doesn't invariably win.

Mark Hodder

A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.

Ciardi, John

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

Nobody's journey is seamless or smooth. We all stumble. We all have setbacks. It's just life's way of saying, "Time to change course."

Oprah Winfrey

10.

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

11.

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

Huxtable, Ada Louise

12.

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

Gusoff, Adrienne

13.

This life of separateness may be compared to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.

Buddha

14.

Young people talk of what they are doing; old people of what they have done; and fools of what they have a mind to do.

Proverb

15.

Life is a classroom in which each of us is being tested, tried, and passed.

Thibodeau, Robert

16.

Look to the future, because that is where you'll spend the rest of your life.

Burns, George

17.

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

18.

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

19.

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

20.

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

21.

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

Aristotle

22.

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

Austen, Jane

23.

May God bless you to live as long as you want to; and want to as long as you live!

Proverb, Scottish

24.

Life is difficult and complicated and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

J.K. Rowling

25.

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

26.

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

Austen, Jane

27.

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

28.

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.

Kundera, Milan

29.

There are four things every person has more of than they know; sins, debt, years, and foes.

Proverb, Persian

30.

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.

Aleichem, Sholom

31.

After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.

Poe, Edgar Allan

32.

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth.

Einstein, Albert

33.

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.

Mills, C. Wright

34.

Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only in proportion as we are desirous of living more do we really live.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

35.

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- that myth is more potent than history. I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts -- That hope always triumphs over experience -- That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

Fulghum, Robert

36.

New York is not Mecca. It just smells like it.

Simon, Neil

37.

Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

William Goldman

38.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

39.

There are three stages in a person's life, birth, their life and death. They are not conscious of birth submit to death and forget to live.

La Bruyere, Jean De

40.

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

Miller, Henry

41.

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

Brendan Gill

42.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life... I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau, Henry David

43.

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

44.

Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.

Nash, Ogden

45.

In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.

Socrates

46.

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Elbert Hubbard

47.

Life is a horizontal fall.

Cocteau, Jean

48.

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

Giles, Henry

49.

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

Forster, Edward M.

50.

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