Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Rogers, Will

Best Quotes about Life

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

Herzen, Alexander

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

Pope John XXIII

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Nouwen, Henri

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

Santayana, George

Life is just a bowl of pits.

Rodney Dangerfield

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

Cousteau, Jacques

When I consider life, it is all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, people favor this deceit.

Dryden, John

Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.

Brecht, Bertolt

10.

Life is an earnest business, and no one every became good or great on a diet of broad grins.

Blackie, Professor

11.

Where the criminals cover their crimes by making them legal. [On Washington D. C.]

Dane, Frank

12.

Where there is life there is wishful thinking.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

13.

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

14.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Thoreau, Henry David

15.

He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.

Horace

16.

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

Pepper, Claude D.

17.

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

Eliot, T. S.

18.

The life of every person is like a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.

Barrie, Sir James M.

19.

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

Boese, Paul

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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

Nash, Ogden

23.

Reality is the crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.

Tomlin, Lily

24.

There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.

Norris, Kathleen

25.

Life's a bitch, and life's got lots of sisters.

Presser, Ross

26.

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

27.

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

28.

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

Baudelaire, Charles

29.

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

Walpole, Horace

30.

Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.

Frankl, Viktor E.

31.

The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.

Norman Thomas

32.

A man's life is 20 years of having his mother ask him where he is going, 40 years of having his wife ask the same question and, at the end, perhaps having the mourners wondering too.

33.

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

Brendan Gill

34.

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

Sartre, Jean-Paul

35.

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

36.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to save it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

37.

If I had been present at creation, I would have given some useful hints.

Wise, Alfonso The

38.

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

Forster, Edward M.

39.

Life in the Fast Lane Playing in Traffic intense stressful challenging overwhelming fulfilling demanding exciting nerve-wrecking entrepreneurial unrelenting empowered exposed: no place to hide flexible confusing results compensation sweatshop team ascendancy ego suppression flat organizations who's my boss no titles no status customer focus self-abnegation decentralized decision making chaos the end of tenure the end of security no complacency fear ongoing change burnout

40.

Refrain from asking what going to happen tomorrow, and everyday that fortune grants you, count as gain.

Horace

41.

If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

42.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Baudrillard, Jean

43.

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

Benjamin, Walter

44.

Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on us.

Holdcroft, Thomas L.

45.

Difficulties come when you don't pay attention to life's whisper. Life always whispers to you first, but if you ignore the whisper, sooner or later you'll get a scream.

Oprah Winfrey

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Life is a little gleam of time between two eternity s.

Carlyle, Thomas

49.

It's not how long life is but the quality of our life that is important.

Dawson, Roger

50.

The simplification of life is one of the steps to inner peace. A persistent simplification will create an inner and outer well-being that places harmony in one's life.

Pilgrim, Peace