Motivational Quotes

Life

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

- Roosevelt, Eleanor

Best Quotes about Life

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

Life is something that everyone should try at least once.

Henry J. Tillman

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

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

Menander of Athens

A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.

Huxley, Aldous

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

Be glad of life because it gives you a chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at stars.

Dyke, Henry Van

You're alive. Do something. The directive in life, the moral imperative was so uncomplicated. It could be expressed in single words, not complete sentences. It sounded like this: Look. Listen. Choose. Act.

Barbara Hall

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

Horace

10.

Life is a horizontal fall.

Cocteau, Jean

11.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

Johnson, Samuel

12.

The drama of life begins with a wail and ends with a sigh.

Antrim, Minna

13.

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

14.

When we exercise self-control on a given occasion, we win for ourselves a little credibility we can rely on the next time around. Pretty soon we develop a reputation to ourselves that we want badly to uphold. With each test that we meet, our resolve gains momentum, fueled by the fear that we may succumb and establish a damaging precedent for our own weakness.

Daniel Akst

15.

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

Debevoise, P. L.

16.

Paris, a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief. [About Paris]

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

17.

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

Nouwen, Henri

18.

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

19.

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

20.

You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can decide how you're going to live now.

Baez, Joan

21.

In the early days all I hoped was to make a living out of what I did best. But, since there's no real market for masturbation I had to fall back on my bass playing abilities.

Claypool, Les

22.

It's better to be an authentic loser than a false success, and to die alive than to live dead.

Markiewicz, William

23.

Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

24.

Life is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you're gonna get.

Movie, Forrest Gump

25.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

26.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

James, William

27.

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

28.

One recipe for a longer life; Never exceed the speed limit.

29.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

James, William

30.

Nature has invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward. As a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life.

Louis Schwartzberg

31.

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

32.

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

Horace

33.

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

Santayana, George

34.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs

35.

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really merely commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outer results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

36.

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

Huxley, Aldous

37.

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.

Klee, Paul

38.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.

39.

Life is just a mirror, and what you see out there, you must first see inside of you.

Wally'Famous'Amos

40.

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.

James, William

41.

The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.

Lin-Chi

42.

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

43.

Life It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.

Shakespeare, William

44.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

Jefferson, Thomas

45.

Today, you have 100% of your life left.

Hopkins, Tom

46.

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